Partisan signed with initials 'G.B.' (lower left); numbered and dated '22 1965' (on the reverse) oil on canvas 63 3/4 x 51 1/2 in. (162 x 130cm.) Painted in 1965
Hamburg, Galerie Neuendorf, Georg Baselitz: Ein Neuer Typ, 1974. Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Georg Baselitz: Retrospecktive 1964-1991, March-May 1992, no. 3 (illustrated in colour, unpaged). This exhibition later travelled to Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, May-July 1992 and Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, July-September 1992. Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, The Romantic Spirit in German Art, 1790-1990, July-September 1994 (illustrated in colour, p. 444). This exhibition later travelled to London, Hayward Gallery, September 1994-January 1995 and Munich, Haus der Kunst, February-May 1995. New York, Guggenheim Museum, Georg Baselitz, May-September 1995, no. 43 (illustrated in colour, p. 42). This exhibition later travelled to Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 1995-January 1996 and Washington D.C., Hirschorn Museum, February-May 1995. Stockholm, Modern Museet, Wounds: Between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art, February-April 1998. Berlin, Altes Museum, The Twentieth Century-A Century of Art in Germany, September 1999-January 2000.
Literature
R. Fuchs, H. Kramer and P. Schjeldahl (eds.), Art of Our Time: The Saatchi Collection, vol. 3, London 1984 (illustrated in colour, pl. 1).
Provenance
Gallerie Neuendorf, Hamburg. The Saatchi Collection, London. Anthony d'Offay, London (A007397). Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998.
Notes
Painted in 1965, Partisan is one of Baselitz's celebrated Hero or New Type pictures in which the artist explored personal and public memories in Germany. In this 1965-66 series of biting contemporary reincarnations of a German Romantic ideal, Baselitz presented the viewer with a strange new order of man, striding like giants across a blasted landscape. This is a visual mythology for the modern world, a new class of hero who has had countless untold adventures in his unspecific and desolate surroundings. Tapping into the existential angst of the period, Baselitz has created the epic figure of the wanderer, the uprooted sufferer of modern life, wrestling with the elements in an unexplained and unspecified struggle to survive. Even the brushwork exists as the gestural evidence of a battle between the artist and the world, Baselitz lashing down his vision in oils in a struggle that itself affirms the life of the painter.
Partisan is a deeply personal vision from an artist who proclaimed himself to be without ideology. In this sense, Partisan is a self-portrait, Baselitz depicting himself as a solitary figure, a warrior-artist, a pioneer striving alone to find civilisation within the no-man's-land of German culture in the 1960s. The open shorts, hinting at the masturbation that is more overt in other paintings on the same theme, are indicative of artistic fertility, of the creative spirit: the Partisan is a pioneer spreading his seed. Meanwhile, the title of this work implies that the artist, to Baselitz's mind, was a hunted freedom fighter, an outlaw and a renegade fighting the good cause. In the world of Informel, Pop and Abstract Expressionism, Baselitz's renegade status was strengthened by his insistent adherence to figurative painting, considered outmoded, defunct or overly traditional by many of his contemporaries.
The sense of isolation that Baselitz felt in the mid-1960s, both as an artist and in life, was all the more acutely felt because of his relatively recent movement from East to West Berlin. He found himself propelled from the world of the anti-fascist, anti-capitalist propaganda and Socialist Realism in the East to the world of capitalism of the West, plunging from one ideological extreme to another. He found this disorientating and was wise enough to retain a cynical distance from it all. Baselitz's art works outwith this world of political points of view, and is instead focussed on his own memories: 'I have no strategies. I have other things: my biography, my feelings, the way I am. And my origins. All that vague stuff. But I have no strategy for giving an answer, for formulating, preparing or introducing anything. Nothing like that' (Baselitz, quoted in F. Dahlem, Georg Baselitz, Cologne,1990, p. 33). As an artist, Baselitz uses his memories and his personality as his source, tapping his own unique subjective view of the world and presenting it on a large scale on canvas. In this way, he was a solitary pioneer amongst the codified movements that populated the German cultural scene of the 1960s.
Baselitz's use of his memories, and in particular his origins, as a source of his art is especially evident in the Hero series. Baselitz had a keen awareness of his origins and his roots, and had even changed his name from Georg Kern, taking the name of his birthplace instead. Baselitz felt an umbilical link to his land. He was fascinated by the ancient monuments and tombs and by the forests (indeed, he almost studied forestry instead of art at one point). Celebrating this heritage during this period, he became the provocative new incarnation of the Romantic painter of the previous century, defying the stigma of being German in the wake of war by celebrating his nationality and his origins in his epic hero figures, providing new mythic content suited to the Post-War world.
