"I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens"
About this Quote
Baselitz delivers the line like an offhand confession, but it lands as a small demolition of artistic innocence. He’s describing a studio “accident” that is anything but random: every time he paints the German artists he admires, the image tilts into a blonde woman. The joke is that he claims not to know why, while the culture he’s painting inside supplies the answer with brutal clarity.
Postwar German art is haunted by the problem of inheritance: what does it mean to love German tradition when that tradition has been contaminated by nationalism, mythic purity, and the aesthetic packaging of power? The blonde woman is a loaded shorthand for “Germanness” as fantasy - not just a person, but an emblem. Baselitz’s move is sly because it makes admiration inseparable from projection. He isn’t copying portraits; he’s showing how reverence turns artists into icons, and icons into gendered, racialized allegories.
The subtext also cuts through the macho mythology of the artist. These are “German artists whom I admire,” a lineage of fathers, yet the result is feminized. That slippage reads like both desire and displacement: the painter can’t face the father-head-on, so he reroutes the image into a safer, seductive symbol. “Oddly enough” is doing heavy lifting, performing bafflement while exposing compulsion.
In Baselitz’s broader practice - inversion, distortion, the refusal of stable viewing - this isn’t a quirk, it’s a method. He stages how history leaks into the hand, how the “why” of an image is often the part the artist can’t admit without implicating himself.
Postwar German art is haunted by the problem of inheritance: what does it mean to love German tradition when that tradition has been contaminated by nationalism, mythic purity, and the aesthetic packaging of power? The blonde woman is a loaded shorthand for “Germanness” as fantasy - not just a person, but an emblem. Baselitz’s move is sly because it makes admiration inseparable from projection. He isn’t copying portraits; he’s showing how reverence turns artists into icons, and icons into gendered, racialized allegories.
The subtext also cuts through the macho mythology of the artist. These are “German artists whom I admire,” a lineage of fathers, yet the result is feminized. That slippage reads like both desire and displacement: the painter can’t face the father-head-on, so he reroutes the image into a safer, seductive symbol. “Oddly enough” is doing heavy lifting, performing bafflement while exposing compulsion.
In Baselitz’s broader practice - inversion, distortion, the refusal of stable viewing - this isn’t a quirk, it’s a method. He stages how history leaks into the hand, how the “why” of an image is often the part the artist can’t admit without implicating himself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Georg
Add to List
