The Brooklyn Rail

New York loves Georg Baselitz. This year alone he’s had two major shows here: the first at the Morgan Library, a retrospective covering drawings made between 1963 and 2018. That comprehensive display gave us the chance to see him in all his spontaneity, his upside-down vision of the world, and his humor. Gagosian’s superb show, the second, consists of thirty-seven oil and ink-on-paper works all made in 2022. The artist who defined neo-Expressionist painting in the twentieth century has now firmly established his presence in the twenty first.

Baselitz’s title may well allude to Philip Guston’s 1973 Painter in Bed, reminding us that he loves to refer to contemporaries: drawings in the Morgan show jokingly name Robert Rauschenberg and Tracey Emin. But any similarities stop right there. Guston’s supine, cigar chomping artist is tucked up in his bed with his paints and brushes balanced on his chest. Baselitz’s painter—if that’s what he is—is stretched out alongside his bed, as if he’d either died and fallen out or simply preferred the floor. In fact, only four works here depict beds and human figures, though two others do contain supine characters without beds, so there is a kind of imbalance or misdirection in the show title. The other thirty-one works, oils and ink on paper focus on a single subject, the Hirsch or stag.

Why Baselitz should be obsessed with the stag is anyone’s guess, but the animal is charged with symbolic meanings. First, there is Saint Hubert, a seventh-century Frenchman out hunting and suddenly face to face with a stag (or hart) with a crucifix floating between his antlers. The vision prompted Hubert to adopt the pious life. Divorced from a religious context, the stag, because of his antlers, is linked to the tree of life and spiritual regeneration. Baselitz resorts to his signature inverted images when depicting the stag, legs up and antlers below. If we link these upside-down stags to hunting, they become kills ready for field dressing. In this sense, they are Baselitz’ version of the “big fish” in Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952), where the old fisherman or old artist plumbs the depths of his imagination, the sea, and comes up with a grand idea. Baselitz is eighty-five years old, but this old man is still in the hunt.

Baselitz combines the title of the show with the stag theme in a huge, 118 by 196 inch work, The Painter in His Bed (2022), a tour-de-force performance. But there is no bed here, no painter, only four inverted white stags on a black field. The black background is ominous, just as it is in the works that do contain a bed and a supine human figure. So, death as a ubiquitous presence haunts these pictures. The stag of rebirth finds itself on a deathbed. This funerary motif recurs in the other bed pictures, especially Schwarzes Bett [Black Bed] (2022). A large work (78 by 98 inches) it, like so many of the larger pieces here, is a collage, being composed of oil, dispersion adhesive, and fabric on canvas. Just as there is no painter or bed in the larger work, there is really no bed in this “black bed” composition. Just a figure floating in a black void, certainly an intimation of mortality.

This somber quality dominates the two works that do contain beds, Weißes Bett [White Bed] (2022) and Bett weiß, weiß [Bed white, white] (2022). Both beds are white, and look like deathbeds, but all beds mark the coming together of beginnings and ends. While it is true that the juxtaposition, in both works, of the white rectangle above and the skeletal figure below recall a medieval flattening of perspective and constitute a species of memento mori, they can also be construed as enactments of the concept that the artist must die to life to produce art.

In fact, while The Painter in His Bed in its entirety, with its black and white sepulchral scenes and its alarming red stags hanging in space could constitute a homage to death, we come away with an entirely different feeling, namely that Baselitz is a phoenix springing back to life out of his own ashes. This is not an ending but a new beginning.