With Georg Baselitz’s Final Show, in Venice, a Provocateur Ends Softly

Six days after the death of Georg Baselitz, his longtime dealer Thaddeaus Ropac opened an exhibition in Venice this week that the artist had already accepted would be his last. 

At the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, “Eroi d’Oro” (“Heroes of Gold”) brings together the final paintings Baselitz made in his lifetime. He died in April at 88, and in a prerecorded film made for the show, he refers to the works without hesitation as “my last paintings.” He says he intended them as a kind of “summation” of everything he had done.

When ARTnews spoke to Baselitz just days before his passing, he was even more direct. “I have a long biography to look back on,” he said. “I have painted an incredibly large number of pictures over the course of more than 60 years. Now that I’m more or less at the end of my painting activity, I thought I should draw some kind of conclusion.”

It is a rare note of finality from an artist who built his reputation on a refusal of good taste and, often, of what was considered fashionable. From the scandal of his early figurative work in the 1960s, through the upside-down paintings that became his signature, to the wooden figures shown at the 1980 Venice Biennale that appeared to salute like broken monuments, his practice was defined by disruption. But the exhibition that Baselitz wanted to be his last is more a distillation of his career than another controversial show.

The paintings are enormous, almost architectural in scale, and covered in gold ground. Across this luminous surface, Baselitz drew thin, ink-like figures, either himself or his wife Elke, lying horizontally, as if seen from above. The bodies float in an undefined space, at once intimate and strangely cosmic.

Baselitz was uncharacteristically precise about what the gold was doing when I spoke to him. “Gold absorbs space, shadows, spatiality,” he said. “And on top of that, just a drawing, as if on a piece of paper, a nude drawing … as fine as I could manage.”

That idea of subtraction rather than addition runs through the entire series. The bodies are reduced to thin black lines. They become ephemeral.

Baselitz has rarely used these gold grounds, which he connected them to Fayum mummy portraits, Sienese altarpieces, and Byzantine icons, all of which depict the dead. “The effect of these images is that the portrait exists in a spaceless or shadowless condition,” he said.

French art historian Eric Darragon, who knew the artist well, told me that the gold backgrounds borrow the full visual authority from the likes of Sienese painters of the 14th and 15th centuries, such as Duccio, Simone Martini, and Fra Angelico, as well as Stefan Lochner, a German painter who worked in the International Gothic style. These artists used gold to suggest divine space, eternity, and spiritual meaning. Darragon argued that Baselitz adopted this familiar visual language but removed its religious function. In turn, it becomes what Darragon described as an “impassive, definitive surface” that “sanctifies nothing.”

As a result, he told me “Eroi d’Oro” is paradoxical, in that it is an ending that still behaves like a beginning. “After 60 years of intense activity, Baselitz felt a sense of fulfillment,” Darragon said, but explained that this idea of closure is unstable. The artist’s defining condition is “his constant need to start afresh, to set off into the unknown with all the risks that entails.”

I asked Baselitz how he wanted the exhibition to shape or challenge the way his work is ultimately understood. “I am not responsible for what happens,” he said. “My communication with the public has always been very sparse and restrained. It is clearly evident that this is not theater, nor mythological activity.”

If he was reserved, it may have been due to wariness. Comments he made in a 2013 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel about female painters landed him in hot water. He suggested women did not make good painters, and was set upon by the art world as a result. In a 2021 interview with Artnet News, he said his words were “cited out of context and [caused] misunderstandings.” He added that he strongly rejected the idea of judging art through identity categories. “I find it utterly stupid to classify art by quotas: male, female, Black, white … for me there is only good or bad art,” he added. 

I asked him how he reflected on his infamous comments, and if his position had changed. “That was a big provocation,” he replied, without elaborating. 

So now that he is gone, where does Baselitz’s legacy rank in the history of contemporary art?

“Baselitz did not believe that history proceeded from results that simply add up,” Darragon told me. “For a work to emerge, he believed that everything must be called into question. He did, moreover, make ‘zero’ a sort of existential emblem that defined him, but this demand, far from being a clean slate, implied, on the contrary, a rediscovery of the past—a past that has been neglected or even forgotten.”

Baselitz, Darragon added, “stands apart from the mainstream of his time.”