LAUSANNE.- Fondation de l’Hermitage presents Baselitz - One Single Passion - The Painting, on view through October 29, 2006. German painter Georg Baselitz --- a surname he adopted as a tribute to the small Saxon town where he was born in 1938 --- is famous for his upside-down work. His pictures (landscapes, figures, still lifes, portraits) are not turned upside down when finished but actually painted that way. One of the explanations of this method of distancing us from the subject matter, which the artist has been using for thirty-five years now, is that it renews the fascination linking the viewer with traditional figuration. Baselitz thus focuses on aspects of the picture’s formal organisation. Paradoxically, this primary concern for pictorial structure makes him the ‘Frenchest’ of German painters, one of the artists in the 20th century who has concentrated most on painting as such. With this exhibition showing about one hundred oil paintings, prints, sculptures and drawings mostly from the artist’s personal collection, the Fondation de l’Hermitage hopes to give a more essential as well as a more intimist vision of Baselitz’s intense, captivating work.

The retrospective selection takes us back over the artist’s career spanning the period from 1962 to 2005, and brings together the best examples he kept of his work. It highlights the pictorial accomplishment of the works rather than simply seeking to present an integral retrospective of the main themes which have inspired Basilitz’s production over four decades of activity. Among the tiny galaxy of German painters, sometimes known as the ‘savages’ and discovered by art-lovers in the late Seventies and early Eighties, Baselitz was the closest to the French tradition due to the formal influence inherited from Cubism. Pictorial structure is more important than figurative content yet very ‘classical’ all the same: portraits, still lifes, landscapes, human or animal figures. In fact, it is even this strictly figurative expression which strikes us after a long period of seemingly abstract work.

Twenty years earlier, in a strong reaction to the dominant American fashion of Action Painting and Abstract Expressionism, the young Baselitz, fresh out of East Berlin, turned to figurative poetics which expressed a mixture of Romanticism and Surrealism (Antonin Artaud is the leading reference here). He changed his name from Georg Kern to Baselitz, after his birthplace, the village Deutschbaselitz. After his large paintings whose obvious sexuality caused a scandal and his ‘hero’ figures of idle-looking, working-class youths, Georg Baselitz went on to paint the segmented, diffracted and layered rural motifs of Frakturbilder (cows, trees, dogs).

This very late ‘post-Cubism’ heralded the upside-down image which was to become Georg Baselitz’s established hallmark from the 1970s. Since then, whether painting or drawing silver birch trees, eagles, gleaners, streets, portraits of Elke his wife or self-portraits, the subject has been inversed. This ‘upside-down world’ has brought out the formal character of the element, which is certainly always recognizable within the picture space, rather than concentrating on the three-dimensional, more or less prosaic representation of reality. This ‘disorientation’, which captures --- and even strengthens --- the viewer’s fascination with the image, enhances the autonomy of the painting, just as in Picasso’s, Malevitch’s or Giacometti’s work : before painting an apple or a chair, you have to paint a picture.

As the actual theme is less important than its visual realization, over the years Baselitz has varied what he calls the ‘method’, i.e. his way of painting. During the Eighties, the Master of Derneburg (where he lives near Hamburg) kneaded tactile matter and bright colour together into a fabric as dense as it was unrelentingly regenerated. In Blick aus dem Fenster (Looking out of the Window, 10.3.1982; oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm), the man’s head facing a bull’s-eye window emerges from a thick web of brush-strokes which create a vibrant environment of superimposed layers. In a way Baselitz brings the painted surface up-to-date with what he is discovering at the same moment in sculpture (also displayed in Lausanne), where the shocks - the surface of the wood dented with an axe - are almost more expressive than the general shape erected in space.

Fifteen years later the method has evolved towards a looser, more open layout and transparent light. Flowing, discursive drawing plays with light, fluid colouring. Thus, in Persisches Liebespaar II (Couple of Persian Lovers II, 14.8.1998; oil on canvas, 100 x 162 cm) we can see a link with Chinese painting as if, after years of intense concentration, maturity now authorized a jubilant, expansive approach.

This retrospective is therefore an invitation to a long and impressive painting lesson highlighting the significant stages of a coherent, relentless quest for the brush-born image, a quest which is indeed so very much alive at the dawn of this century.

The exhibition, presented exclusively in Lausanne, is curated by Rainer Michael Mason, former Head Curator of the Cabinet des Estampes in Geneva. It carries a major catalogue published jointly with the Bibliothèque des Arts, with colour reproductions of all the works exhibited.