Review of Georg Baselitz: Heroes – Astonishing Paintings Offer a Savage View of History

Thaddaeus Ropac, London. The artist depicts fear, disgust, and guilt over Germany's Nazi past. His monumental works are so ironic that they feel like spitting at it. When German painter Georg Baselitz died this year, a part of Europe's historical memory, already rapidly fading, went with him. Baselitz was born in 1938, experienced Hitler's Germany and World War II as a child, and later discovered that he was living in East Germany

When the German painter Georg Baselitz died this year, a part of Europe's rapidly decaying historical memory went with him. Born in 1938, Baselitz experienced Hitler's Germany and World War II as a child, then found himself growing up in communist East Germany before escaping to the West and becoming an artist. His acid and honest perceptions of the history he lived in would no longer be those of the living person I was fortunate enough to encounter. But he has left us a gift: an exhibition in London where he helped design his most amazing paintings ever, Heroes.

It is a brutal and brutal vision of modern history with feelings of horror, disgust and irreparable guilt hanging in the heavy poisoned air. But there is also a terrible joy, the thrill of telling the truth. You feel the liberation that Baselitz felt in 1965 when he put brush to canvas to begin these paintings. Comparing the explosive fury and absurdity of his art to punk might be an understatement, but the title of this series of massively imaginative portraits is so ironic it's spitting.

Mit Rote Fahne - or With the Red Flag - depicts a massive, square-shouldered, yet weary soldier holding at half-mast a flag that is a splotch of red and black. A flag of blood forms the red of the black scales, which represents the shadow of the swastika. All around the soldier is a wasteland. Do we owe him? No, he had nothing. The ruined world was under his feet, destroyed by the German heroes who fought in World War II. When Baselitz painted this angry tribute in the mid-1960s, these men were running West German banks and car companies.

Another long-haired protagonist, in a dress with short pants, stands in a landscape full of trash and blood. The gentle-faced character balances two crimson gloves, seemingly preparing to let them go and live without these ugly restrictions and with clean hands.

It was as if Baselitz was walking the more affluent streets of West Germany, seeing healthy, optimistic faces and wondering how easily the atrocities of World War II could be consigned to the past. The Holocaust ended only 20 years ago, these paintings scream, when the advancing armies of Hitler's Reich discovered the sites where six million Jews were systematically murdered - how can we Germans keep our heads up and clap our hands?

But if Germany is in shame, what about German art? Baselitz and his artistic peers Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, all of whom confront German history, are sometimes accused by critics of glorifying or celebrating it, but there is no hint of Teutonic grandeur here. In Ein Moderner Maler – A Modern Painter – Baselitz portrays an artist who cannot work because both his hands are caught in human traps. Defeated, he sits on the ground in a military uniform and armbands, like the rest of the criminal and insane heroes. He literally pours his heart out in a mime of inner anguish: a ring of intestines rests between his legs, while another section of intestine protrudes from his side and becomes a spiraling pig's tail. This is what the romantic inner life of this German artist has become. It's okay to laugh, his hair is slicked back and he has a square mustache to remind you that Hitler also fancied himself an artist.

Baselitz preserves his deepest revulsion for his own artistic mastery: these brilliant paintings say that painting is broken, that it is no longer possible. Their lopsided, limp figures resemble Frankenstein's monsters, made of bits and pieces of flower and flesh pitifully stitched together. One of the soldiers sitting under the trees has a square head on top of a square body with blood dripping from two branches on his head. He is a spirit within his clothes, there and not there.

This way of depicting the human face makes Baselitz unique. He has little in common with post-war British figurative artists such as Bacon and Freud, for whom there is always a real, pulsating body. Baselitz's body is abstract, designed with irony and black humor, their suffering is absurd. Another hero stands with his flies, liquid gray fountains of semen pouring out of his black pants as he soars over a shattered landscape. His ecstatic expression tells us that he is enlightened by all this while at his feet is a Disney duck, a symbol that perhaps feigns innocence in post-war life.

What happened to the art of memory? After all, with artistic calculations, history books and Holocaust memorials, the far-right party AfD is winning one German election after another. For extremists of every hue, it is not even necessary to deny the Holocaust - today you can dismiss it, trivialize it, dismiss it as a thing of the distant past. And the heroes walk again. Baselitz paints one of them waving, or saluting, in blood-soaked pants with a ghostly shadow of a face. Around him in the European night, white specks fall slowly, like snow or ash.