"Pictures for the Fathers: Baselitz’s Heldenbilder as Anti-Images of the Socialist and Fascist Body". (original) (raw)

2022, Image, History and Memory, Routledge 2022

The subject of the study is Heldenbilder (Hero Paintings), a series of paintings the German artist Georg Baselitz created in the years 1956–1966. The paintings were interpreted as a manifestation of childhood trauma that marked the work of the generation of “children of war”, and as a means of rationalising the artist’s position in German post-war society as well. The starting point for consideration is the studies by Alexander Klug devoted to Baselitz’s work. The context mentioned for the recognition of the semantics of the artist’s works is, on the one hand, the tradition of figurative art, which in post-war Germany did not break with the heritage of fascist art. On the other hand, it is inspired by the work of Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte, the debate that swept through Germany in the 1950s and was to answer the question about the possibility of referring to the idea of ​​humanism and renewing the image of man, deformed by 20th-century nihilism. On the third – propaganda of a new man, carried out on the basis of socialist realism by the communist authorities (Walter Ulbricht) in the name of the idea of ​​a classless society. On the fourth – body images of war veterans, reflecting the fundamental experience of participants in armed conflicts. The author points to the relationship between fascist ideology and socialist realism, visual representations of the new man, resulting from the interest of both regimes not in the real body, but in the “super-body”, constructed for the purposes of propaganda, which involved the exclusion of images of a deformed and repulsive body. He concludes that although Baselitz’s paintings do not represent real characters, they are closely related to reality as images of “anti-heroes” and have contributed to the destruction of social taboos, paving the way for a critical reflection on the body undertaken around 1968, and for the rehabilitation of expressionist art in the 1970s.