Untitled (1.XII.06) strikes a masterful balance, Georg Baselitz’s vivid artistic vision holding its own among frenetic lines of ink and saturated sections of watercolour. A pair of boots is sketched from the knee down in a freeform technique that suggests rapid action. The heels are adorned with spurs, alluding to the romance and lawlessness of the Wild West; the boots stand boldly, raw paper showing through, against the pooling aqueous blues that compose the background. These elements are tied together by the foreground’s expressionistic brushwork of deep black, which threatens to consume the cowboy: the composition is almost overwhelmed by the artist’s vigorous creativity.
The subject matter for this work is one that recurs in Baselitz’s oeuvre. The artist stated that ‘feet are my earthing’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in Georg Baselitz Gemälde und Arbeiten auf Paper von 1971 bis 2004, exh. cat., Galerie Henze & Ketterer, Switzerland, 2008, p. 19), locating the motif as a grand symbol of power and personal expression. Indeed, in Untitled (1.XII.06) the feet configure an uncertain stability, besieged by surrounding abstraction. Further significance lies in the appropriation of symbols by Baselitz to represent connections between the past and the present, particularly those directly connected to Saxony. While his art-historical interest in feet can be traced to the dissections of Rembrandt and the studies of Géricault, the colours and formal language of the work recall German Expressionists such as Edvard Munch or Emil Nolde. The quality of Basetliz’s brushwork, however, makes for a strongly anti-classical presence; the spurs add the irreverent kick of humour typical of his work, in which nothing is ever as it seems.