Baselitz Die Afrika-Sammlung.

Baselitz Die Afrika-Sammlung

K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Dusseldorf, Germany June 6-August 24, 2003

The German painter sculptor, and graphic artist Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) owns an intriguing, "radically subjective" collection of African art (catalogue, p 8), the bulk of which was assembled between 1977 and 1985. What makes this collection so special is the large number of "non classic" objects A selection of some 130 of these works has been shown over the past year in a traveling exhibition, which I viewed in its initial showing in Dusseldorf.

The way African art is received in the West and the history of Western taste regarding African art are still in need of systematic exploration (see Clarke 2003). William Rubin, for one, has commented on the difference between the aesthetic criteria developed by early Parisian dealers who--with their predilection for highly refined, relatively realistic objects with a glossy patina, of the kind made by the Baule, the Fang, or the Luba--influenced generations of African-art collectors, and the preference of Picasso and other avant-garde artists for less realistic and less well finished sculptures, for coarseness ell/d inventiveness (Rubin 1984:17). Baselitz clearly falls within the second category, for there was not one Baule, Fang, or Luba object in the exhibition. "My collection is somewhat raw compared to others," he told the curator, Peter Stepan (catalogue, p. 18).

The collection, which largely consists of series of similar objects, has a number of unusual features. To begin with, Baselitz's interest is not limited to wood sculptures. His African collection is world famous for its many rag dolls and heads, which were used by the Bwende and Bembe of Congo in their funeral rites. In the past, art important leader's corpse would be dried for months and placed inside a stuffed, larger-than-life doll (niombo), which was then buried. No such large niombo coffins seem to have survived--only a number of the separately made heads. Baselitz's collection also includes numerous smaller rag dolls in standing or sitting positions, called muzuri or muzidi, which were used to store the relics of important ancestors. What makes these objects interesting to the artist is the fact that the material they are made from allows postures and gestures that are uncommon in wood carvings (Fig. 1).

Furthermore, unlike most other artist-collectors, including De Vlaminck, Derain, Picasso, and Arman, Baselitz has very little affinity for masks. He owns a few unusual specimens, two of which were exhibited: a copper mask from the Dinga (who live along the border between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola) and a large wooden mask from the Ituri Region of the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The artist considers masks to be objects that "disguise" the person instead of creating a new one (catalogue, pp. 18, 42).

Yet another feature of Baselitz's collection is his early interest in East African art, which he acquired at a time when this part of the continent was generally considered a sculptural no-man's-land. This is in keeping with the artist's general preference for unconventional pieces and his refusal to stay on the beaten track. What the established canon considers to be the "unaesthetic" quality of much Tanzanian sculpture recalls Baselitz's own crude carvings (Fig. 2).

The exhibition was organized along geographical and ethnic lines: there was one room for East African and one for West African objects, and several areas in between contained the other core collections--divination baskets from Central Africa, the aforementioned rag heads and dolls, and sets of power figures from peoples including the Kongo, the Bembe and especially the Teke. Few but de tailed wall texts provided ethnographic information about most of the objects. The sober design of the exhibition's installation, by Nina Simonis, gave both objects and visitors plenty of space. This was the first general overview of the collection's highlights, and it presented some surprises, including a Cameroonian figure of the Yamba and a two-meter pole with a sculpted head from Tanzania. The sheer number of some of the objects also made a powerful impression.

On the whole, however, this exhibition reminded one of earlier surveys of and selections from the Baselitz Africa collection. In 1985 Raoul Lehuard offered a first survey in the pages of Arts d'Afrique Noire; a few years later more than a dozen objects were shown in Cologne at an exhibition on the human figure in African sculpture, and a decade ago Jacques Kerchache organized an exhibition with an important selection from the entire collection (see Lehuard 1985; Heymer & Gohr 1990; Kerchache 1994). The Dusseldorf exhibition, therefore, presented few novelties.

Moreover, it was a typical "artistic" exhibition. For instance, Baselitz owns one of the few complete sets of large Bembe ceremonial trumpets, consisting of a "family" of four anthropomorphic instruments known as the "father," "mother," "daughter," and "son." These trumpets were played through a hole in the back. Yet in the exhibition, the trumpets were displayed like sculptures, face on, with their backs (and hence the mouth-hole) hidden, making it impossible to appreciate them as musical instruments (Fig. 3).

The exhibition was limited to Baselitz's African objects, and even though none of the artist's own work was on display, the question of the relationship between the two inevitably arose. Indeed, European (avant-garde) artists' interest in objects from non Western cultures is by no means new. It is interesting to contrast the Baselitz collection with two other important Africa collections, recently exhibited and published, which are also owned by contemporary artists. A selection of Arman's prestigious collection traveled around the world and presented mostly "classic" objects--especially from the Gabonese Fang and Kota peoples, both absent from the Baselitz exhibition (see Nicolas et al. 1996). Arman's taste is definitely less "raw" than Baselitz's. The impressive Africa collection of another German sculptor, Fritz Koenig, on the other hand, offered a wider aesthetic range (see Eisenhofer et al. 2000). This collection seems to be broader in scope than the one under review, with a variety of sorts of objects, including household articles, and a noted interest in the most diverse materials, including metal, terracotta, and wickerwork.

