Georg Baselitz
LR
1966

Colored woodcut on litho paper
47.5 x 38.5 cm

Inv. no. 829
Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen
Acquired 1973

Georg Baselitz
1938, Deutschbaselitz (DE) / lives at the Ammersee, in Basel, Salzburg, and Imperia 

Georg Baselitz is one of the major innovators of the woodcut technique. Using the old technique of the chiaroscuro woodcut, he prints a sheet with two printing blocks in several steps. Various test prints allow him to explore the relationship between positive and negative as well as the interactions of colors. Our outstanding Baselitz holdings, especially these rare proofs, are some of the greatest treasures of the Museum Morsbroich’s print collection. 

In 1965/66, Baselitz made what later became known as his “hero paintings.” They show strong but maimed men, melancholy survivors in a world destroyed by war. They are partisans, shepherds, or rebels, all outsiders: alter egos of the artist, who was expelled from the art academy of East Berlin in 1958, emigrated to the West, and didn’t fit in there either. “In a cultural era of ruins” (Richard Shiff), he sought his own path beyond the categories of (Eastern) realism and (Western) abstraction. 

“LR” refers to the Romantic painter Ludwig Richter, whose once popular idylls now seem but a distant memory. He appears as a lonely wanderer, in other words as one of Baselitz’s ambivalent “heroes.”