Johannistriebhirsch

A monumental painting, this spare canvas features two stags turned upside down, which appear like spectral forms in a nocturnal setting. In centering this motif, Baselitz knowingly traverses a sweep of Western art historical references—from the pre-historic paintings at Lascaux to the depictions of Saint Eustace and Saint Hubert, to stags in the works of Gustave Courbet, Ferdinand von Rayski, and Joseph Beuys among others—as well as kitschier contexts from folksy hunting lodge prints to the logo of the German digestif Jägermeister. The symbolic and visual richness of stags, especially with their distinguishing crown of antlers that shed and regrow annually, is also not lost on Baselitz. Antlers, associated with male virility and courtship rituals in the animal world, become proxies in Baselitz’s paintings for the libidinal cycles of humans—thus the work’s title Johannistriebhirsch, loosely translated as "Late Love Stag," a phrase from German slang denoting increased sexual arousal among the elderly.

The strategy of inversion, which Baselitz has deployed in his paintings since 1969, is both a compositional and conceptual device by which he neutralizes narrative, content, and expression to focus on the possibilities of painting itself. As Andreas Zimmerman evocatively observes, "[the antlers] are open to the heavens; it is only in Baselitz’s reversal that they connect with the Earth."[1] Indeed, in the loosely brushed passages that describe the stags’ bodies and heads, their antlers resemble the inverted tree branches of Baselitz’s earlier paintings of trees and roots.

[1] Andreas Zimmerman, in Georg Baselitz: The Painter in His Bed, New York: Gagosian, 2023, p. 54.