Georg Baselitz: Akademie Rousseau

Academy Rousseau by Georg Baselitz

"In the Picasso Hall of the Basel Art Museum hangs a special painting, a full-length portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire with his muse Marie Laurencin. Henri Rousseau painted this marvellous picture. However, I always remembered it as a portrait of Rousseau himself with Madame Rousseau. Marie Laurencin was Apollinaire's muse, Clémence Rousseau was Rousseau's muse. Franz Marc, in turn, painted a portrait of Rousseau for the Blue Rider. And Picasso also had a self-portrait of Henri. There is an intimate photo, taken by André Gomés, in which Picasso can be seen holding the self-portrait of Rousseau in his right hand and the portrait of his wife in his left. Picasso, the designer of novel objects and daring images, loved Rousseau, the painter of things in frozen grace. The painter's gaze in his self-portrait is also frozen. It is directed at his own work, in which objects that we also recognise can be seen in an unusual way, Gothic, Byzantine, somehow different from what we have known before. Not only the Egyptian Picasso, but also other picture constructors, for example Kandinsky, had pictures by Rousseau; Wassily the little picture The Painter and His Wife. De Chirico draws Picasso with friends under the self-portrait of Rousseau with a palette. Didn't Beckmann paint the balloon and the avenue by Rousseau? I have the red lithograph The War of Rousseau, ca. 1895, which also exists by Ensor, by Uccello, something similar by Böcklin and also by Stefano della Bella. I have painted many portraits of my wife and myself in recent years, including many of these portraits of the two of us in other people's guises, sometimes as my parents, sometimes as Lenin and Stalin, but mostly as Otto Dix's parents. This double portrait of Dix's parents is also a picture from the Basel Museum, with a variation in Hanover. It was supposed to be another double portrait of Elke and me, transformed into Marie Laurencin and Apollinaire, whereby the beautiful frame of this picture in Basel was also important - in my memory, not in the face. Last year I bought a lot of old Italian frames and made portraits of Winfried Dierske, myself, my wife and also variations of the old Rayski pictures from 1960. So far so good. In the end, I didn't put these portraits in the old frames, but Rousseau's double portrait in Basel in the old painted frame was still haunting my mind. It was quite a jumble in my head of all these portraits and frames and the anti-realist painter Rousseau. Finally, in Italy, I painted Elke and myself as nudes and gave us the faces of Madame Rousseau and Henri. It became a construction in the sense of an iron and a racehorse, which was not what I wanted. So I got rid of it and started again, from scratch, without stimulation, soberly, simply, modestly, yet stubbornly, with the marvellous self-portrait of Rousseau, 1902-1903, with the saw beard under his nose, the self-portrait that Picasso had. It went well, it turned out well, and romanticism had won. After that, I left the path briefly and painted Madame Rousseau, but that was not a self-portrait of an artist, but a portrait of his muse. There is a book in my library, Fünfhundert Selbstportraits von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 1936, by Ludwig Goldscheider. I leafed through it, but found little that was useful to me. A review from the Saarbrücker Zeitung said of this book: "A picture book for grown-up people, in the best sense of the word, a book for tired eyes that no longer want to read, only look." And last but not least: "A reminder of modesty and humility." That's how it is, that's how it was. Where was my head, my love? Which artists, which self-portraits? Was there even a self-portrait by Pollock, for example? There is this small portrait of a Mexican boy, it was recently hanging in an exhibition, next to a very small self-portrait by Rothko. So that was the beginning of the next few months in the studio: Rousseau, Madame, Munch, Kirchner, Heckel, Schmidt-Rottluff. Franz Marc painted Rousseau's portrait, I paint Marc, de Kooning, Tracey Emin, Modersohn-Becker, Clyfford Still and so on, I also love Arnold Schönberg's self-portrait and his music. Unfortunately, Wolfgang Rihm doesn't paint. The portraits should be like appliqués on the canvas, i.e. the background black and as flat as possible, without space, the head on top, usually with a lot of white colour, applied quite thickly as in recent years, but always with Rousseau in mind, not slipping into dullness, not into reality, not into the truth of Ingres, but staying with Romanticism, including humility. Laughter is allowed." (Georg Baselitz)