Baselitz: Naked Masters

Peter Paul Rubens, Helena Fourment (‘Het Pelsken’), 1636/38, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna; Georg Baselitz, Finger Painting – Black Elke (detail), 1973, private collection. © Georg Baselitz 2023, photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin.

The contemporary artist George Baselitz (b.1938) is known for making frequent references to art history in his works. With this in mind, Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum invited him to take part in an exhibition in which he entered into a visual dialogue with Cranach, Altdorfer, Baldung Grien, Parmigianino, Correggio, Titian, and Rubens as well as the Mannerists at the court of Emperor Rudolph II. The result is Baselitz: Naked Masters, an exhibition which includes his selection of about eighty of his own works and forty from museums’ collection. The focus is on ideal beauty, the history of nude portraiture and the currency that painting itself still has.

The exhibition website shows some of the paintings in dialogue with quotes from Baselitz. For example, a text next to a pairing of the artist’s Finger painting – Black Elke, 1973, with Peter Paul Rubens’ Helena Fourment (“The Little Fur”), 1636/38, explains : “Both pictures show very directly the extraordinary intimacy of the painters with their wives. Rubens naturally worked within a much narrower framework of conventions, which he confidently stretched to the extreme. In order to legitimize the life-size depiction of his almost naked wife, he used the well-known statue type of the ancient Venus pudica . For Baselitz, the fur is ‘simply a wonderful picture. When you see a picture like this you either say I never want to die or I'll die happy! These are incredible experiences.’”