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拍品专文
In Georg Baselitz’s Sandteichdamm (Sandteich Dam) (1974), brushstrokes of bright blue, black, yellow and apricot come together with the bold, dripping gestural energy of a picture by Willem de Kooning or Joan Mitchell. A picture emerges—only it is upside-down. The work shows a country path receding through a forest of tall trees, framed by a loose border and inverted in Baselitz’s signature manner. It is one of a number of paintings made in the mid-1970s that depict the land around the artist’s childhood home of Deutschbaselitz in Saxony, East Germany: the village from which he took his name. Baselitz had first made paintings of this scenery as a teenager in the mid-1950s. Now, living in the rural West, he painted Saxon motifs in a nostalgic mood, furthering his career-long exploration of uprooted personal and national identity. The present work’s surface bears imprints of the artist’s fingers, linking it to the Fingermalerei (‘Finger Paintings’) he had begun in 1972, and marking a tactile engagement with the autobiographical image. Held in the same private collection since the 1980s, it was included in a 1997 survey of Baselitz’s work at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, and in the German touring exhibition Georg Baselitz. Das Naturmotiv in 2012.
Baselitz had been making upside-down paintings since 1969. Through these convulsive works, which pictured a decoupling of medium and subject matter, he reflected on Germany’s turbulent and uncertain post-war society. The first, Der Wald auf dem Kopf (The Wood on its Head), depicted a forest. Many featured Teutonic pastoral icons such as woodsmen, dogs, eagles and cattle. Their inversion put these symbols under pressure, as if trying to empty them of their burdens of meaning. Sandteichdamm is among a number of pictures which carry more intimate significance. While Baselitz initially dismissed their content as unimportant, he later admitted that such references to his personal past—and to his first youthful forays into painting—have transformed his body of work into something like an extended self-portrait. The image of the tree-lined embankment near his home remains especially potent. ‘The dam at the end of the sandy pond’, he wrote in 2001, ‘… becomes the self-portrait and the inner self’ (G. Baselitz, ‘What it Is’, 2001, in D. Gretenkort (ed.), Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings & Interviews, London 2010, p. 255).
Baselitz’s Saxon upbringing formed an important part of his artistic character. Born Hans-Georg Kern, he moved to West Berlin in 1957 and deliberately styled himself as an outsider. He adopted the name of his hometown in 1961, coinciding with the erection of the Berlin Wall. Later, living with his young family in a village to the far West, his rural surroundings inspired an increasing retrospection in his work. He yearned for his remembered adventures among woods and wetlands, now lost to the past and sealed away by the Wall. The Sandteichdamm theme emerged in 1974, shortly before Baselitz moved into a castle in Lower Saxony. The present work’s surface is marked by the prints of his hands and fingers, as if Baselitz is trying to touch or take hold of his memories. If this haptic aspect echoes the Fingermalerei made in 1972-1973, the vivid, dreamlike blues and yellows also anticipate the heightened palettes that would emerge in his paintings later that decade, which openly engaged with the legacies of Abstract Expressionism and Edvard Munch.
Deutschbaselitz is surrounded by 300 acres of lakes and fish-ponds, set among an ancient network of embankments and tree-planted dams. The Grosse Sandteiche (Large Sand Ponds) are just fifty metres from the schoolhouse on Sandteichweg where Baselitz’s family once lived. ‘The avenue along the pond dam is about two thousand metres long’, Baselitz remembered in 1982. ‘It is flanked by ancient oaks, also birches, and on the lower edge of the embankment an undergrowth of hazelnuts, honeysuckle, and mock orange. Sunlight is filtered through the canopy; the end of the dam is bluish but not dark’ (G. Baselitz, ‘What is a picture?’, in documenta 7, vol. 1, exh. cat. Kassel 1982, p. 437). Sandteichdamm carries this same sense of evocative colour and space, even as it depicts a world turned upside-down. The scene would continue to haunt Baselitz. In 2006, it resurfaced in a series of his ‘Remix’ paintings, combined with pairs of walking feet. In ever new versions, genres and forms, motifs percolate through Baselitz’s work, and the artist continues to wander among the places of his past.
Baselitz had been making upside-down paintings since 1969. Through these convulsive works, which pictured a decoupling of medium and subject matter, he reflected on Germany’s turbulent and uncertain post-war society. The first, Der Wald auf dem Kopf (The Wood on its Head), depicted a forest. Many featured Teutonic pastoral icons such as woodsmen, dogs, eagles and cattle. Their inversion put these symbols under pressure, as if trying to empty them of their burdens of meaning. Sandteichdamm is among a number of pictures which carry more intimate significance. While Baselitz initially dismissed their content as unimportant, he later admitted that such references to his personal past—and to his first youthful forays into painting—have transformed his body of work into something like an extended self-portrait. The image of the tree-lined embankment near his home remains especially potent. ‘The dam at the end of the sandy pond’, he wrote in 2001, ‘… becomes the self-portrait and the inner self’ (G. Baselitz, ‘What it Is’, 2001, in D. Gretenkort (ed.), Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings & Interviews, London 2010, p. 255).
Baselitz’s Saxon upbringing formed an important part of his artistic character. Born Hans-Georg Kern, he moved to West Berlin in 1957 and deliberately styled himself as an outsider. He adopted the name of his hometown in 1961, coinciding with the erection of the Berlin Wall. Later, living with his young family in a village to the far West, his rural surroundings inspired an increasing retrospection in his work. He yearned for his remembered adventures among woods and wetlands, now lost to the past and sealed away by the Wall. The Sandteichdamm theme emerged in 1974, shortly before Baselitz moved into a castle in Lower Saxony. The present work’s surface is marked by the prints of his hands and fingers, as if Baselitz is trying to touch or take hold of his memories. If this haptic aspect echoes the Fingermalerei made in 1972-1973, the vivid, dreamlike blues and yellows also anticipate the heightened palettes that would emerge in his paintings later that decade, which openly engaged with the legacies of Abstract Expressionism and Edvard Munch.
Deutschbaselitz is surrounded by 300 acres of lakes and fish-ponds, set among an ancient network of embankments and tree-planted dams. The Grosse Sandteiche (Large Sand Ponds) are just fifty metres from the schoolhouse on Sandteichweg where Baselitz’s family once lived. ‘The avenue along the pond dam is about two thousand metres long’, Baselitz remembered in 1982. ‘It is flanked by ancient oaks, also birches, and on the lower edge of the embankment an undergrowth of hazelnuts, honeysuckle, and mock orange. Sunlight is filtered through the canopy; the end of the dam is bluish but not dark’ (G. Baselitz, ‘What is a picture?’, in documenta 7, vol. 1, exh. cat. Kassel 1982, p. 437). Sandteichdamm carries this same sense of evocative colour and space, even as it depicts a world turned upside-down. The scene would continue to haunt Baselitz. In 2006, it resurfaced in a series of his ‘Remix’ paintings, combined with pairs of walking feet. In ever new versions, genres and forms, motifs percolate through Baselitz’s work, and the artist continues to wander among the places of his past.