Born Georg Kern in 1938, Baselitz adopted the name of his birthplace in Saxony, East Germany just after his definitive move to the West in 1958. Brought up in an atmosphere of gloom and social realism, he had been expelled from art school in East Berlin for ‘social-political immaturity’. He fared better in West Berlin and firmly grasped the fashionable nettle of existential angst while struggling with a whole raft of Western influences, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. He developed his own brand of uncouth and aggressive figuration, making his trade-mark (from 1969) the upside-down motif. Baselitz paints his pictures flat on the floor, working all round them, but chose to exhibit them with the figurative elements the wrong way up in an attempt to disassociate subject from content. He wanted the formal abstract qualities of his pictures to be judged in their own right, irrespective of what they actually depicted.
I remember when Baselitz’s paintings started appearing in London after his first real introduction to this country in the RA’s groundbreaking 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting. I was very struck by their size and the vigour of their brushwork, also by their lush colours. I remember encouraging the more sceptical to try to see these paintings with fresh eyes (this was what Baselitz was after, was it not?), for they could not fail to be moved if they abandoned their preconceptions and prejudices. His 1983 Whitechapel show was a further revelation, particularly in respect of his breakthrough into sculpture. So does all this enthusiasm of yesteryear survive today? Does Baselitz’s work still look good?
The visitor enters the show via the octagon, where one of the best sculptures (a figure falling over while doing a cod Nazi salute, which caused a furore at the 1980 Venice Biennale) is surrounded by eight mannerist ‘Hero’ paintings. These tough Sixties pictures still pack a punch — just look at the amputee ‘Blocked Painter’ or ‘The Tree’ — and are rather more interesting than the jokey sex paintings next door. The room of drawings and prints ably demonstrates Baselitz’s graphic skills, but sadly the paintings don’t always convince. On occasion they can be surprisingly lyrical (as in ‘Finger Painting — Apple Trees’, 1973, or when he paraphrases Lovis Corinth), but all too often they are simply clumsy and ineffective. The exception is room 6, hung with the ’45 Series of 1989. This group of 20 gouged and painted wood panels exerts an extremely powerful collective impression: gentle pink heads encaged by stab marks. The later works, when Baselitz revisits old themes and repaints actual pictures in a thin and insubstantial manner, are inevitably rather lacking by comparison.
The exhibition is rather too densely hung, as if quantity will somehow compensate for quality, and I am reminded of Robert Hughes’s enjoyable dismissal of Baselitz as ‘that sturdy German fountain of overwrought mediocrity’. A much-publicised interest in ‘ornament’ does not make the late ‘Remix’ paintings any stronger, despite Norman Rosenthal’s assurances that they constitute an ‘unbelievably lyrical recollection of youth’ which the world will come to love as they do Picasso’s late period. Now I’m the sceptical one.
Although the Baselitz show will attract young painters, I doubt if it will be a popular success. But the other exhibition currently in the Academy’s Main Galleries is in danger of being overlooked altogether, not being the kind to attract reviews or stray punters. And this is a great pity, because it is of decided interest to the non-specialist, despite its possibly off-putting title. It’s basically a collection of treasures belonging to or associated with the Society of Antiquaries (whose HQ is in Burlington House, along with a number of other learned societies besides the RA), which, before the British Museum took over that role, was the chief national repository of antiquities, historical documents and pictures. These are just the sort of things that people enjoy looking at when they visit historic monuments or stately homes.
The show opens with a long central cabinet containing a mid-15th-century Roll Chronicle on vellum (with 17th-century additions), intricately illuminated in coloured inks, being a sort of family tree tracing Charles II’s descent from Adam and Eve, via Noah and the Dukes of Normandy. Nearby are broadminded old books: Michael Drayton’s verse epic ‘Poly-Olbion’, Wynkyn de Worde’s ‘Cronycle of Englonde’ and Aylett Sammes’s ‘Britannia Antiqua Illustrata’, open at an image of a druidic wicker man. A late-17th-century Cabinet of Curiosities contains the finger of a Frenchman among more commonplace articles, while the Gray’s Inn Axe, a flint handaxe from the Lower Palaeolithic period, presents to our astonished gaze an artefact some 350,000 years old. The magus John Dee’s ‘Holy Table’, in carved marble (a later copy of his original wooden one), is a stimulating alternative to a surfeit of royal portraits, though among the paintings here is Hans Eworth’s resplendent but frigid likeness of the heretic-burning Mary I. A diptych of Old St Paul’s from 1616 is an altogether more human and encouraging image.
The exhibits are interspersed with welcome caricatures by the likes of Rowlandson and Cruickshank offering Antiquarian spoofs, just to prove that the Society is not a prey to humourless priggishness. In fact, the show is fascinating. An 1835 painting by Richard Tongue of Bath of the Neolithic burial chamber of Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire vividly recalled my own visit to the site a year or two ago. And a drawing from c.1784 by the Swiss artist Samuel Hieronymous Grimm, of the entrance to the prison chamber of Lincoln Cathedral, shows hardy antiquaries venturing across a ladder propped over a perilous drop. This drawing seems to explore a very contemporary predicament (the difficulty of achieving the simplest acts) with economy and wit. Gilbert White noted the artist’s distinctive ‘vein of humour’, an invaluable asset in a man commissioned by the Dean of Lincoln to tour the country and depict ‘everything curious’.
One of the most momentous objects here is the medieval Yorkist processional cross recovered from the Battle of Bosworth (1485). Not because it looks particularly splendid, though it is quietly ornate in bronze gilt, but because of what it represents: the end of the Wars of the Roses, and the victory of the Lancastrians under Henry Tudor, the father of modern English history. There are other more eye-catching exhibits, various arms and pieces of jewellery and especially the magnificent late Bronze Age shield from Beith, Ayrshire. Don’t miss the lock of Edward IV’s hair, a watercolour copy of a now destroyed mural of Edward VI’s coronation procession, the plans, photos and film of Mortimer Wheeler’s celebrated excavation of Maiden Castle, and a female skeleton from St Bride’s, Farringdon Street.
A room of Pugin and William Morris artefacts (including a glorious Morris embroidery and a Philip Webb medieval-style settle) precedes the exhibition’s lustrous finale, a section devoted to the numinous if not minatory Stonehenge. For those of us who love paintings there is quite an array here: first Girtin, with a blue-tinted watercolour of the henge in a thunderstorm; then Turner, outdoing him by painting a shepherd and some of his flock actually struck by lightning; then Constable, depicting a storm passing away and a rainbow appearing. This trio could almost have been painted sequentially, though 40 years separate first and last. Then, to the right, on the end wall is the flaming apocal yptic sunset of John William Inchbold. As I say, quite a finale, and well worth a visit.
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