February 02, 2021
German artist Georg Baselitz and his wife,
Elke, have gifted six inverted portraits to the New York institution to toast
the Metropolitan Museum of Art 150th anniversary in 2020. The works all date to
1969, and they will be on view in the exhibition “Georg Baselitz: Pivotal Turn”
through July 18. The portraits, made in 1969, are among the first that Baselitz
created using the radical strategy of inversion, in which the pictorial motif
is literally turned upside down, enabling the artist to focus on painting's
possibilities, rather than the image of the sitter in direct relationship to
the viewer. Baselitz’s series of portraits from 1969 depict close friends and
peers from the German art scene. Subjects include the journalist Martin G.
Buttig, the gallerists Franz Dahlem and Michael Werner, and the collector Karl
Rinn. The works have been in the artist’s collection for six decades, and
Baselitz created them to subvert the conventions of the portraiture genre.
The director of the museum Max Hollein
said, “This formative group of early portraits by one
of the greatest painters of our time is an important addition to the Met’s
outstanding collection,”
Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in
1938 in East Germany, where he began his art studies in 1956 at the Academy of
Fine and Applied Art in East Berlin. After a decade of this practice, in 1969,
Baselitz reached a critical point in his career as he sought to expunge
narrative content and expression from his works in order to focus on painting
itself, and he began representing subjects upside down.
Georg Baselitz, Da. Portrait Franz Dahlem (1969). © Georg Baselitz. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Baselitz Family.
In the statement, Baselitz said, “It brings tremendous joy and satisfaction knowing that these six works that have remained in our collection and that mark a significant moment in the evolution of my approach to painting will be an integral part of the Museum’s historic collection,”
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