Beschreibung:

◆ 17 Georg Baselitz Follow P.D. Idol signed 'G. Baselitz' lower left; further signed and titled 'G. Baselitz "P.D. Idol"' on the reverse oil on canvas, in artist's frame 101 x 81.5 cm (39 3/4 x 32 1/8 in.) Painted in 1964.
Provenance Helmut Klinker, Bochum Thomas Borgmann, Cologne Josef Froehlich, Stuttgart (acquired in 1983 - 1984) Zwirner & Wirth, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006 Exhibited Munich, Galerie Friedrich & Dahlem, Baselitz: Oelbilder und Zeichnungen , 25 June - 4 August 1965, no. 1, n. p. (illustrated) Frankfurt am Main, Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Georg Baselitz der Weg der Erfindung, Zeichnungen, Bilder, Skulpturen , 5 May - 14 August 1988, no. 45, p. 195 (illustrated, p. 139) London, Tate Gallery; Kunsthalle Tübingen; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Kunsthalle Hamburg; Vienna, Bank Austria Kunstforum, The Froehlich Foundation German and American Art from Beuys and Warhol , 20 May 1996 - 17 August 1997, no. 16, p. 239 (illustrated) Tate Liverpool, Contemporary German & American Art: From the Froehlich Collection , 5 June - 20 August 1999 Karlsruhe, ZKM Museum für Neue Kunst, long-term loan, 1999 Verona, Palazzo Forti, Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, La creazione ansiosa / da Picasso a Bacon , 13 September - 11 January 2004, no. 90, p. 102, 206 (illustrated, p. 103) Faulconer Gallery Grinnell College, Start by Asking Questions: Works from the Faulconer and Rachofsky Collections, Dallas , 18 September - 13 December 2015, pp. 24, 108 (illustrated, p. 25) Dallas, The Warehouse, Identity Revisited , 1 February - 2 December 2016 Literature Andreas Franzke, Georg Baselitz , Munich, 1989, no. 41, pp. 51, 267 (illustrated, p. 48) Catalogue Essay ‘You must have the will to deny content in order to begin to make a painting that will exist for itself…I begin with an idea, but as I work the picture takes over.’ Georg Baselitz P.D. Idol is one of five paintings that comprises Georg Baselitz’ seminal Idol series from 1963-1964. Painted at a critical moment in Baselitz’ career, when he first garnered international acclaim, P.D. Idol incorporates the central concerns of the artist’s early painterly practice. In P.D. Idol , 1964, Baselitz depicts an otherworldly figure set against a rich ground. Delicate visceral hues of white and sandy yellow paint modulate an elongated bust that commands the pictorial space of the canvas. Disorienting the viewer’s expectations of gravity and perspective, the bald-headed figure looms larger-than-life. Its haunting eyes gaze into the distance, evoking the pathos reminiscent of religious portraiture, and the existential angst of Edvard’s Munch’s The Scream , 1893 (National Gallery, Oslo). A visual and thematic continuation of the artist’s widely lauded Oberon , 1963-1964, (Städel Museum, Frankfurt), P.D. Idol is an early example of Baselitz’ career-long investigation into the human figure. Here, focusing on the depiction of the head, P.D. Idol anticipates not just Baselitz' Heroes series, but also foreshadows his later wooden sculptures. As signified by the prefix ‘P.D.’ in its title, the present work powerfully demonstrates the central aims of Baselitz’ provocative painterly practice. Directly referencing the profoundly existential and fevered Pandemonium manifestos that Baselitz, together with fellow artist Eugen Schönebeck published in 1961 and 1962, the present work channels the artist’s intense concern with the grotesque. In these idiosyncratic texts and accompanying illustrations the artists laid bare their desire for catharsis, which they sought to achieve by pursuing a charged combination of infantile regression, excess and deliberately vulgar provocation. Whereas his contemporaries turned to Conceptual art, Pop or Arte Povera, Baselitz returned to the human figure and embraced the ‘asocial, the insane, the deviant and the amoral’. Employing a crude and heightened palette the artist conveyed raw emotion, evoking tenets of German Expressionism and categories that had been ‘deemed “degenerate” during the Third Reich’ (Shulamith Behr, Georg Baselitz , exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2