Baselitz painted the Helden (Heroes) series in 1965–66 during a scholarship in Florence. The works depict solitary male figures — tattered, bandaged, carrying staffs or rags — standing in blasted, rubble-strewn landscapes. The scale is monumental; the bodies are defeated. The hero is an anti-hero.
The series absorbs Mannerist distortion from Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: elongated limbs, off-balance compositions, emotional extremity. At the same time, it reflects Baselitz’s childhood in postwar Saxony — the Dresden ruins, the solitary wanderer in a destroyed landscape. The Helden reject both heroic bombast and easy anti-fascism. They are ironic only in the sense that the scale claims grandeur while the subject refuses it.
The series includes Held (Hero, 1965), Der neue Typ (The New Type, 1966), Der Waldarbeiter (Woodman, 1969), Der Finger maler (Finger Painter), and Der Hirte (Shepherd). Each figure is solitary; each landscape is apocalyptic. The brushwork is thick and anti-academic; the proportions are deliberately crude.
Featured works
- der-waldarbeiter — Der Waldarbeiter, 1969; the bandaged woodcutter in apocalyptic landscape
See also
- Georg Baselitz — the artist
- lineage — Mannerism as ancestor
- formal-grammar — monumental scale and the defeated body