Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [146]
The means Kiefer chooses to portray fascism are unorthodox. Besides sand and straw, his paintings are collages of acrylic paint, tar, epoxy, copper wire, melted and hardened lead, and ceramic shards.
Clemente, “Francesco Clemente Pinxit,” 1981, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Clemente distorts the body to express irrational fears and fantasies.
CLEMENTE: BODY LANGUAGE. Another European who employs the Expressionist mode successfully is Francesco Clemente (b. 1952). In various media (watercolor, pastel, fresco, and oil), Clemente portrays nightmarish, hallucinatory states of mind through images of fragmentary body parts. “I’m interested in the body as a conductor between what we show on the outside and what we feel within,” Clemente said.
Clemente’s portraits uncover more than the naked human body. They suggest repressed urges and fantasies that both repel and fascinate. His faces are typically distorted with psychic strain, à la Munch, and rendered in unnatural color. In one painting, a pair of feet exudes a brown substance resembling blood, feces, and mud.
BASELITZ: THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN. Painter-sculptor Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) led, with Beuys, the revival of German Expressionism. A controversial artist, since 1969 he has portrayed figures upside down to show his disdain for convention.
Like Kiefer, Baselitz deals with World War II and its aftermath. In the ’60s he painted despondent pilots and pink, gangrenous feet. As a child Baselitz witnessed the firebombing of Dresden in 1945, which inspired a major work, “45.” The piece consists of twenty large paintings of women’s faces (upside down) on wood. The faces are purposely distorted, looking like terrified Raggedy Ann dolls with their pink skin and red hair. Transcending the comic effect is Baselitz’s violently scarred wood. With chisel, chainsaw, and wood plane he attacked the images, making them look under fire. Violent vortexes of slashes and gouges spin out from the faces as if victims of strafing.
BASQUIAT: THE WILD CHILD. Jean-Michel Basquiat (pronounced BAHS kee aht; 1960-88) died at age 28 of a drug overdose. The enfant terrible of ’80s art, he lived, painted, and died hard.
A high school dropout and self-taught painter, Basquiat first made his mark around 1980 in downtown New York scrawling graffiti slogans on walls. As part of a two-man team known as SAMO (for “same old shit”), he left anonymous social observations like: “riding around in Daddy’s convertible with trust fund money” and “SAMO as an antidote to nouveau-wavo bull-shit.” In 1981 Basquiat, of mixed Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, turned to painting and was instantly taken up by the art world. His intense, frenetic canvases, crammed with graffiti lettering and cartoonish figures, made him a Neo-Expressionist superstar.
Basquiat’s street-smart work conveys the fierce energy and jazzy spontaneity of rap music. He collaborated with his friend and mentor, Andy Warhol, for a few years before Warhol’s death in 1987. Basquiat, with his fast-track personality and self-destructive life-style, had the fifteen minutes of fame Warhol predicted. He was both a legend and a casualty of the superheated ’80s art scene.
THE NEW BREED: POST-MODERN ART
Art in the ‘90s is as diverse as the post-Cold War world. With nations changing their stripes as rapidly as a chameleon on plaid, art