Evocatively confronting the viewer with raw, visceral brushstrokes and an electrifying color palette, Glastrinkerin [Female Glass Drinker] is a superb example from Georg Baselitzs' acclaimed Drinkers series. This body of work, created in the early 1980s, is exemplary of this period of fervent creativity for the artist and pays homage to Baselitz’s German Expressionist predecessors, championing of German Neo-Expressionist painting and the artist’s newfound freedom from ideological limitations. Although he never sought to deliberately emulate the work of past masters, the Drinkers were nevertheless influenced by the German Expressionists, especially artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde of Die Brücke. Baselitz explained, “These works represent my reaction to expressionist art during the ‘80s… I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings desired by my father’s generation. Their denouncement made them especially appealing to me as a human being...” (Georg Baselitz, quoted in P. Kort, “80s Then: Georg Baselitz Talks to Pamela Kort,” Artforum, April 2003, p. 207)

In Glastrinkerin, Baselitz presents the human figure upside down, distorting conventional interpretation, and, with expressionistic gusto, the artist liberates his subject from traditional assumptions without turning to pure abstraction. As with the most expressive and vibrant of the works from this series, Baselitz here exuberantly paints in crisp yellow a harlequin-like figure that bristles with spontaneity and the glass adds a spirited component of carnival and bacchanal-like fervor to the portrait. Baselitz first forayed into inverting his subjects in 1969 with an upside down variation of a 19th-century landscape by Ferdinand von Rayski. Through inverting the figure, Baselitz explores figurative tradition whilst simultaneously interrogating and destabilizing its techniques. As in his famed Hero paintings executed two decades prior, Baselitz presents a conflicted figure struggling with the existential terms of her own reality in a fundamentally altered, modern world.

Executed in 1981, Glastrinkerin is part of the esteemed collects ion of Hardie Beloff and, along with three other superb examples by the artist that span Baselitz’s career, together represent the most significant collects ion of the artist’s work ever to come to auction. In particular, the present work dates to a formative period in Baselitz’s celebrated artistic career during which the artist enjoyed resounding institutional appreciation; the artist represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980, participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982 and was the focus of a traveling retrospective at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Kunsthalle, Basel in 1983.

In the present composition, Baselitz portrays an upturned woman, with eyes wide and lips parted, mid sip of a frothing drink. The figure’s upside-down portrayal instills in the composition a sense of disorientation, forcing the viewer to mentally invert the image to make sense of it. Baselitz heightens this sense of unease with his choice of color and handling of paint. The central figure is rendered in an acidic, biting shade of ochre and set against an opposing purple backdrop; rich hues of red, vibrant teal, and creamy, foamy whites punctuate the composition. Baselitz renders the scene with visceral, staccato strokes of paint that activate and agitate the surface. In every instance, the painting oscillates back and forth between the inverted representation of the seated figure and the abstraction of its painterly field. This dynamic, tactile surface epitomizes Baselitz’s own description for his style at the t.mes , which he described as “boxing with both hands.” (Georg Baselitz, quoted in P. Kort, “80s Then: Georg Baselitz Talks to Pamela Kort,” Artforum, April 2003, p. 207)

As an East German who had moved to the West just before the construction of the Berlin Wall, Baselitz’s figures demonstrate the fractured sense of identity of postwar Germany. Like his contemporaries Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, Baselitz sought a new pictorial language in order to carry on with the act of painting in the decades following World War II, as the specter of war still lingered over many aspects of daily life. Like Baselitz’s New Types and Heroes of the mid-1960s, the Trinkers can be understood in similar terms, where a conflicted figure struggles with the existential terms of their own reality in a fundamentally altered, modern world. Then as now, these paintings are seen as powerful emblems that reflect the artist’s attempt to create meaningful work in a still-divided Germany that stood at the brink of the Cold War’s end. Indeed, Donald Kuspit noted the particular power of the series when Trinker am Tisch [Drinker at Table] was exhibited in New York at Xavier Fourcade in 1983: “These paintings are not only upside-down, they are inside-out: the figures have a flayed, raw look that goes with spiritual nakedness…The ‘reversible world,’ the sense of ‘topsy-turvydom’ — of everything stood on its head — is also a comic acknowledgment of the world’s craziness, a picaresque way of calling it into questionableness. Very simply, it is a way of…negating what seems the proper order of things…used to renew the failing criticality that is the soul of modernism.” (Donald Kuspit, “Georg Baselitz at Fourcade,” Art in America, February 1982, pp. 139-40)

The appearance of the Beloff collects ion at auction constitutes the first t.mes that this remarkable group of works in its entirety has been seen publicly. Over 70% of the funds generated by the sale of the collects ion will be distributed to a wide array of charities dedicated to a variety of causes, including animal welfare, justice initiatives and a series of non-profits supporting the people and institutions of Hardie Beloff’s community of many years, Philadelphia. At the collects ion’s core is the greatest grouping of works by Georg Baselitz in private hands, which together succinctly articulate the very best of the German artist’s inimitable oeuvre. Deeply discrete during his lifet.mes , Hardie Beloff nevertheless believed in sharing his collects ion with the public and routinely lent works to institutional exhibitions under the alias “Fielding Mellish”, a nod to the 1971 film Bananas.

Artist

Georg Baselitz