In November 1961, the residents of West Berlin woke to find their city dotted with posters. These, in scabrous drawings and words, attacked contemporary German art as a thing of “anthropomorphic, pot-bellied putty-rocks”. Baffled Berliners who made it to the end of the text found an advertisement for an exhibition of work by the posters’ twin authors. One was a painter called Eugen Schönebeck, who was to remain little known outside Germany. The other was Georg Baselitz, later a star of the international art world, who has died aged 88.
The posters comprised both an artwork and a manifesto. Called Pandemonium I (Pandemonium II, released three months later, self-defeatingly observed that “all writing [was] crap”), it came at a charged moment in German history. The Berlin Wall had gone up shortly before. Politically as historically, Germany was split in two – East and West, and before 1945 and after. For artists, these divisions went together. By 1961, prewar German art, even if untainted by nazism, was off limits. In its place was American abstraction, the style of the victor.
