1. Buchloh vs. Kuspit: regression or revival?
The canonical reception fight. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting” (October 16, Spring 1981) reads the German painters as a reactionary nostalgia for an unrecoverable pre-modern subjectivity. For Buchloh, the return to figuration, myth, and expressive gesture was not a liberation but a retreat — a cipher of political and aesthetic regression at the very moment when conceptual and media practices offered more rigorous critical tools.
Donald Kuspit, writing in Artforum and Art in America across the early 1980s, defended Neo-Expressionism as a legitimate generational revival — a necessary recovery of painting’s affective and bodily capacities after the coolness of minimal and conceptual art. Where Buchloh saw capitulation, Kuspit saw healing.
The painters themselves remained largely silent in this exchange; Baselitz in particular treated criticism as irrelevant to the work. Curators Christos Joachimides, Norman Rosenthal, and Rudi Fuchs positioned the work against the criticism institutionally — through the landmark exhibitions “A New Spirit in Painting” (1981), Documenta 7 (1982), and “Zeitgeist” (1982). The museum pickup, which placed Neo-Expressionism in permanent collections worldwide, contradicted Buchloh’s dismissal in practice without answering it in prose.
The split institutionalized: October as the venue for the attack; Artforum and Art in America as the venues for the defense.
2. Kiefer and German-historical material: critique or aestheticized apologia?
Kiefer’s Heroische Sinnbilder photographs (1969) show the artist reenacting the Nazi salute at European historic sites. His Margarete and Sulamith paintings (1981) embed Celan’s “Todesfuge” in straw and ash. The Wege der Weltweisheit woodcuts arrange Wagner, Nietzsche, and Germanic myth in forest compositions. From the beginning, critics divided.
Andreas Huyssen’s “Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth” (October 48, Spring 1989) is the major sympathetic reading: Kiefer confronts the past by inhabiting its visual language, turning the perpetrator’s symbols into material for mourning and critical re-enactment.
The opposing reading, persistent in German criticism and voiced publicly around the 1980 Venice Biennale scandal, holds that Kiefer’s treatment of Nazi iconography — however intended — risks aestheticizing the very history it claims to confront. The straw is beautiful; the woodcuts are monumental; the photographs are composed. The temptation of myth, in Huyssen’s own title, includes the possibility that the artist does not fully resist it.
Kiefer has rarely commented directly on this dispute. His strategy is to let the work remain ambiguous — the identification with the perpetrator as both necessary and dangerous.
3. Baselitz’s 2013 Der Spiegel statement: women cannot paint as well as men
In a January 2013 interview with Der Spiegel, Baselitz was quoted saying that women did not paint as well as men: “Das haben sie nicht nötig. Frauen malen nicht so gut” — they don’t need to; women don’t paint so well. He cited auction prices and museum representation as evidence of qualitative inferiority rather than structural bias.
The response was immediate and widespread. The Guardian, Frieze, BBC, and Artnet condemned the remarks. Feminist critics and historians pointed to the exclusion of women artists from galleries, academies, and markets as the cause of any disparity — not innate incapacity. Baselitz partially retrated: he insisted the remarks were an observation about market statistics, not a personal belief, but he did not fully withdraw the claim.
The press’s archival stance: the statement is on the record, the response is on the record, the partial retraction is on the record. The dispute belongs in the archive because it exposes the unapologetic machismo of the Neo-Expressionist generation.
4. Junge Wilden: continuation or market-driven rupture?
The Junge Wilden — Salomé, Fetting, Castelli, Middendorf — are sometimes treated as Neo-Expressionism’s direct heirs and sometimes as a market-driven imitation wave whose rapid rise and fall (early 1980s peak; collapsed market by 1987–88) damaged the older painters’ reception.
The case for continuation: they share the return to figuration, aggressive gesture, and monumental scale; they emerged from the same Berlin and Cologne milieus; they showed alongside Baselitz and Kiefer in key exhibitions.
The case for rupture: their rise was faster and more market-dependent; their visual language was more directly imitative of Baselitz and Kiefer than generative; when the market collapsed, their prices fell sharply and institutional attention shifted away, tainting the entire movement by association.
The documentary record supports both positions. The wiki notes the fork without adjudicating.
5. Lineage claims: documentable inheritance or critic-imposed scaffolding?
Critics invoke Brücke, Blaue Reiter, Beckmann, Beuys, German Romanticism. Some of this is documented: Baselitz acknowledged Mannerism openly; Kiefer studied under Beuys; Beckmann is cited by multiple painters. Some of it is retrospective scaffolding: the Brücke and Blaue Reiter references appear more often in exhibition catalogues than in painter statements. The wiki names the distinction explicitly.
6. Baselitz’s inverted paintings: formal innovation or avoidance mechanism?
The inversion of the canvas — turning the subject upside down — has been read as a radical formalist strategy (forcing the viewer to attend to paint rather than narrative) and as a clever avoidance mechanism (a way to paint figuratively without the burden of meaning). Buchloh’s critique implies the latter: the inversion is a cipher of regression, a way to have figuration without the political responsibility that figuration carries. Baselitz’s defenders read it as the former: a way to make the viewer see paint as paint while retaining the human body as structure.
Both sides have textual support. Baselitz himself gave both explanations at different moments.
See also
- Georg Baselitz — the figure at the center of multiple disputes
- Anselm Kiefer — the figure whose work most divides critics
- buchloh-kuspit-reception-fight — the canonical reception fight (as concept page)
- Junge Wilden — the next-generation extension
- Venice Biennale 1980 — site of the Pavillon controversy
- Bilderstreit — the broader postwar German debate about figurative painting