Georg BaselitzSigmunds Höhle

Anselm Wagner’s highly readable essay sets off at once on a culturally and historically most interesting, faintly satirical tour de force into the pictorial world of thought of the great German painter Georg Baselitz, and above all into all the entanglements and histories that form the subject of his most recent series of works: “Sigmunds Höhle.” The title alone suggests a hair-raising story. In 1938 the cancer-stricken father of psychoanalysis, then 82 years old and placed under house arrest by the Gestapo, translated into German, together with his daughter Anna, a French book about a chow-chow bitch which, like him, was suffering from a carcinoma in the right side of the throat and had to undergo repeated operations and courses of radiation until she was finally cured – a happy ending, then, of the kind that was famously to be denied to Freud. The French original of the book was by Freud’s patient, friend and patron Marie Bonaparte, who then helped him and his family to emigrate. As with many dog owners, the Freuds’ relations with their four-legged companions were contradictory – Freud had three chow-chows one after another, Anna an Alsatian. On the one hand, according to Wagner, “they embody an almost paradisal existence spared culture and the discontents it engenders”; on the other, Freud and with him psychoanalysis stand “in the materialist tradition of the Cynics, the dog philosophers …, who relieved their bodily needs in public like dogs, despised the achievements and taboos of civilisation and combated Platonic idealism with coarse actionism.” And even when Georg Baselitz – himself a dog owner, as several photographs in this book document – “paints dogs or other animals, they belong in the first instance, like landscapes, still lifes, nudes and portraits, to the conventional, ‘banal’ subjects that are meant to distract as little as possible from painting as such.” Yet the painter also gets up to all manner of mischief with such magnificent ideas as a kind of “hole in the picture” at the centre of these dog portraits, or the ornamental band of cloud that he ties around the animals’ bellies like an apron, “whose pattern is not by chance reminiscent of an anus or a vulva.”

Exhibition:
Contemporary Fine Arts CFA Berlin, 1/10 – 14/11/2015