The standout show in Venice this year is also one of the most poignant. Georg Baselitz died a week before the opening of the exhibition of his paintings Eroi d’Oro (Golden Heroes) on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore (until 27 September). In two large rooms, very large upright paintings show a single inverted naked figure drawn with a fine black line on a golden ground. The figures are all, with one exception, images of Elke Kretzschmar, the artist’s wife. The exception is a smaller inverted portrait of the artist himself, looking a little like Hokusai in a famous self-portrait drawing (which Baselitz some years back used as the inspiration for a series of works) once again naked and appearing in extreme old age.
Baselitz’s voice echoes around the space. He recorded two short statements that are shown on a video monitor, describing the paintings as a ‘summation’ of his life and work, although leaving it for the visitor to work out what this might mean. The paintings are meditations on old age, restoring dignity to the ageing body, and great hymns of praise to Elke, the central subject of his imagination for more than six decades. They also show how deeply history and politics are embedded in Baselitz’s work. The effect of the upside-down paintings, after all these years, is to make us realise that it is the world that is topsy-turvy. Life has been turned upside down one last time.
This was on ample view at the Biennale, in which the art often seemed to take second place to political furore and demonstrations. Baselitz, on San Giorgio, felt safely distanced from the baton-wielding riot police. Elsewhere art felt vulnerable and under attack.
This is a situation we are getting increasingly used to, especially in the UK following the bouleversement of the recent council elections. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has claimed that a historic shift has occurred in the political landscape, and it is hard to disagree. What was once a matter of Left versus Right, has become an opposition based on cultural questions of identity and belonging.
A longer-term view
Should museums be worried? On a local level, perhaps not quite yet. Cultural organisations should look beyond the ups and downs of turbulent political moments, says Clare Palmier, the director of The Art Station in Saxmundham, East Suffolk — although this also means shoring up local arts organisations and vital cultural assets against all future odds.
And yet still there are troubling signs. The Reform pledge, in its manifesto for the Welsh Senedd election, to control how museums display the interpretation of history is a worrying, if typically confused message from a party seemingly devoted to reducing state intervention. The challenge for museums is nevertheless how to take these views on board, as Tony Butler, the executive director of Derby Museums Trust, says, and to provide a common ground on which divergent views can meet. This, it might be said, is practical moral ambition. At present one of the very few initiatives to create this space comes in the form of citizens’ assemblies and juries, for example those at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham, and the Birmingham Museums Trust. How much these left-liberal initiatives can consider the view from Reform is an open question. The very notion of diverse community engagement might fall on some ears as ‘woke’.
These are positive projects, but it is also worth bearing in mind the worst-case scenario of how things might evolve. Here the historical lesson is important. The first signs of cultural manipulation by authoritarian leaders in the 1930s was to determine the appointment of museum directors. By the end of 1933, most left-leaning museum directors in Germany had been replaced by Nazi-friendly personnel, who generally knew little about art and had no experience of running museums. Political appointments to museums and cultural institutions are the canary in the coalmine.
Georg Baselitz’s B.j.M.C. – Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1965). Private collection © Georg Baselitz 2025
Broader questions
Following the destruction and defeat of the Third Reich, Georg Baselitz was the first German artist to create lasting symbols of such a historic moment, in the form of the ‘hero’ paintings from the mid-1960s. A memorial exhibition of these will take place later this year at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. The ‘heroes’ are battered figures of soldiers, poets and painters wandering through a bleak war-torn landscape.
They are based on Baselitz’s earliest memories of Red Army soldiers entering Germany at the end of the war, and retreating remnants of the Wehrmacht. But they have a far wider resonance, and are part of the legacy of a great artist who combined a deep conservatism in his attitude to technique and his study of the art of the past, with a resolute avant-garde involvement in challenging forms of art. The heroes remain symbols of our time, struggling through a darkening world, and asking the question: what now?
• John-Paul Stonard is an author and art historian. His latest book, The Worst Exhibition in the World: Degenerate Art, 1937, was published on 5 May
