A Never-Ending Conversation

Matthew Holman

In late July 2025, in the gilded confines of the Salzburg Marionette Theatre, Georg Baselitz wept. The figures he had designed for a production of Igor Stravinsky’s avant-garde theatrical work L’Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) moved with a life he had not anticipated. Marking his first foray into puppet theatre, Baselitz had created 15 raw, minimalist forms – bodies of cardboard, limbs jointed and pulled by strings, heads of uniquely coloured crinkled metal foil – whose distorted physiognomies brought a new expressivity to the medium.

Stravinsky wrote The Soldier’s Tale in 1918 while living in exile on Lake Geneva in the wake of the Russian Revolution. He turned to Alexander Afanasyev’s Faustian folk tale for his two-part theatrical fable that follows a soldier who trades his beloved violin to the Devil for vast economic gain. The soldier’s bargain delivers everything he asked for and nothing he needed. Wealth arrives but his sense of belonging dissolves. Unrecognisable to those who once knew him and now without an army, our lost soldier is unable to retrace the steps that brought him here and soon discovers that what was lost cannot be recovered. On stage, these jointed bodies enacted Stravinsky’s fable of bargain and sacrifice with a strange, lurching grace. The backdrop featured Baselitz’s scrawled playing cards, the Dame and the seven of hearts in black on blue among them, as the soldier plays his hand with the Devil. What did it mean for an artist who was himself expelled – who traded the certainties of East Germany for the freedoms and estrangements of the West – to contribute to the production of this fable at the end of a long career? And what is the violin – the instrument surrendered, the irreplaceable thing – in Baselitz’s own story?

For an artist who spent six decades driving the figure to its limits in paint, what undid him in Salzburg was not the spontaneous overflow of sentimental feeling (no one could accuse him of that) but a more penetrating recognition: the forms he had made could still exceed his intentions, achieving through motion what paint achieves through mark. The marionette is an instrument of delegation as the artist’s hand, now removed, is replaced by string and gravity and the exposed logic of the stage. That his painted and his puppet figures share this quality – of bodies who have slipped the direct control of their maker and who still have the capacity to surprise and move even him – resonates with force across his latest suite of paintings. ‘Back Again’, 30 paintings made between 2024 and 2025, are among Baselitz’s final works. He knew that would be the case, working at floor level on canvases that exceeded the wheelchair-bound painter’s reach. ‘I have a long biography to look back on’, the artist said earlier this year, as he prepared for a major exhibition of large-scale gold-ground works at Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice. ‘Now that I’m more or less at the end of my painting activity, I thought I should draw some kind of conclusion: a summation of the paintings I’ve done over the years.’² Running concurrent to these late returns is a larger argument about the figure as something held between earthly weight and another kind of power, at the mercy of forces it cannot see. The soldier’s violin cannot be reclaimed.

Elkes Geburtstag am Teichdamm (2025) names the person present in Baselitz’s work longer than almost any other motif: his wife, Elke Kretzschmar, whom he met in 1958 at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin. Both Eastern exiles – she studying graphic design, he already deep into the important ‘Rayski-Kopf’ series – they were part of the same Dresden circle as their mutual friend A. R. Penck. They married in 1962, the year after the Berlin Wall went up, sealing off the world they had come from and making the life they were building together the only direction left. ‘You can lose the model, but you don’t lose the subject,’ Baselitz said, ‘Elke comes in and out of the picture... I don’t illustrate her. If anything, I try to remove her, but I usually can’t. She comes into the process whether I want it or not, through the back of my mind. The point of portraiture is to leave the portrait behind so that you can go forward.’³

To go forward, as ever in Baselitz’s work, is also to go back. Teichdamm, a compound proper noun for ‘pond’ and ‘embankment’ or ‘causeway’, is not a waterhole in any minor sense of the word: it is one of the great Upper Lusatian lakes, rimmed by oaks and birches, overflown by sea eagles, ospreys and falcons. It was in this Saxon enclave that the young Baselitz would climb trees and scale the vertiginous ledges of the local quarry where, as Richard Calvocoressi writes, in the ‘immediate aftermath of war, the landscape was a ruin: littered with decomposing corpses, burnt-out tanks, crashed planes, and other debris’. It was here Baselitz and a local friend would collect up ‘live ammunition, rusting machine guns, and other military paraphernalia.’⁴ To return to Teichdamm, then, is to return to the place where Hans-Georg Kern first learned to see – before he moved to the West in 1957, before he shed his given name and took instead the name of his birthplace, Deutschbaselitz, as if to carry the landscape with him into the life he was making. To mark, in the very syllables by which the world would come to know him, both the village he left and the fact of leaving.

Catherine Lampert, watching Baselitz work across the floor canvases in which Elke’s body took a splayed form, caught the same doubleness that runs through everything here: the figures, she wrote, might have their feet tied to ‘the earth wire’ and yet at other times ‘the zero gravity of dark, outer space prevails.’⁵ The inverted figure that became Baselitz’s signature pictorial invention he first deployed in 1969, as a way of liberating the image from narrative and forcing the viewer to attend to paint itself rather than subject. In Elkes Geburtstag am Teichdamm, the arboreal tubers of the forest double up as arteries or veins, as the upended body appears both suspended above, and subsumed into, the gaping earth. Once more freed from the conventions of portraiture, the inversion makes the figure simultaneously earthbound and celestial, rooted and adrift, with the same doubleness that has driven the work for 60 years.

