Naked Masters at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna ★★★★★

Ten years in the past, the exhibition Background Tales at Dresden’s Residenzschloss paired work by the German artist Georg Baselitz with works from the close by Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Slightly than the originals, nonetheless, work similar to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1512-13) have been proven as large digital reproductions. It was a daring and thought-provoking resolution to the issue of hanging up to date artwork alongside Outdated Masters, placing Baselitz’s work right into a life-sized musée imaginaire.

Baselitz: Bare Masters on the Kunsthistorisches Museum is one other pairing with Outdated Grasp work—this time, nonetheless, the encounter is actual. 5 massive galleries and surrounding cupboard areas have been hung with work by Baselitz from the previous 5 many years. Alongside and beneath are 40 or so work from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together with works by Titian and Correggio, and plenty of by Bartholomeus Spranger, a Flemish artist who labored on the court docket of Rudolf II in Prague.

It’s no shock to be taught that the exhibition was chosen and hung for probably the most half by Baselitz himself. The tone is ready within the first gallery by an unlimited paint-spattered canvas hung excessive over a fragile Adam and Eve (round 1485) by Hans Memling, the outer wings of an altarpiece, whereas Albrecht Altdorfer’s Lot and his Daughters (1537) is flanked by three upside-down Baselitz determine work from the early Nineteen Seventies. At first sight, there appears little correspondence between new and Outdated Masters, the sequence of galleries proving quite their full distinction and irreconcilability.

The brand new work are gentle, ethereal, unframed; the older work darkly varnished in ornate surrounds. Conventional narrative pictures, with roughly acquainted tales, kind a stark distinction with up to date work that talk of non-public need and trauma. Baselitz paints the other way up, shelling out with gravity. The Outdated Masters preserve their toes firmly on the bottom. Three nice late work by Titian, whose surfaces are labored and refined to the best poetic pitch, are paired with canvases which might be nearly solely summary in impact, with no reference to conventional mythological or biblical sources.

But, for all this sense of distinction, nothing feels misplaced: not even the 5 massive work of golden arms, like Midas paws, hung round the one portray too massive to be moved, Garofalo’s Resurrection of Christ (1520). What emerges is a dialogue between previous and new held not on the extent of floor curating or formal likeness, however quite on a deeper degree of paint and portray itself, the type of connections that would solely be solid within the eyes and thoughts of an artist. Even probably the most stunning mixtures, similar to Baselitz’s inverted bare portrait of his spouse, Johanna Elke Kretschmar, alongside Rubens’s well-known portrait of his spouse Helena Fourment, vaguely making an attempt to cowl her physique with a fur wrap, have an sudden and shifting affinity.

The theme of “bare masters” unfolds in three galleries on the coronary heart of the exhibition. Within the first we see Baselitz’s unusual obsession with the concept that Duchamp “stole” the composition of Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) from a Picasso (Lady in an Armchair, 1910), occasioning a collection of latest work during which Duchamp is offered as a sex-mad libertine—the composition of two copulating figures primarily based on an 18th-century pornographic print. With them hangs Spranger’s Jupiter and Antiope (round 1596), exhibiting the bare gods encircling each other in a woodland setting.

On this gallery, dedicated to decadence and need, the boldest mixture is Image-thirty-two (1994), a picture of a girl (Baselitz’s spouse Elke), proven the other way up and crouching bare, drawn with thick black paint positioned on a gold floor, with an internal pictorial body of burnt sienna. It hangs above two kitsch lounging nudes by Dirck de Quade van Ravesteyn. The weighty golden Elke appears to compress the 2 polished Ravesteyn our bodies into one doubly unhealthy portray. Alongside, Baselitz’s Ade Nymphen (1998) exhibits two pinkish nude females, floating across the fringe of the canvas, as if decompressing the Ravesteyns. The Baselitz is a surprisingly lovely portray with its garish colors, ungainliness, pink lips and earth-coloured genitals, and soiled, coal-grey grounds, starkly punctuated by clean discs (made by the paint tins Baselitz makes use of to maintain his canvas flat whereas portray).

Two additional galleries are dominated by the spectral, full-length inverted determine work, made with a lustrous, metallic-seeming pigment in opposition to a black floor, which have fashioned Baselitz’s Bildmodell for the previous few years. They appear to flash out of the darkness like ethereal deities, dense constellations of glowing gentle. It’s definitely a daring gesture to hold considered one of these celestial apparitions, With out Shirt and Home (2018), above two Correggios (The Rape of Ganymede and Jupiter and Io, each round 1530) and Titian’s Danaë (1564), however the impact is quite to throw an sudden give attention to the older work: Baselitz’s massive canvas turns into extra like background, related extra with the gallery structure. As he places it himself, like “wallpaper” across the Outdated Masters.

Right here the reality of the “bare masters” turns into clear. It isn’t eroticised nudity, or just an unclothed human state, that types the topic, however quite the bare vulnerability of age, and of the predicament of the ageing painter, weighing up the truth of mortality with the urge to create artwork, and the ever-fraught relationship with the custom of Western oil portray. Titian’s Nymph and Shepherd (round 1570), a darkly-glowing poetic homage to bodily love, hangs alongside Parmigianino’s Cupid Making his Bow (round 1534) and a duplicate of the identical made by Joseph Heintz the Elder in 1603, making a joke quite about the place all of it—love—started. Above, Baselitz’s double celestial determine composition Wohin (2017) exhibits the inverted figures of Georg and Elke, made when the artist was across the identical age as Titian portray his Nymph and Shepherd. Wohin? The place now?

The identical query could be requested of the exhibition as a complete, which has a tone each provocative and elegiac. Within the grandness of the setting and in a museum unashamedly dedicated to the glory of artwork, it’s a coronation of types for Baselitz. It is usually one thing extra private—the exploration of an artist dwelling on the origins of his portray in his early experiences of artwork in museums. However likewise in non-public life and emotions, specifically his love for Elke, and their rising consciousness of mortality in previous age. It’s provocation with a function. We’d not all the time agree with what Baselitz says, each in artwork and life, however his portray continually reminds us of the significance of defending the liberty for artists to talk their minds unhindered. Baselitz: Bare Masters is that very uncommon factor—an exhibition that’s itself a formidable and memorable murals.

• Georg Baselitz: Bare Masters, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, till 25 June

• Curators: Georg Baselitz and Andreas Zimmermann

What the opposite critics stated

Baselitz: Bare Masters obtained largely good opinions within the Austrian press. Almuth Spiegler writes in Die Presse of the “astonishing curiosity” of an exhibition which on the face of it—an previous white painter evaluating his nudes with these of the Outdated (white) Masters—was a uncertain proposition.

Hedwig Kainberger, within the Salzburger Nachrichten, writes of the comparisons between new and previous portray as “tremendously stimulating”, and of the placing depiction of growing old on the human physique in latest work.

In Falter journal, Nicole Scheyerer factors out that the Kunsthistorisches Museum has had no solo exhibits of girls since 1995, regardless of having a feminine director, Sabine Haag, since 2009.

Katharina Rustler, in Der Normal, additionally factors out the dearth of girls on present on the museum however writes appreciatively of the openness of interpretation (i.e., lack of lecturing wall texts), in order that guests can “float by the galleries like Baselitz’s personal ghostly figures”.