Georg Baselitz: Six Decades of Drawings

Isabelle Dervaux discusses one of the most celebrated contemporary German artists, Georg Baselitz. He gained international recognition in the 1960s for revitalizing figurative painting. Our exhibition, Georg Baselitz: Six Decades of Drawings celebrates the gift from Baselitz to the Morgan of fifty drawings covering the span of his entire career. On display will be examples from the iconic Heroes series and fractured drawings of the mid-1960s; landscape and figure drawings from the 1970s, when Baselitz began turning his images upside-down to emphasize their structure and materiality over their subject; colorful pastels and watercolors from the 1980s and 90s; and a group of Remix drawings from the last twenty years, in which Baselitz revisits themes from his early works. Organized in collaboration with the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which is the recipient of a similar gift from the artist, the exhibition will include about sixty-five drawings. Combining sheets from both donations, it will present a retrospective of Baselitz’s artistic development and highlight the central role drawing plays in his practice.