“If you take the term remix from music…it means you rescue something in a new time, or, for example, you bring it into the new time. That doesn’t mean you rehash it, but instead that you use quite specific essences, basic themes, in order to reformulate it.”
—GEORG BASELITZ
Ein Moderner Maler (Remix), executed in 2007, is an extraordinary, monumental example of Georg Baselitz's consistently idiosyncratic and affective artistic practice. In the upper half of the composition a coarsely rendered male figure squats staring out at the viewer. His shirt and trousers are split open and his hands seem to claw at the ground for purchase. An inverted, bare-limbed and crooked tree dominates the lower half of the canvas, executed in thick washes of black paint. On a narrative level, neither image appears to be directly related to the other, with the composition split almost exactly in half along the horizontal axis. Formally, however, figure and tree are united by the artist’s fluid, free-flowing and spontaneous brushwork which delineates form and volume through gestures towards figuration. Ein Moderner Maler (Remix) stands as an arresting example of the artist’s irreverent practice and speaks to his career-long experimental impulse, uniting several key aspects of Baselitz’s oeuvre: his series of Heroes and New Types (1965-66), the inverted technique, begun in 1969, and his developing use of “motifs” as the aesthetic and conceptual core for his paintings.
A dynamic and striking composition, the present work belongs to Baselitz’s most recent reinvention of painting: his Remix series. In these works, begun in 2005, he took his own earlier paintings as motifs, revisiting and reforming them through new styles and methods, whilst also continuing to mine art historical precedent. In Ein Moderner Maler (Remix), he has enacted a double transformation. First, he has taken his own earlier painting, Ein Moderner Maler (1966, Berlinische Galerie), as his ur-image, remoulding the dishevelled, wounded soldier-figure of the earlier work through a lighter, sparser palette that shimmers across the stark white ground. Secondly, in the lower half of the composition, the tree appears upside down, denying instant legibility and performing the "inversion" that has defined his oeuvre since 1969. Washes of colour have replaced the heavier, thickly-applied impasto found in his paintings of the 1960s and early 1970s, bringing the work closer to watercolour in its mode of composition. What remains, however, is a vibrant, gestural brushwork that synthesises colour and form in a manner familiar from a particularly German kind of Expressionism yet also revealing a tendency towards abstraction and a unique kind of action painting.
“Recently, after many other restless shifts in style and practice, he started an intriguing new series of paintings. Their method is called remix. They are new formulations of old paintings or rather old motifs and subject-matter and all painted in a very light, casual manner, in thinly brushed paint, light and swift sometimes as watercolour. [...] Painting is now sheer, free, unhindered painting. [...] The image we then have of the artist [...] is one of someone who carries his life's work with him as a great treasure with other surprises to come.”
—Rudi Fuchsi
In Ein Moderner Maler (Remix), figure and tree appear as direct correlates, creating a duality that untethers the overall image and destabilises the pictorial content of the composition. Conceptually, this reflection of figure and tree unites Baselitz’s seminal series of Helden (Heroes) and Neue Typen (New Types), bodies of work that cemented his reputation as one of the most provocative and compelling voices of the post-war era. During this fervent decade of explosive productivity, Baselitz’s paintings remained dichotomously ambiguous and incisive, simultaneously vulnerable and defiant. The tree is a subject with which the artist engaged several times during the 1960s and it belongs to his seminal series of Heroes in mood and style, unflinchingly examining the fallibility of the human condition. These paintings of trees are nominally symbolic of a romanticised stoic stability, fixed in place and time. Within this visual universe, however, they function as metonyms for the wounded heroes, informed by loss and despair. In the present work, metaphor becomes reality as Baselitz visually superimposes hero and tree within the same composition, explicitly elucidating the conceptual slippage of his earlier paintings as well as ironising his role as a “modern painter”.
Reflection, inflection and deflection are key tenets of Baselitz’s artistic praxis. As seen in the present work, by transforming and reconfiguring his own earlier works, he reconfirms the pictorial notion of the “ornament” or “motif” which he developed through his “inverted” paintings. This technique provided Baselitz with a model for achieving expressivity through formal distortions without concurrent psychological implications, affirming the artist’s emphasis on structure and composition over narrative content. As he explained, “Turning the motif upside down gave me the freedom to tackle the problems of paintings, reducing the images to the base formal qualities of line, shape and color”ii.
Just as Baselitz investigates an art historical past, so he also examines (his own) history. As Norman Rosenthal has noted, Baselitz “has striven constantly to confront the realities of history and art history, to make them new and fresh in a manner that can only be described as heroic”iii. In this way, a spontaneous, synthetic composition of monumental dimensions, Ein Moderner Maler (Remix) not only reflects Baselitz’s innovative, transcendent engagement with art historical tradition, but also provides a captivating insight into the creative process of an artist who continues to lead contemporary discourses on painting.
