Skip to main content

Georg Baselitz: master of obscenity and Bowie's inspiration

Before David Bowie’s “Heroes”, the German artist painted a series of the same name, taking a past tainted by Nazis and making it new. Now two exhibitions celebrate his subversive brilliance

In 1977, at the Hansa studio in West Berlin, David Bowie was recording some new songs when he happened to look out of the window. The pop legend saw his musical collaborator Tony Visconti kissing his girlfriend in front of the heavily guarded concrete barrier built by communist East Germany to keep its citizens in. He wrote “Heroes”, one of his best loved songs, that contains the lines: “I, I can remember / Standing by the wall / And the guns shot above our heads / And we kissed as though nothing could fall.”

But Bowie wasn’t the first person to juxtapose totalitarian brutality and the frailty of the individual in a modern masterpiece called Heroes. A decade earlier, as the cold war began to intensify, a young German artist named Hans-Georg Kern painted a series of ironic paintings also collectively titled Heroes. They turn the happy smiling people who featured on propaganda posters of the time into bleeding, dismembered figures of pathos and tragicomedy. This September, both the early rage and the latest work of this great artist can be seen in two London exhibitions.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3lqytXi
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more