"I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation"
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Baselitz smuggles a whole postwar coming-of-age story into a line that sounds casually autobiographical. “Like every European” is doing sly double duty: it’s a wink at cultural cliché, but also an assertion that Expressionism isn’t a niche taste so much as a shared inheritance across a continent trying to paint itself back together after catastrophe. He frames his love as almost inevitable, then immediately complicates it with the real engine of the quote: generational refusal.
The bite is in “precisely.” He didn’t admire Expressionism despite its stigma; he admired it because of the stigma. That’s less about teenage contrarianism than about the politics of memory. His father’s generation, especially in Germany, had reasons to distrust Expressionism: it was condemned under the Nazis as “degenerate,” and after the war it could read either as tainted modernism or as a painful reminder of what had been suppressed. Baselitz positions himself as the artist who chooses the forbidden archive, not to be edgy, but to reclaim a language that power tried to erase.
There’s also a neat inversion of authority. The father stands in for the default taste-police of respectability; Baselitz discovers a model of expression that privileges distortion, anxiety, and rupture. In other words: a style suited to a society that can’t honestly paint itself in clean lines. Expressionism becomes both aesthetic preference and moral posture, a way to declare independence from inherited denial.
The bite is in “precisely.” He didn’t admire Expressionism despite its stigma; he admired it because of the stigma. That’s less about teenage contrarianism than about the politics of memory. His father’s generation, especially in Germany, had reasons to distrust Expressionism: it was condemned under the Nazis as “degenerate,” and after the war it could read either as tainted modernism or as a painful reminder of what had been suppressed. Baselitz positions himself as the artist who chooses the forbidden archive, not to be edgy, but to reclaim a language that power tried to erase.
There’s also a neat inversion of authority. The father stands in for the default taste-police of respectability; Baselitz discovers a model of expression that privileges distortion, anxiety, and rupture. In other words: a style suited to a society that can’t honestly paint itself in clean lines. Expressionism becomes both aesthetic preference and moral posture, a way to declare independence from inherited denial.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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