'Baselitz: Nackte Meister’ Opens At Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum

By Heloise Pinto

Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum opened its new spring exhibition on Tuesday. Baselitz: Nackte Meister, ‘Naked Masters’ (7th March-25th June), an exhibition across five rooms of around 70 works of art by contemporary German artist Georg Baselitz, presented amongst 40 of the museum’s Old Master treasures. After having been invited by the museum to put together the exhibition in the year of his 85th birthday – which will see several other galleries around the world celebrating his career – Baselitz chose to deal only with the nude. Along with co-curator, Andreas Zimmermann, he selected from the museum’s collection, and his own body of work, masterpieces of this enduringly captivating genre. 

Baselitz has made it clear that the aim of this exhibition is not to teach visitors about art history; for one thing, that is the purpose of the museum and its permanent collection, from which this display takes nothing away. For another, however, biblical, mythological and historical themes have never interested the artist: “When I enter a museum, I see pictures, not stories”. What Baselitz is trying to do with Nackte Meister is to use his own work – which has always famously revolved around strong human impulse and the artist’s visceral reactions to the worldly themes that have shaped his lifetime – to offer visitors a new way of looking at historical pictures which formally address visual humanity and human anatomy. He is not engaging here with subject matter beyond genre (the German term for the nude, ‘der Akt’, appearing especially appropriate for English-speakers here), but with painting itself and its intrinsically human nature. 

Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Fall: Adam and Eve, 1510/20, Lime panel, 137 × 54 cm each, with Baselitz’s nude Finger Paintings. Image: Kunsthistorisches Museum via Instagram

Three nudes made in 1972 with the fingers of Baselitz’s right hand accompany Lucas Cranach the Elder’s The Fall: Adam and Eve (1510-20). Human flesh responds to painted flesh - with more flesh. Were it not for Baselitz’s insistence that narratives are not important here, it would be tempting to acknowledge an unsubtle link between Eve’s offer of the forbidden fruit and Baselitz’s consistent, wilful rejection of the given order of things, manifesting itself most obviously in the necessarily ‘upside-down’ appearance of his surrounding works. “The hierarchy of sky above and ground down below is … only a pact that we have admittedly got used to but that one absolutely doesn’t have to believe in”. Any such ‘pact’ has long been an abhorrence of Baselitz’s, be that his parents’ wishes for his career, the ‘dishonest’ dominance of socialist propaganda in the art of the GDR in which he grew up, an apparent tendency in people to overlook the artistic in art history, or to dictate the orientation – or placement – of an image for viewing; he has maximised the capacity of the museum’s great walls and arranged his vast canvases above, below and alongside its Old Masters.  

Il Garofalo, The Resurrection of Christ, 1520, oil on poplar 314 x 190 x 9.5cm, with Baselitz’s hand paintings, oil and gold varnish on canvas. Image: Kunsthistorisches Museum via Instagram.

Five individual golden hands from a 2019 body of work rhythmically surround Benvenuto Tisi’s (Il Garofalo) The Resurrection of Christ (1520), highlighting the formal principle that shaped the Renaissance: Mannerism. The museum invites us to read this painting for its historical messaging, to understand what its detail and codes reveal about the artist’s intentions. With shimmering varnish and gesture, Baselitz reminds us that the reason we know and care what those intentions were is that the Renaissance reinvigorated the idea of ‘artist’, whose genius, design, and hand (‘Maniera’, meaning style, from ‘mano’, or ‘hand’) made marks of paint on a canvas into more than the sum of their parts. 

Bibliography 

Spiegler, Almuth. “Daran ist nichts verkehrt: Baselitz im KHM”. Die Presse. 3.3.23. https://www.diepresse.com/6258866/daran-ist-nichts-verkehrt-baselitz-im-khm 

“Baselitz: Nackte Meister. Sonderausstellung 07.03 - 25.06.2023”. Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien. https://baselitz.khm.at/ 

“Ein “Fleischsalat”: Georg Baselitz im KHM”. Austria Presse Agentur. 3.3.23. https://apa.at/news/ein-fleischsalat-georg-baselitz-im-khm/ 

“Georg Baselitz”. Thaddaeus Ropac. https://ropac.net/artists/28-georg-baselitz/ 

“Georg Baselitz ‘23”. Thaddaeus Ropac. https://ropac.net/online-exhibitions/96-georg-baselitz-23/ 

“Georg Baselitz: Nackte Meister”. Hatje Cantz Verlag. https://www.hatjecantz.de/georg-baselitz-8410-0.html 

“kulturMontag, ORF 2”. 6.3.23. https://tv.orf.at/program/orf2/kulturmont814.html 

“Nackte Meister: Georg Baselitz im Dialog mit den Alten Meistern in KHM”. ORF TV-Programm. https://tv.orf.at/230306kumo124.html 

“Wien| KHM: Georg Baselitz | Nackte Meister | 2023”. Art In Words. 6.3.23 https://artinwords.de/wien-khm-georg-baselitz/