Lot 615 D

A figure in the context of a battlefield, frozen in the situation, wounded, torn by emotions, perplexed and shattered, but surviving, a hero bravely presenting the flag as the last of his regiment, standing between fallen comrades and facing all dangers with superhuman greatness. With this heroic figure, guilty of war and tyranny, Georg Baselitz aims at an emotion that was taboo in the 1960s. This pen and ink drawing suggests a hero of a past as a metaphorical flag bearer in the front ranks. Baselitz' hero is tired and battle-weary. The lowered flag, held vertically and defensively in front of the body, is free of sovereign gesture. The very energetic figure, drawn in lower view, the upper body slightly turned backwards, evokes a feeling of resignation and cold, waiting determination. Baselitz places his bare-footed, straddle-legged hero almost in the centre of the picture, draws him with overlong legs in torn trousers, short, waistcoat-clad upper body and a rather small head, typical for this group of works.
With the paintings, drawings and etchings, mainly created in Berlin and the Villa Romana in Florence in 1965 and 1966, first extensively exhibited at the Galerie Neuendorf in Hamburg in 1973, and characterised by Günter Gercken as New Types and Heroes for the first time, Baselitz, born in 1938 as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony and influenced by post-war East and West Germany, invents an extraordinary, sometimes outrageous pictorial language for his contemporary audience, in which he conducted a political and ideological discourse on the one hand and rebelled against the dogmatic rejection of representational realism propagated by older fellow painters on the other hand.
During his stay in Florence at the Villa Romana in 1965, Georg Baselitz became interested in Italian Mannerist prints and began to collect them. His encounter with the engravings of Pontormo, Rosso, Parmigiano, Schiavone and other Italian artists of the 16th and early 17th centuries influenced Baselitz' work. He discovered parallels with the themes of his current pictorial world, such as, dominant figures with a striking physical presence. The drawing of Helden [heroes] on unprinted paper from the 17th or 18th century, presumably discovered in one of the numerous Florentine antiquarian bookshops, demonstrates the artist's fascination for a genre to which, for a moment, he becomes very close.