Max Beckmann Die Nacht (The Night), 1918 oil on canvas Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf © Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf/ DACS, 2017. Image: Art Media/Heritage/Scala, Florence
The fattening of perspective and shocking twisted and distorted forms are reminiscent of the earlier northern tradition of Hieronymus Bosch and Baselitz’s personal collection of sixteenth century woodcuts and prints. Pairing beauty and ugliness, the artist reconciles past and present, never allowing ‘his marks to become calligraphy, that is, to become beautiful in themselves. Each attains its own ugliness […]. Oversized, coarsened, each pulls apart from its neighbour even when it is part of a decorative pattern, resulting in pockets of local disharmony’ (Richard Schif in Baselitz, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007, p. 27). The Frakturbilder present the painting as a ruin, in which both the action of building and destroying takes place simultaneously. Here, Baselitz layers subject matter, as the knife-yielding worker hacks away at intestines, while his blade independently dissects the bloodied entrails. The fracturing process declares the autonomy of the image over the subject of the painting; the content, whilst still prominent, becomes subordinated to stylistic explorations. The masterful control of order within Ein Werktätiger, a painterly assemblage of diferent elements, presents Baselitz’s pictorial experimentations, encapsulating the world’s splintered complexity and multidimensionality.
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