Lot 17 D

"The motif of the eagle goes through the work of Georg Baselitz like a keynote. It appears for the first time in the 'Pandemonic Drawings' of 1962, as the bird rises with powerful, beating wings above the little view of the village of Deutschbaselitz. Since then the eagle motif has been used consistently to try out new possibilities in painting and drawing in all the individual development stages of Baselitz's work. [...] After the free drawings and coloured graphics produced in connection with the Eagle-Portfolio of 1974 and a group of Eagle Drawings in oil paint on paper made in New York in 1975, the preoccupation with this motif reaches its most intense concentration in the series of large sheets made from November 1978 to April 1979. [...] The eagle motif can be used in any material, but its effect changes since it depends primarily on the nature of the technique. [...] While the body of the eagle appears in the gouaches in compact material quality, it is dematerialised in the line drawings with their soft outlines, or reduced to a transparent scaffold with violent structures of strokes." (Günther Gercken, Der geopferte Adler, in: Georg Baselitz, Adler, exhib.cat., Galerie Buchmann, Basel und Galerie Neuendorf, Frankfurt/M., Stuttgart 1988, p.10, p.12)