The Teichdamm itself is also a return to the site of his earliest experiments as an artist. The watercolour Adler (Eagle), 1953, made when Hans-Georg was 15, shows two airborne eagles locked in heavenly combat above snow-flecked mountain peaks. For a wild and nature-loving child in Nazi Germany the eagle was still a symbol of fascist authority, and Baselitz never made his peace with the political systems that formed him, nor the art establishments that sought to absorb him. Talons perpetually unsheathed, he was constitutionally unwilling to land anywhere he was expected. The doubling of the eagle in Objekt naiv (2024), 70 years later, returns to this early image: a naïve object, a work of the adolescent reimagined by the octogenarian, the almost natural-historical fidelity to the texture of claw and feathers now rendered in racked lines of dried-blood red on bleu céleste, reduced to its barest principles. The eagle commands the sky and belongs to heights, yet in Baselitz’s hands the aerial figure falls, inverted and plunging. Characteristically, Baselitz was explicit about the stakes: ‘The hierarchy of sky above and ground down below is in any case only a pact that we have admittedly got used to but that one absolutely doesn't have to believe in. For me, every kind of artistic pact is a fallacy.’⁶ The doubling of the eagle raises the question of which version is primary, and whether the idea of an original image can survive its own reproduction. Two figures again, fighting or mirroring.

The atmosphere shifts entirely with Habe ich indische Tänze gesehen (I Saw Indian Dances), 2025. Durga – the Hindu goddess of creative power, protection and destruction, depicted with multiple arms in perpetual motion – appears in gold against black, with contours variously exact or liquefied. Gold paint on canvas refuses any decorative enshrinement and is instead deployed as a fiercely animating force. ‘Black is the beginning of an aesthetic intention, gold is the end of that process’, Baselitz said in his last interview, conducted from his Munich office in April 2026, ‘because you know there’s no further experimental principle beyond it.’⁷ Where the eagle falls, Durga dances. Gold on black, the figure’s arms, legs and head overlap and multiply, invoking the visual logic of perpetual motion, a body that has never stopped moving and shows no sign of stopping. The composition reminds me of the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1518, when hundreds of people danced compulsively for days on end, some until they died: a collective seizure that looked, from the outside, like ecstasy, and was, from the inside, something closer to catastrophe. Baselitz holds both possibilities open. Durga’s dance is generative and destructive at once, with the forces of creation and annihilation expressed as a single continuous act, which is precisely what the goddess, in Hindu tradition, embodies.

The titles scatter the motif across geographies, from the East Coast of the United States to South Asia – Indischer Tanz überall, selbst in N.Y., Spiegeltanz in Indien, Indische Tänze in Pittsburgh – staking a claim for the figure’s strange universality. Pittsburgh refers to the birthplace of Andy Warhol, an artist Baselitz admired and collected, and the titular subject of Andys Rorschach tanzen nicht, 2025. Predictably, Warhol’s 1984 Rorschach paintings cast a long shadow here: both series scale the imperfectly symmetrical inkblot with its deferral of stable meanings. Worth noting, perhaps, that Warhol wilfully (or ironically) misinterpreted the clinical process, believing that patients created the inkblots and doctors interpreted them. Take Kein Symbol (No Symbol), 2025, whose title warns against overdetermined readings. Note the curvature of thigh and ankle, wrist and elbow, and how they are so deliberate and defined, as the goddess’s limbs appear to pirouette for space among the more aleatory drips and splatter dispersed from above, paint released at a distance from the canvas rather than applied directly to it. It is as though the figure is simultaneously being made and coming apart at once.

For his final act, Baselitz returns to familiar ground only to find it transformed once again. The figures he has made across six decades – falling eagles, upended bodies, dancing goddesses, beloved faces – remain at the mercy of forces they cannot see. Behind everything stands the Saxon landscape that formed him, and Elke, who steadied him. In the end, Baselitz’s violin is all that cannot be recovered – not mourned, but transfigured, again and again, into the very condition of his work. He was an artist who spent a lifetime fighting the elemental principles of gravity; he refused the world which was given to him while remaining answerable to it. As Baselitz wept at the Salzburg marionettes, one imagines him discovering that the jointed, pulled, crinkle-headed things he made have somehow kept faith with everything he has lost. These paintings do the same: each mark a return, each return a transformation, the canvas holding what the world could not.

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Matthew Holman is a writer based in London. His work spans literature and the visual arts, with a particular focus on the avant-garde, cultural diplomacy, and the political life of modern art. His first book, Frank O'Hara and MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator (Bloomsbury, 2025), frames O'Hara as a central figure in the global circulation of postwar American art. He has co-authored several books and written for major institutional publications, including Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2026). He is Commissioning Editor at The Art Newspaper and writes regularly for Frieze, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. Matthew holds a PhD in cultural history from University College London and has held fellowships at Yale, the Smithsonian, The Courtauld, and the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin.