These images, while not precisely poignant, certainly have something to say about the way victims of war may be dehumanised. He is, of course, upside down (if we know one thing about Baselitz, it’s that since 1969 he has depicted his subjects upside down, the better to encourage focus both in himself and in his audience). Baselitz repeatedly and skilfully depicts this boy, sometimes in colour and sometimes in black and white, sometimes in stark outline and sometimes half-obscured by shading.
PENCIL SKETCH FASHION ILLUSTRATION SERIES
In 1998, for instance, he made a series of eight etchings based on a detail of Arkady Plastov’s A Fascist Flew Past (1942-7), in which a shepherd boy lies injured or killed by a Nazi aircraft. Photograph: © Salomé/ Ashmoleanīaselitz is less of a phoney than Penck. Every high-living international banker should (and probably does) own a set. More convincing is Berlin Suite (1990), a series of 10 primary-coloured aquatints in which every figure, whether stick or not, is at play, exuding even at their simplest the optimism and possibility that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. But though perfectly pleasing in its way, it’s hard to shake off the sense that you’re looking at the efforts of a cut-price Kurt Schwitters. Untitled (Standart), which dates from about 1973, is a series of largely abstract work on paper made from everyday stuff such as foil and newsprint (artists’ materials were scarce in East Germany, where Penck lived and worked until 1980). In the 1960s, Penck developed Standart, a pictorial alphabet incorporating elements of graffiti, calligraphy and symbols like stick figures. The older artists liked to work in series, playing on a theme, pushing the limitations of their chosen media. The only moment of tranquillity, albeit of a somewhat bleak kind, comes via Lupertz’s trio of etchings Landscape I, II, III (1998), in which clumps of leafless trees form bridge-like compositions that suggest not the countryside, but the liminal half-green spaces to be found on a city’s outskirts. It’s a show that seems to beat out an unceasing rhythm (and perhaps this is unsurprising: Penck and Lupertz played in a jazz band Castelli and Salomé were into punk). Either way, the atmosphere overall is relentlessly youthful. Its second focuses on drawings and prints by younger artists associated with the movement, all of whom worked in West Berlin in the 1980s: Elvira Bach (b.1951), Salomé (b.1954), Rainer Fetting (b.1949), Luciano Castelli (b.1951).
Its first half is devoted to those artists – Penck, Georg Baselitz, Markus Lupertz – who were known as Junge Wilde (Young Wild Ones – or, as the Ashmolean has it, Young Fauves) in the 1980s, though they were, of course, well on the way to middle age by then (Penck and Baselitz were born in the late 1930s, Lupertz in 1941).
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