Georg Baselitz remixes German history

Georg Baselitz, at Gagosian Gallery, NYC. Through Dec. 22.

The German painter Georg Baselitz rose to fame in the '70s and '80s for his fearless and direct confrontation with his nation's disgraceful 20th Century. At a time when his teachers and the German art world embraced American pop art, Baselitz went art brut.

He was kicked out of his East German art school and came west to make big, sloppy canvases that snaked with wide swaths of bright color, black outlines, sloppy drips. He painted an infamous canvas of the child Adolf Hitler with an erection the size of a salami. It was all very scandalous to a nation trying to forget the past.

For years, Baselitz painted all of his canvases upside down. It's hard to say why. There's the formalist's explanation: that modern paintings are always about the surface of the canvas, and nothing could reinforce that like a decade or two spent seeing form first, subject second. The painting painted upside down (and not just hung upside down) is seen as abstract form instead of as a picture of known objects.

I've never been satisfied with the formalist explanation, since I think most successful drawing and painting is done by seeing the world abstractly anyway. And since Baselitz isn't what you'd call a finicky draftsman, it's hard to say he was using the technique to see anew.

A political explanation -- that Baselitz saw the world as upside down -- is just too corny.

To me, Baselitz's methods have always been about scrapping to get out of the dilemma of being a German artist after Hitler. But like a dog on a tether, he pulls as far as he can and finds himself leashed.

In his show of paintings now at Gagosian, the East German emigre is at it again.

His "Remix" paintings, two of which are photographed above, are Hitler redux. They feature so many dirty Charlie Chaplin mustaches and wagging cocks that you'll think you're at a Fatty Arbuckle party.

The imagery is strong, explicit, unavoidable. He's taking on big subjects. He's standing atop the rubble of the Berlin Wall with paintbrushes in his hand and painting his nation.

However, this dilemma of a German artist unable to avoid the Nazi era can almost be seen as Stockholm Syndrome. "Being preoccupied with your past gives you something to hold onto," he says in an interview (about work that does not show Hitler, but more "folk" elements of German art).

The tragic horrors of National Socialism were unavoidable to Baselitz's generation. Now Baselitz, who is 69 years old, has returned to suite of images he made when he was young. Now they're writ larger and with more clarity. In the painting above, Hitler emerges from the soil fused with a nasty rootball that stretches its tentacles firmly below ground.

"What I could never escape was Germany, and being German,” said Baselitz. He says he uses the term "remix" because it comes from youth culture, and it's not just the rehashing of old material. It's a return to an approach, to a freshness of dealing with what's inescapable.

Baselitz uses Hitler the way an American might use McDonalds or JFK. It's part of his national mental landscape, to the point of being interestingly banal.

Read an interview with Baselitz here.