Georg Baselitz Books

Picasso’s granddaughter introduces readers to a sublime selection of the artist’s erotic masterpieces, brought together in this lush and elegant volume. Pablo Picasso lived life as he painted it—with sensual energy and abandon. Nearly every woman whom he loved has been immortalized in his work, from the playful nudes of his early years to the classical representations twenties and the more frankly sexual paintings that crowned his career. With mesmerizing color and an appealing design, this chronologically arranged volume follows Picasso’s artistic development as expressed in more than ninety erotically charged works. Exquisitely reproduced paintings and etchings such as Salomé Dancing Nude in Front of Herod, Demoiselles d’Avignon, and the famous Pisseuse are displayed alongside fragments from Picasso’s love letters and his revealing observations about the role of sensuality in his life. Diana Widmaier Picasso comments on her grandfather’s amorous adventures, offering intimate revelations and insights that transform this beautiful book into a personal reflection of one man’s consuming passion.

By the time Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) came to artistic maturity in Germany in the mid-1960s, he had renounced the gestural abstraction prevalent in Europe and America and developed a new aesthetic based upon the figure and its representation as an abstract image. His bold canvases - which began to feature his signature upside-down figures later in the decade - have brought him international recognition, but only now is his important career the subject of a comprehensive survey, organized by the Guggenheim Museum and traveling to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and the Nationalgalerie, Berlin.This monograph, by Guggenheim Deputy Director and Senior Curator Diane Waldman, documents every phase of the artist's career as a painter and sculptor. New translations of many of Baselitz's writings provide additional insight into his radical use of the figure in painting. A chronology, bibliography, and exhibition history are also included.

Text mainly consists of correspondence between Strindberg and the artist and a biography of the artist (by Sten Åke Nilsson).

In the Picasso room at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, a striking painting captures Guillaume Apollinaire alongside his muse, Marie Laurencin, created by Henri Rousseau. Initially, I mistook it for a self-portrait of Rousseau with his own muse, Clémence Rousseau. Franz Marc also portrayed Rousseau for Der Blaue Reiter, while Picasso owned a self-portrait by Rousseau. A poignant photograph by André Gomés shows Picasso holding Rousseau's self-portrait in one hand and the portrait of Rousseau's wife in the other. Picasso, known for his innovative works, admired Rousseau, who depicted familiar objects with a unique rigidity. Rousseau’s gaze in his self-portrait is stiff and focused on his art, presenting objects in a way that feels Gothic and Byzantine, diverging from typical perceptions. Other artists, like Kandinsky, also collected Rousseau's works, including the small canvas The Painter and His Wife. De Chirico depicted Picasso and friends beneath Rousseau's self-portrait, while Beckmann painted Rousseau’s hot-air balloon and street. I have Rousseau’s red lithograph The War, reminiscent of works by Ensor, Uccello, Böcklin, and Stefano della Bella. Recently, I’ve painted numerous portraits of my wife and myself, often dressed as various figures, including my parents and historical icons, echoing the style of Otto Dix’s double portrait of his parents, which can be found in the Basel Kunstmuseum.

An exploration by an artist and writer duo of a fundamental constant in the history of humankind: rage, and its impact on the world. Rage and obstinacy are close relatives--and fundamental categories in the work of both Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. In World-Changing Rage, these two accomplished German creators explore links and fractures between two cultures through two media: ink and watercolor on paper, and the written word. The long history of humankind is also a history of rage, fury, and wrath. In this book, Baselitz and Kluge explore the dynamism of rage and its potential to rapidly grow and erupt into blazing protests, revolution, and war. The authors also reflect the melancholy archetype of the Western hero (and his deconstruction) against the very different heroic ethos of the Japanese antipodes. More powerful than rage, they argue, is wit, as displayed in the work of Japanese master painter Katsushika Hokusai. In this volume, Baselitz repeatedly draws an image of Hokusai, depicting him with an outstretched finger, as if pointing towards Europe in a mixture of rage, wrath, irony, and laughter, all-too-fleetingly evident in his expression. A unique collaboration between two of the world's leading intellectuals, World-Changing Rage will leave every reader with a deeper appreciation of the human condition.

Two modern renaissance men pay homage to the medieval tale of Parsifal From Wolfram von Eschenbach's epic of chivalry to Richard Wagner's opera, from the knight as fool to the fool as savior, the story of Parsifal has struck deep chords with artists over the centuries. In this collaboration, Georg Baselitz's studies for a 2018 production of Parsifalat the Munich State Opera (2018) are paired with Alexander Kluge's responses to Baselitz's drawings, through stories in which he filters out individual elements from Eschenbach's epic, such as Parsifal's native wit or the figure of the Knight of the Cheerful Countenance. The result is an ongoing communication conducted over long periods of time: aspects of the Middle Ages can be found in the present. The volume concludes with Tristan Marquardt's text "Excerpts from a Parsifal Lexicon," which shows how far our contemporary language has diverged from Eschenbach's in terms of meaning and sound.