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The German artist lived through Nazism and communism – and his horrific, shaming works, including a masturbating Hitler, forced his country to face its past. Yet in later life, he beautifully captured human frailty, portraying himself and his wife nude
Georg Baselitz was a living thread of history and his death robs us of the truth he knew when we need it more than ever. He was one of the only two people I have spoken to for whom Nazi Germany was a living memory: Baselitz was born in 1938, making him far too young to bear any personal guilt but old enough – seven when the Third Reich fell – to retain direct experience and images of it.
In his art, he cut those images up, gored and eviscerated them in paintings of uniformed young enthusiasts with blood spurting from mangled limbs or entire bodies fed through some hellish grinder and roughly remade. Into the woods they went, these ironically titled “Heroes”, chopping and being chopped in the guilty depths of the German forest.
In every drop of paint Baselitz slurped and streaked, it’s hard to avoid seeing the Holocaust. Some artists would be irritated by such grand historical interpretations of their work, but after Baselitz wrote me a disarming letter a few years ago, we spoke. I wrote about him in a book he had approval of, and it became clear he absolutely recognised the shadow of history in his art. How could he escape it? At the start of the 1960s Baselitz, who had experienced not only Hitler but East German communism before crossing to the west, horrified a postwar West Germany that was trying to forget with obscene images of a rancid, shameful society.
His 1961 painting Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) depicts a stunted character with flattened black Hitlerian hair and the hint of a square moustache, nude except for military-looking shorts, masturbating. In a later reworking, he made the masturbator’s identity even clearer. Baselitz would go on to paint upside-down German eagles as if flying above an infernal Berchtesgaden, which became the Nazis’ southern HQ, and carve a huge rough-hewn, polychrome wooden statue of a saluting Adolf who rises from a recumbent position like a mummy waking from its tomb.
These were not tasteful, evasive meditations but deliberately provocative confrontations with historical shame and guilt. He put his zombie Hitler woodcarving in the German Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale, in a joint show with the similarly history-cursed Anselm Kiefer. They were accused by some of being fascistic, but what a misunderstanding: the German Pavilion in Venice is a Nazi-era neoclassical building inscribed Germania, so instead of tastefully ignoring that grotesque heritage, Baselitz and Kiefer set out to rub everyone’s noses in it, to insist that Europe must always remember its big night down the drain.
But the drain gets nearer every day. The stench is overpowering. The lessons Baselitz painted seem to belong to a lost world of conscience and probity. He himself is now history, and I owe it to him to set down some words against misremembering. Baselitz loved to provoke and can be quoted to sound like someone he was not – he supposedly slighted female painters but in reality was a fan of Tracey Emin. In fact he was the opposite of some stereotypical Teutonic macho artist. I love his late work, in which he portrayed himself and his wife Elke nude, as vulnerable, decaying old people, or even as dying bodies: he even made art recently using his walker.
When I told him how moving I found these images of human frailty, he asked if I thought it was only now that he was doing his best work – was it weak before? I’ve never encountered such honest uncertainty in such a famous figure. He also told me how he once sat with his family in the Wolsey and watched Lucian Freud come in with a young woman but was far too shy to say hello.
He had much in common with Freud and Frank Auerbach as a painter of bodies and memories, both of which can so easily be destroyed. Baselitz was an artist who never lost touch with the thin, frail, human truth. He was my kind of hero.