Landscape with Pathos

Speaker: Hannah Klemm
Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Saint Louis Art Museum

Hello, I am Hannah Klemm, the associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Landscape with Pathos, at first glance, looks almost abstract, yet artist Georg Baselitz has in fact taken an image of a landscape—blue sky, white clouds, trees, and a rocky outcrop—and flipped it upside down. This painting is one of the first works in which Baselitz inverted his imagery, a formula that became his signature style.

It was in 1969 that Baselitz began inverting his compositions; he wanted to stress the constructed nature of painting by creating a sense of dislocation for the viewer. He also wanted to disrupt traditional visual entry into pictorial space and any easy narrative readings of his paintings, but he didn’t want to create a work that was fully abstract. He often used biography as a starting point for the content of these paintings, either locations from his life or people in it, yet the subjects he chooses were often also part of long art historical traditions—such as landscape painting, in this case.

Baselitz was seven years old at the end of World War II. He spent his childhood in Communist East Germany in the town of Deutschbaselitz in Saxony. In 1957 he fled East Germany and enrolled in art school in West Berlin.

This painting is based on the landscape of Saxony. Baselitz was inspired by multiple sources that documented the landscape of his Saxon home. First, he looked to documentary photographs from a 1939 booklet published by the Saxon authorities that detailed regional landscapes and monuments. Baselitz brought several of these booklets of the Saxon landscape with him when he left East Germany. Second, many of his inverted landscapes of this time were influenced by the meticulous regional landscape paintings of the 19th-century Saxon painter Ferdinand von Rayski. Baselitz had seen the work of von Rayski in Dresden as a child with his father. Nearly a century after they were painted, von Rayski’s paintings had been appropriated by the Nazi party for propagandistic purposes.

Baselitz was interested in using his method of inverting the imagery as a way to examine the problematic history of the German landscape. In particular, he was interested in how the Nazis embraced and utilized the German landscape and German aesthetics to glorify the Third Reich, casting a dark shadow on historic artworks and motifs considered typically German.

In his paintings Baselitz confronts the human and cultural tragedies of World War II. Landscape with Pathos’s layered references and dislocating inversion conveyed the displacement and rootlessness caused by the war and subsequent division of Germany that Baselitz also personally felt through his own exile, while the deft combination of expressive, abstract, and documentary traditions demonstrate how landscapes have been coded and coopted throughout history as symbols of national and cultural identity.