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OhOn one wall, a body falls gently into the blue sky. Instead, it splatted, landing with a thump on the blood-stained mud. You don’t need to be an art critic to know what Georg Baselitz’s last painting was: death was coming to him, and he knew it.
Baselitz died in April aged 88. He was one of the most famous, well-known artists of his generation, and this work was his last. It is impossible to look at these paintings and drawings and see them through the lens of death. It feels like a last-ditch attempt to come to terms with life and what it means, and a desperate reckoning, rage, and chaos and the end of it all.
He painted these last works from an office wheelchair with a paintbrush on a stick, the canvas stretched out on the floor in front of him, his body not strong enough to stand as it used to. But they are still immediately recognizable in the way Baselitz works, filled with naked bodies, which are hung upside down to confuse the viewer and confuse your eyes. It’s just that now the chair has left muddy tracks all over the picture, evidence of slow decline.
The figures in these books, as usual, are himself and Elke, his wife and museum. It is their weak skin and crippled limbs that bind to any task.
As soon as you walk in and see the body falling through the air you know exactly what Baselitz is going through: life is a journey, run, then crash, you hit the dirt and you’re dead. But the two paintings on both sides do not accept that fate. Instead of being quiet and calm, the figures keep bumping into each other, they’ve grown more legs, they’re fighting what’s coming, they’re scared, they’re shaking.
They look like spiders who want to climb into the bathroom, and they repeat it over and over again. The last room is full of golden insects crawling on black cloths, falling into the abyss, desperately trying to escape. It’s a very scary, scary, angry, fear-filled thing.
Things are quiet in the room of gold curtains. Here, Elke’s body is a paper-thin, fragile material. You can’t tell one from the other, they’ve almost become one image now. Over the years, we’ve watched Baselitz’s figures dwindle – he wasn’t a great artist, and he had his share of shows, so we saw him age over time, his lines start to waver, his features become less and less. But this is another level, the final thought, of impending sickness, broken bodies beyond repair. With the golden cloths, it is as if he is sanctifying himself and his wife, turning the figures into Byzantine religious icons. They know, I think, that artists transcend themselves beyond their work, and these are things that should be worshiped after they are gone.
Eagles appear here, as they have throughout his work, as symbols of his youth in a broken Germany, which was destroyed after the war. They too shuddered, a great disorienting burst of flying wings, falling to the ground. “Now that I’m almost done with my painting career, I decided to finish it,” Baselitz said. Eagles, bodies, references to history: this one is reaching all the legs of his life in art.
I’ve never been a big Baselitz fan: I found the whole painting touching and would have led a campaign to get his entire work on display so we could see what it’s all about. I also think they released the same cartoons over the years.
But these are very cruel things. How can you not be touched by such an important artist, trying to say goodbye and doing so beautifully? He wanted an end, well here, a complete stop at work. Or a shout. What a sad goodbye.
