MUNICH.- To honour Georg Baselitz on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München is presenting graphic masterpieces by this artist as part of its IM BLICK (IN FOCUS) series of studio exhibitions. With over 1100 works on paper by Baselitz, this collection is the only one of its kind anywhere in the world, and it will be showing sheets from two outstanding groups within his body of work. On the one hand early major works from his series “Helden” (Heroes). These works provide an impression of Baselitz’s radically expressive draughtsmanship in the mid-1960s and confirm his pre-eminent position within modern and contemporary figurative art. On the other hand these will be juxtaposed with a second highlight: more recent works from his oeuvre as a printmaker. You can see exemplary sheets from Munich’s unique collection of 148 artist’s proofs related to “Malelade” – Baselitz’s captivating artist’s book of 1990 – which establish the artist’s status as a technical virtuoso and brilliant printmaker. In “Malelade” fascinating colour etchings of great lyrical power are paired with the artist’s linguistic experiments, and the two merge into a modern epic founded on two complementary forms of genius.

With “Helden” (Heroes) Baselitz has created a cohesive group of works consisting of paintings, drawings and prints made between 1965 and 1966, initially during his residency at the Villa Romana in Florence and later in West Berlin. They comprise enigmatic portraits, whose titles enable us to identify them as young heroes, rebels, partisans, shepherds and dissidents, but also young painters. In spite of their exaggeratedly bulky physiques and their demonstrative virility, they appear battered and crippled and anything but heroic in the midst of apocalyptic landscapes. Sunk in melancholy they look like old-fashioned, fairy-tale giants who have no place in reality – however familiar these creatures may still feel to us today. At the time of their creation they were perceived as pure provocation, depicting a “New Type” of “Helden” (Heroes) which represented an anachronism to the German economic miracle of the 1960s, although today we are becoming more and more aware that these years were a period of forgetting and silencing. The “New Type” of “Helden” (Heroes), the alter ego of a whole generation of younger artists, was certainly ahead of its time: indeed all the contradictions of its visual idiom foreshadow the political revolt of the movements of 1968.

The painter’s book “Malelade” was created in 1989, the year in which Germany’s reunification process began, and it draws more out of contemporary history, looks backward and forward, when Baselitz takes the essence of Germany’s history and fate as his theme. The play on words of the title, “Malelade”, already oscillates between the extremes of what Baselitz describes as an infantile, idiotic use of language and the far-seeing intellectual résumé of a “peintre maudit”, in the French Existentialist sense of an artist cast out into the world. Continuous rudimentary scraps of words like “Romanticist // broken” or “much night are come” or “his against protection // and without dress // dumb Young Donkey” develop a cosmos of simultaneously meaningful and paradoxical references. It is none other than the artist himself who stands behind this dialogue. The awkward, unsteady handwriting of the etched lettering further underscores the contradictions of the semantic and syntactic inconsistencies and merges into the motifs of Baselitz’s deliberate iconography. In this way he develops a multifaceted image of a torn German sentiment that never comes to rest.

Never again has Baselitz encapsulated the current state of the modern “conditio humana” in prints possessing so much verbal and visual power.

At the same time, this studio exhibition once again serves to express the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München’s esteem for its patron of many years: Duke Franz von Bayern. He was among Georg Baselitz’s first collectors and remains very close to the artist today. It is only because of his generous gifts that the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München can represent the graphic artist Georg Baselitz in such exquisite quality. We owe it to his patronage and his still persistent enthusiasm for the ever-changing work of Georg Baselitz that the holdings of the collection of this artist’s graphic work are still being continuously supplemented to this day.