This celebration of his German-ness in Partisan is mixed and ambiguous. Dressed in tattered clothes, with his shorts undone, alone in a strange, barren landscape, the Partisan is a post-Wagnerian image of myth and manliness, a provocatively flawed and sexual figure and certainly not the venerated idol of a new age. Although there is a hint of the bucolic, the timeless traveller standing by his campfire in the same way that Odysseus or Friedrich's wanderer might, even this pastoral idyll is deeply scarred and frayed. The Partisan is a new flawed Adam expelled from an unspecified Garden and left to roam the wilderness of modern life. The landscape of the Hero paintings smacks of the post-Apocalyptic. In this sense, Baselitz's Partisan recalls the German troops returning to their homeland at the end of the Second World War, only two decades earlier. In a country unwilling to acknowledge its own recent history, where reminders of the War had been erased and mentions of it were taboo, Baselitz has portrayed a hero in khaki crossing the battle-scarred landscape, forcing his audience to confront and accept their history, rather than ignoring it. These pictures would prefigure other artists' explorations of the same delicate subject, not least Kiefer's famous Occupations of four years later.
This exploration of German identity in the Post-War world is an extension of the profound bond between Baselitz and his German homeland: his personal history is a facet of his national history, and his memories are a facet of a more general public theme. Thus the Partisan is the solitary, unsocial and unappreciated warrior returning to his home, echoing Baselitz's own family history: Baselitz's father had been drafted into the army only to return home after extended captivity at the hands of the British and the Russians. He was injured, losing an eye, and was prevented for some time from resuming his post as a teacher because he had fought for the fascist forces but had returned to a Socialist republic. So too, the Partisan, with his hands at his side, has a hint of subjugation and victimisation, and his ragged appearance makes him appear disenfranchised and unappreciated. This is not the towering vision of Socialist Realist propaganda, of a strong and able hero for the masses, but instead the compromised and complex reality of the German man in 1965.
Baselitz himself has stated that his Hero images owe much to Socialist Realist images, especially those of the Soviets following the final defeat of the White Russians. The painter was intrigued by the propaganda images of the able warrior-workers founding a new nation and bringing about the birth of a new age. But Baselitz's Partisan is neither the superman of the Soviets, nor of Nietzsche - he is a punctured deity, a flawed image with tattered clothes in a state of semi-undress, holding out his hands in an act of supplication, as though to display stigmata that are not there.
As well as echoing the art of propaganda with its striding assurance, the Partisan's pose also reflects the Mannerist tradition that had influenced and impressed Baselitz for many years, but which came to the fore in 1965 when he won a six month scholarship in the Villa Romana in Florence. Not only was this exposure to Southern life a revelation, but his exposure to the Mannerists in situ and to their contrapposto figures was hugely significant to the inception and development of the Hero series. Partisan, like the figures in other pictures in the series, has the small head and large hands and body that Baselitz had gleaned from both the Florentine and the Northern Mannerists. Baselitz himself has explained that there is an intense force to these images, and he would often look at prints from the period when seeking inspiration for his paintings. Even in his loyalty to and plundering of the Old Masters, Baselitz was at odds with the art world around him, defiantly refiguring the 'types' of a former civilisation's religious art in his New Types.
Seeing these pictures in Florence affected both his appreciation of the figures, and also of the function of art. For art taken from a church and placed in a museum has been stripped of its context and therefore of its meaning. Baselitz's painting circumvents this by making his paintings autonomous, and also by impressing the point that they are completely personal. However great the link between the image of the Partisan and the wider public, however much meaning the hero has to its viewers, this picture is Baselitz's own statement to himself: 'Only pictures show our actual condition. They are inventions that cannot be compared with reality; they have no truth. They consist in, or are implied by, a subjective experience' (Baselitz, quoted in ibid., p. 23). Baselitz's personality, memories, German-ness and knowledge are the filters through which he has created a bold and searing vision of humanity. The artist's mind is the lens through which we see the world in a new light, we gain a new understanding of our own existence. Like Baselitz, we see ourselves in the hunted, solitary Partisan. By forcing this subjective experience onto the canvas, Baselitz presents the world with the new mythic figures for a secular German iconography.
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