SFX: Disjointed, assonant music coming up and fading down at key points throughout. 

NARRATOR:  

Odd, isn’t it? Head towards the bottom, breasts and torso in the middle. Legs sticking up, like antlers.   

This is artist Georg Baselitz’s portrait of his wife, Elke. But, turned on its head, something as familiar as a seated woman becomes…disorienting. Look at the drips of paint, and you’ll realize that Baselitz didn’t paint this right side up, then turn it upside down. In fact, we can’t tell exactly how he painted it. The drips are flowing in different directions.  

That sense of being lost when you’re looking at it – that wasn’t an accident. Baselitz was born in Germany a year before the start of World War II, and began painting in the decade after his country’s defeat. The war and the Holocaust turned Germany’s national identity on its head – like Elke, sitting in her upside-down armchair.  

GARY GARRELS:  

It’s hard to recall or remember at this point how ravaged Germany had been by the Second World War.  

NARRATOR:  

Curator Gary Garrels.  

GARRELS:  

The country—psychologically, spiritually, culturally—had been devastated.  

NARRATOR:  

After the war, many Germans wanted to forget, to erase the past, to get on with their lives. 

GARRELS: 

And by the sixties, the German economy was on an upsurge again, and people felt like they could let the war disappear. Baselitz and a number of artists felt that, in fact, the ghosts of the war were very alive; that the idea of some kind of rebuilding, of a reconciliation, was psychological and cultural; it wasn’t just about the material lives of people. 

NARRATOR:  

This painting, like Germany’s dark history, is hard to make sense of. We might not want to look at it. But, Baselitz insists, it has to be done.