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Georg Baselitz was history and his death robs us of the truth he knew when we need it more than ever. He was one of only two people I have spoken to who was a Nazi Germany it was a living memory: Baselitz was born in 1938, which made him too young to take personal blame but old enough – seven when the Third Reich fell – to preserve his experiences and his images.
In his paintings, he cut the images, beat them up and removed them from the drawings of young lovers in uniform and blood flowing from torn legs or whole bodies fed by the hellish grinder and reformation. They went to the forest, called “Heroes”, cutting and cutting in the German forest.
For every drop of Baselitz paint that glitters and streaks, it’s hard to avoid seeing the Holocaust. Some artists might be offended by such a broad interpretation of their work, but when Baselitz wrote me a disarming letter a few years ago, we talked. I wrote about him in the book he had, and it became clear that he knew his history well. How could he escape? In the early 1960s Baselitz, who had met not only Hitler but also East German Communism before crossing over to the West, terrorized the post-war West Germany that was trying to forget with the ugly images of a model, shameful group.
His 1961 painting Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) shows a stuttering man with Hitler-style black hair and a moustache, naked except for a pair of military-style shorts, playing with the naked body. In later revisions, he revealed the identity of the clown. Baselitz goes on to paint German eagles upside down as they fly over Berchtesgaden, the Nazi-occupied south, and carve a large wooden statue of a saluting Adolf rising from a stable like a mother rising from her grave.
This was not a sweet, sly meditation but a deliberate tirade of historical shame and guilt. He installed his zombie Hitler painting in the German Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale, in an exhibition linked to the cursed history. Anselm Kiefer. They were criticized by others that they were lovers, but what a misunderstanding: the German Pavilion in Venice is a neoclassical Nazi building that was written Germania, so instead of eagerly ignoring the ugly legacy, Baselitz and Kiefer began to rub everyone’s noses, saying that Europe should always remember its great night.
But the drain is getting closer every day. The stench is getting worse. The subjects that Baselitz painted seem to belong to a lost world of consciousness and art. He himself is now history, and I owe him some words against misremembering. Baselitz loved to provoke and could be made to sound like someone he wasn’t – he allegedly mocked female artists but was actually a fan of Tracey Emin. Instead he was the opposite of another Teutonic macho artist. I love his late work, in which he shows himself and his wife Elke naked, as old people decaying, or as dead bodies: he recently created art using his walker.
When I told him how I got these pictures of human weakness, he asked me if I thought that now was when he was doing his best work – was it weak before? I have never experienced such honest uncertainty as a celebrity. He also told me how he was once with his family at Wolsey’s and watched Lucian Freud arrive with a girl but was too shy to say hello.
He was very similar to Freud and Frank Auerbach as an artist of bodies and memories, which can be easily destroyed. Baselitz was an artist who never lost touch with the small, fragile, human truth. He was my kind of hero.