According to the standard account, it was the bohemian artist Paul Gauguin at the end of the nineteenth century, followed by painters such as Matisse, Derain, Picasso, and Braque in Paris and artists elsewhere in Europe, including Kirchner, Nolde, Ernst, and Carra, who pioneered the "discovery" of African and Oceanic art and precipitated its influence on modern art. The art historians Robert Goldwater (1938/1986), Jean Laude (1968), and William Rubin (1984) greatly refined and extended the picture, but their analysis of primitivism--with or without quotation marks--remained within the paradigm of direct stylistic borrowing from, or explicit formal affinities with, African and Oceanic imagery. In recent years, however, this standard account has increasingly come under fire.

For instance, the roots of the "primitive" as a cultural construction devised by modern Europeans go well back beyond the artists of the last 120 years, and must be sought in philosophical ideas that developed from the early eighteenth century on (Connelly 1995). Gauguin's or Picasso's primitivism did not, in other words, emerge out of nothing. Furthermore, the importance of Pre-Columbian art even to Gauguin has been obscured in favor of Oceanic and, in particular, African art. Pre-Columbian art's contribution to modernism fails to fit into the teleologically reconstructed development from post-impressionism, fauvism, and cubism to abstract expressionism (Braun 1993). Another criticism of the primitivism debate concerns its exclusive focus on formal connections between non-Western objects and modern art, and its failure to examine their affinities of content and meaning (Wedewer 21300). Finally, the standard account presents primitive-modern interaction as though it operated (and still operates) in only one direction: from a timeless, self-repeating African artistic tradition to a dynamic, open-minded Euro-American one. Yet cross-cultural interaction is a two-way street (Manning 1985).

Little of this ongoing debate is found in the catalogue's introductory essay by Peter Stepan. "Primitivism" is replaced by "transculturalism," a term which, we are told, no longer smacks of colonial devaluation and implies an equal appreciation of different cultures (catalogue, p. 187, n. 78). The relationship between Baselitz's creativity and his collection of African art is couched in terms of "iconographic influences," "osmotic exchanges," "correspondences," and "citations or paraphrases" (pp. 23, 29-33). Stepan shows how the artist also draws on non-African artistic sources, including mannerist motifs by Edvard Munch. However, as will be seen shortly, the relationship with African art is not limited to form and style.

The catalogue includes (in abridged versions) three of the many interviews about African art that Baselitz has given over the years and in which he has set out his idiosyncratic theories. According to him, African art is "almost a prehistoric sculpture," because "Africa has been the same formula for 2000 years" (catalogue, pp. 21, 37). Its sculptors endlessly repeat the same "basic type," whose knowledge may be "genetically transmitted," and even recent objects are therefore "time capsules" that open the door to a distant, unspecified past (pp. 21, 42, 44, 46-47). In a sense, one could say that Baselitz has a keen interest in African art, but for the wrong reasons!

One of the grounds for these ideas is the distinction Baselitz makes between the supposedly utterly social African craftsman and the individualistic Western artist, whose main drive is to create by destroying his predecessors' work (catalogue, pp. 21-22, 36, 42). Such an attitude is especially true of the avant-garde artist, who must permanently be on the move and renew his work. In Baselitz's aesthetics, then, a personally tailored Africa functions as a kind of stabilizing basso continuo for the iconoclastic capriccios of Western artistic freedom.

Another possible explanation for Baselitz's anachronistic view of a timeless Africa is his propensity to provoke. In the early 1960s the artist wrote militant manifestos against bourgeois society and the dominant art scene; his paintings of men with huge erections were considered obscene and led to criminal proceedings (see Schwerfel 2000:47-58). Since 1969 he has painted his human figures upside-down. At the 1980 Venice Biennale he shocked the world with a wooden sculpture (his first public one) of a seated figure leaning backward with its right arm raised. Although the palm of the hand was turned upward, the position was generally interpreted--and denounced--as a Nazi salute. At the time, Baselitz explained his sculpture with reference to Lobi art, in which a seated person represents a "paralysed figure" and an upright figure with a raised arm is a "dangerous person" (see Meyer 1981:86, 88). Nowadays, however, he downplays this connection with Lobi sculpture (catalogue, pp. 47-48, 189, n. 149).

At the Dusseldorf exhibition, one could not help thinking of this chronicle of provocation when confronted with the aforementioned Congolese mask from the Ituri region. Its surface is whitened with kaolin and has hundreds of small decorations in black and red: these are in the shape of swastikas (incidentally, a motif whose local meaning remains a mystery, as pointed out by Marc Felix--catalogue, fig. 100). In the end it is as if Baselitz's need to come to terms with Germany's Nazi past and deal with the ever-receding avant-garde has found its resolution in the art of an imaginary continent with no history at all.

References cited, page 96

The exhibition traveled to the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Germany (September 25-November 16, 2003), and Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz, Germany (December 14, 2003-February 29, 2004). The catalogue, edited by Peter Stepan, includes contributions by Viviane Baeke, Daniela Bognolo, Herman Burssens, William Dewey, Ekpo Eyo, Marc Felix, Danielle Gallois-Duquette, Dunja Hersak, Manuel Jordan, Raoul Lehuard, Wyatt MacGaffey, Christine Stelzig, and Peter Stepan. It is published by Prestel (192 pp., approx. 70 b/w & 75 color illus.; text in German; EUR 50 hardcover, EUR 25 softcover).

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