Georg Baselitz: ‘Belle Haleine’, at Cristea Roberts Gallery
Georg Baselitz’s Belle Haleine at Cristea Roberts Gallery marks the first time the provocative series of 10 linocut prints have been shown together since they were first made and exhibited in the early 2000s. Always referential and often derivative, Baselitz takes the title of the work from the famous 1920-1921 work by Marcel Duchamp titled: Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette, meaning ‘Beautiful Breath, Veil Water’. The works appear to have very little in common save for pre-occupations with the body and its sexual and gendered performativities, functions, and artefacts. Each of the prints has its own title, mostly also comprising art historical references, including one, Moustache le soeur, 2002, also referencing Duchamp. Baselitz’s main reason for using Duchamp’s title, Belle Haleine seems to be, according to the exhibition text, a reference to Duchamp’s female alter-ego, pictured on the original work, a ‘rectified readymade’ made by Duchamp with the assistance of Man Ray. Duchamp’s alter-ego was named Rrose Sélavy: a pun on the phrase, Eros, c’est la vie (meaning “Love [or sex], that’s life”). Baselitz carries this sentiment through the print series, although the legacy of Duchamp’s gender-fluidity is not represented in this heteronormative, phallocentric work. The contrast with Baselitz’s macho form of lascivious humour feels uneasy.
The linocuts, at first sight, are huge, monumental, and monolithic, but seem to decrease in size; the more they are inspected, the more empty they are revealed to be. As well as being referential through use of titles, the images in the series reference scenes from 19th century erotic lithographs. The bold, greasy shadows of lithography are replaced by vapid white lines of self-satisfied inversion: images inverted black to white and white to black, top to bottom and bottom to top. Each print in Belle Haleine depicts a couple engaged in some type of sexual activity - always heterosexual and featuring a prominent phallus.
Baselitz is nothing if not consistent in his misogyny. Since 1969 he has depicted his figures upside down; this is done to ‘resist descriptive interpretation’ so that the subject of each work, rather than being the human sitter, is the ‘act of mark-making itself.’ Thus Baselitz directly empowers his own ejaculatory mark-making, fetishising his inaccurate, lethargic marks as genius, to be placed front and centre, over and above the subject that they depict, are comprised of and facilitated by. This is an act of absurd reification: object becomes subject and subject becomes object, so that human subjects are rendered passive by the artist’s own self-indulgence, and socio-sexual relations become inherently codified and demarcated in relation to which bodies can enact and be seen to enact certain acts: bodies as commodities in a world communicating at the level of market relations, and commodities reigning as subjects. And what fine commodities these prints are, with prices not listed, prospective customers must enquire with Cristea Roberts Gallery. Based on the prices listed for the adjoining exhibition of Baselitz’s etchings, we can assume they are high.
Famous for stating that “women don’t paint very well”, Baselitz is openly sexist. The reification and objectification within his methodology of inversion is accompanied by an objectifying, animalistic, debasing approach to depicting women, which contains the full spectrum of misogynistic imagination: all the way from maiden to crone. All of the above is as unsurprising as it is uninteresting regarding Belle Haleine. Something that did interest me about the work, however, is the covering of a large area of each genital with a white void. This is, apparently, a reference to Duchamp’s Étant donnés in which a naked woman is framed by and viewed through a hole in a wooden door. Rather than the hole being, as in Duchamp’s work, a voyeur’s peep hole, in Baselitz’s work, it is a tool for obfuscation, imagination, and the obscuring of sexuality. For Baselitz, this hole is a centre around which the imagination can circle, “as with the hole in a record around which the music plays.” This void can also be seen as an act of self-censorship by Baselitz after the 1963 incident which saw two of his paintings of naked figures seized by prosecutors on suspicion of immorality and obscenity. In censoring the copulating body in this way, there is also the sense of a crude, bourgeois anti-corporeality, whereby the sexist imaginary of the hole/void/opening is instrumentalised to hide away a site of perceived carnal sin. Either way, the circle relates in an interesting way to Baselitz’s use of negative space and white cut line. The circles blend seamlessly into the white lines cut into the lino as if they are a part of their world: of dead, removed matter. In fact, rather than being a result of uplifting lino, the white circles were the result of an additive process: paper discs were placed in position on the lino just before each print was taken.
The exhibition text proposes a similarity between the work of the 17th century Chinese painter, Bada Shenren, and the ‘lightness of the cut line and elegance of repeated, short, dynamic strokes’ found in Belle Helaine. Although I would dispute the aesthetic links to Bada Shenren (the work is entirely different in composition, mark-making, treatment of light, and subject matter etc.), I did find the energy and abstraction perceived upon close inspection of the works to be engaging. This, however, is probably only a by-product of the artist’s fixation, attachment, and self-satisfaction with his own ejaculatory, sprawling white marks. The central interest and contradiction in the work seems to me to come from the tension between erotica, objectification, reification, and fetishism (both economic and sexual) on one hand, and modesty, voyeuristic imagination, obfuscation, and delayed or deferred gratification on the other.
Belle Haleine is accompanied by an exhibition of recent etchings by Baselitz in the Gallery’s downstairs space which will be discussed in a following article.
This exhibition was open at Cristea Roberts Gallery, 43 Pall Mall, from 10th November - 22nd December 2023.
