Georg Baselitz: Sigmunds Höhle

Painting in doggystyle, so to speak

Anselm Wagner's essay, which is well worth reading, starts immediately with a culturally and historically highly interesting and satirically tinged parade ride 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 theme of his latest series of works: "Sigmund's Cave". The title alone suggests a hair-raising story. In 1938, the cancer-stricken father of psychoanalysis, 82 years old and placed under house arrest by the Gestapo, translated a French book into German together with his daughter Anna about a Chow Chow dog who, like him, suffered from a carcinoma in her right pharyngeal cavity and had to undergo multiple operations and radiotherapy until she was finally cured; a happy ending that Freud was famously denied. The French original of the book was written by Freud's patient, friend and patron Marie Bonaparte, who then helped him and the family to emigrate. As with many dog owners, the Freuds' relationships with their four-legged friends are contradictory - Freud had three Chow Chows in succession, Anna a German shepherd. On the one hand, according to Wagner, "they embody an almost paradisiacal existence, spared from culture and the discomfort it causes"; on the other hand, Freud and with him psychoanalysis "stands in the materialistic tradition of the Cynics, the dog philosophers ... who carried out their physical needs like dogs in public, despised the achievements and taboos of civilisation and fought Platonic idealism with coarse actionism". And even when Georg Baselitz, himself a dog owner, "paints dogs or other animals, as some of the photos in this book document, they initially belong to the conventional, 'banal' themes, like landscapes, still lifes, nudes and portraits, which are intended to distract as little as possible from the painting as such". But on the other hand, the painter plays all kinds of tricks with such grandiose ideas as a kind of "picture hole" in the centre of these dog portraits or the cloud ribbon ornament that he ties around the dogs' abdomens as an apron, "the pattern of which is reminiscent of an anus or a vulva for a reason".

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