ART REVIEW : Too Many Holes in Baselitz Survey : Missing Critical Works Make It Difficult to Appreciate Artist

In the United States, the paintings of German artist Georg Baselitz have been difficult to know. The 30-year retrospective that opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art doesn’t rectify the problem.

Baselitz’s sudden burst onto the American scene as a principal star of the early 1980s frenzy over Neo-Expressionist painting came after he had been working for 20 years (he was born in 1938). The eccentric, upside-down figure paintings that made him instantly recognizable were compelling, but where had they come from?

Expressionist art claims a long and revered ancestry in Germany, reaching back at least to medieval Gothic religious art. But Baselitz’s Expressionism seemed different.

All the signs of Expressionism were there, including anguished subjects, richly brushed surfaces, a stark or jarring palette and a crudeness of execution more skillfully stylized than actually inept. Turned upside-down, though, his images of imperial eagles, solitary drinkers and male and female nudes felt decidedly unexpressive of an interior self. Their Expressionism seemed to have drained out, like water poured from an inverted pitcher, leaving only the vessel behind.

Personal and cultural history loomed large as a problem for Baselitz, not as a refuge. That’s no surprise for an artist whose generation had come of age in postwar Germany, where a fever-dream of global conquest had left unfathomable ruin in its wake.

When Baselitz painted a big, bleak picture of a nude woman picking through the rubble for scraps, he may have been remembering poignant scenes from his World War II childhood. Surely he was recalling Jean-Francois Millet’s famous 19th-Century painting of peasant farm-women bent over and gleaning in the fields. But just as surely, his painting depicted the dilemma of the contemporary German artist, sorting through the charred and desolate landscape of history.

Baselitz’s “The Gleaner” (1978) is included in the LACMA retrospective. As with certain other pictures in the show, it helps make sense of his artistic trajectory. Especially worthwhile is the extraordinary group of so-called “hero paintings” from 1965, whose disheveled itinerants in search of useful labor can be seen as a metaphor for an artist in want of a meaningful role.

It turns out, however, that Baselitz’s career is not well laid out here. A lot is missing from the show. From 97 paintings at its May inaugural at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, it’s down to 70 at LACMA. If major omissions had been avoided the trim wouldn’t be a bad thing, overblown spectacles being a Guggenheim staple. But important works simply are not here.

Things get off on the wrong foot right away. “The Big Night Down the Drain” (1962-63) is a painting about failed potency notoriously confiscated by authorities from the young artist’s first gallery show, held in Berlin in 1963. “The Great Friends” (1965) is the one hero painting whose monumental size--more than eight feet by 10 feet--approached the mural scale of American Abstract Expressionism, so important to Baselitz’s development. Neither painting is in the show.

In the so-called “fracture paintings” that followed between 1966 and 1969, Baselitz began an eccentric dismantling of the conventional pictorial format of figurative art. This emergent attitude is at the core of his artistic significance, but only a single fracture painting is on view.

The absence of critical early pictures makes the 1960s a mere sketch. Baselitz’s formative years aren’t well-known in this country, and these omissions leave our understanding, well, badly fractured. A foundation for the rest of the exhibition hasn’t been built.

In 1969, the artist took a small but fateful step, which led to the mature Neo-Expressionist art we know today. He turned a canvas upside-down, in order to neutralize any customary reading of the chosen figurative image.

“The Wood on Its Head,” a landscape, was Baselitz’s first upside-down picture. The format soon became his trademark.

“The Wood on Its Head” is indebted to a landscape by a little-known mid-19th-Century German Realist painter named Ferdinand von Rayski. The significance of 19th-Century European and American landscape painting lies in its embodiment of a new Western concept of nationalism, in which national soil and cultural identity are merged. The inversion of that tradition by a German post-World War II artist is essential to know--but “The Wood on Its Head” is not at LACMA.

Nor is the monumental painted-wood carving called “Model for a Sculpture,” which caused such a ruckus when it was shown in the German pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Detractors said the raised arm of the crudely rendered, reclining figure signified a fascist salute, while Baselitz insisted its upraised palm derived from a sign for offering in totemic African sculpture.

The few sculptures that have made their way into the show are not installed to conform with the chronology of the paintings, nor are they collectively considered as a distinct body of work. Instead, individual carvings are placed here and there throughout the galleries, like decorative accents. Sculpture as potted ficus.

In 1983, as German Neo-Expressionism exploded into a dazzling international phenomenon, Baselitz painted a monumental canvas (almost 15 feet long) conflating a traditional religious picture on the theme of the Last Supper with a homage to his artistic predecessors in early-20th-Century German Expressionism--Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde, Heckel, Muller, Pechstein. “Supper in Dresden” is something of a summation of the spiritual, social and artistic impulses that had come together in Baselitz’s work--and no, it’s not here either.

The show’s catalogue offers no checklist of works originally included in the retrospective at its Guggenheim debut. This maddening omission devalues the book as an archival document (at least it features a generally thorough text by curator Diane Waldman). But much of the missing art was in the New York presentation (some was not). It’s bizarre to read didactic wall labels at LACMA that refer to important paintings that won’t be found in the galleries.

Somewhere in the 1980s the show completely falls apart. Does this represent a downward slide in Baselitz’s work or simply a poor selection of examples? Or has the hit-or-miss chronology of his development just taken its cumulative toll?

Baselitz’s artistic stature remains a muddled question mark. The artist hasn’t been well-served by this pseudo-retrospective, and neither have we.