The bright, Pop colors of the double portrait, and of many of the new paintings inspired by the Orangenesser, recall Roy Lichtenstein, an artist who often alluded to previous styles and subjects in art history just as Baselitz does. The painting’s long, alliterative title gives a clue to a more recent artistic affinity: Wenn das Wörtchen wenn nicht wär, wär’s ein Lichtenstein gewesen translates as If if were not a word, it would have been Lichtenstein. This elderly naked couple exude resilience and even zest, their enduring love for each other clearly as strong as ever, whatever the future holds. But there is no hint here of the preoccupation with vulnerability and physical decline that characterizes his earlier portraits.
The grandest of the San Francisco paintings (over eight feet high by thirteen feet wide) is a double portrait of Baselitz and Elke in that tradition of portraits of couples of which Otto Dix’s unsparing portrait of his ageing parents, Die Eltern des Künstlers II ( The Artists’ Parents II, 1924), in the Sprengel Museum Hannover, has served as a model for Baselitz in the past. The procedure is analogous to collage, while the effect is of an image that pulsates with a dancelike energy-with the rhythms of life itself. The result suggests a fleeting, fragmentary view, due in part to the fact that Baselitz brushes paint onto small pieces of cloth that he then impresses on the canvas laid out on the floor and in part to his use of stencils or templates to block off areas of canvas or to achieve sharp contours. In the new paintings, however, Baselitz’s touch is much lighter, the paint is thinner and more fluid, like watercolor, and the forms are broken. The San Francisco paintings, a riot of acidic colors on white grounds, are possessed of a luminosity and vigor that point to their inspiration in earlier works by Baselitz-the first nude self-portraits and portraits of his wife Elke, for instance, culminating in the monumental, authoritative Schlafzimmer ( Bedroom, 1975), and the ferociously painted, wild-looking Orangenesser ( Orange Eaters) from the early 1980s. The two shows could not be more different but they are in a striking sense complementary. Others, including those in a San Francisco exhibition this spring and in a second body of work to be shown in Hong Kong, have not been directly touched by the artist’s hand. Some of the first works on a black ground produced in this way were given a coating of gold paint mixed with gold varnish, either through a spray pump or with a brush or both. The transfer differs from the original in that it is a mirror image, reversed as in printmaking.
Once it has been peeled away from the first canvas, the latter is usually discarded, though occasionally it is worked on and exhibited in its own right. Baselitz then applies various degrees of pressure to the back of this second canvas. This is best described as a process of transferring an image from a painted canvas lying unstretched on the floor, the oil paint still wet, to a second canvas laid over it, covered with either a white or a black ground. Last summer he started experimenting with an entirely new technique.
His capacity for hard work and his inexhaustible energy are remarkable for an artist in his eighties, especially one who paints crouched over the floor, bent double.