A Workman
Georg Baselitz German
Not on view
Baselitz’s early Frakturbilder (Fracture Paintings) focus on the bodies of men, and animals in nature, in various stages of disintegration. The disjointed limbs and jumbled parts indicate the artist’s forceful confrontation of the artistic and cultural legacies of Nazism—the ruthless government under which he was born—by envisioning the physical and psychological violence wrought upon the German body politic. In the titular saw-wielding workman, Baselitz recognizes the simultaneous processes of cleaving and creating. The figure perhaps allegorically stands in for the artist himself, as he grapples with the violent past and attempts to paint in the cultural landscape of postwar Germany.
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