Painterly pandemonium

The painters born in Germany between the rise of Hitler and the collapse of the Third Reich – Gerhard Richter, Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer – have no equivalent anywhere else. They belong, wrote the poet Rudolf Brinkman, who was born in 1940, to “a generation of junk, hastily and fearfully fucked into existence before the war or in the first days of the war. Feeling guilty for being there, guilty of having done this or that. Burning tanks fall out of the sky, shrapnel – and afterwards, when it ended? Now the musty atmosphere of collective guilt, now the grey images come.”

While the rest of the world got on with the dazzle of abstract expressionism and the fun of pop, the German war babies who came of age in the 1960s made art that was one long variation on the death fugue: Richter’s grey blur, Polke’s grainy dispersion canvases, Kiefer’s crumbling surfaces encrusted with ash or straw. And then there was the joker in the pack: Georg Baselitz, famous chiefly for painting people upside down but, it turns out at the Royal Academy’s massive red-carpet retrospective opening today, as inevitably death-haunted and history-laden as the rest.

Born in Saxony in eastern Germany in 1938, Baselitz made his name with “The Big Night Down the Drain”, in which a small boy in shorts pulls out his enormous cartoon-like penis. Removed by the West Berlin state attorney when it appeared in Baselitz’s first show in 1963, this two-metre canvas is one of a group of murky pornographic shockers – “P.D. Stem”, a flailing phallus emerging like a tree stump against a dark ground; “G. Antonin”, a collection of wilting, elongated, deformed male nudes piled up like rag dolls – that forms the Royal Academy’s opening display. Its mix of tenderness and rage compels.

“And who did he pull by the dick in front of the painting, if not the tormented, pathetic Germans whose night of the senses is now down the toilet?” asked one German critic. The obscenity objection masked a political one: like Günter Grass’s Oskar in The Tin Drum (1959), here was a child born during the war compulsively drawing attention to truths his parents wanted to ignore. Here too was an artist in an era dominated by American culture and imagery who recognised that the German historical experience demanded a uniquely German art.

With unprecedented loans from German and Swiss public and private collections, the Royal Academy’s survey includes almost all the important works from this formative period. Among the “pandemonium” paintings whose grossly distorted body parts suggest psychological as well as physical mutilation are 11 canvases – including “Russian Foot” and “The Old Native – Border of Existence” – depicting a single stunted, wounded or putrid foot. In “Homage to Vrubel”, Baselitz reinterprets the Russian symbolist masterpiece “The Demon” through the flayed body of a young blond masturbator crouched malevolently in a corner. The Russian theme leads on to the caricatured anti-heroes in a style derived from the socialist realism of Baselitz’s youth: the monolithic, bulky soldiers, uniforms ragged and flies undone in “The Great Friends” and “With a Red Flag”, the phallic-shaped, blotchy, tapering quartet of heads in “Oberon”.

Painterly surfaces are thick and syrupy, with pink and grey tones, recalling at once the convulsive slashes of Corinth and Soutine and the gesturalism of Guston and de Kooning. The vigour comes from Baselitz’s challenge as an outsider, proffering unfashionable European figuration whose macho subjects and bombastic scale ape mid-century America’s high-testosterone monumentality. Beyond the boasting is sexual anxiety, mirror of demasculinised, fatherless, fractured postwar Germany. The effect is enhanced by the appropriation of German romanticism, palpable by the mid-1960s when Baselitz places tree-like male figures, with echoes of the crucifixion (“Blocked Painter”, “Forward Wind”) into flat, scarred landscapes.

These wounded figures follow the long northern European tradition of the grotesque that runs from Grunewald’s suffering Christ through symbolist Munch to Kirchner and Dix’s tortured expressionist modern man. Even in the greatest hands, this is not a language of subtlety. With Baselitz, a synthesiser rather than an original constructor in the first place, the problem is that once he has melded this myriad of art-historical strands to suit his own historical purpose, his inventiveness and purpose dwindle. This is true of many artists who achieve self-expression young; it is acutely apparent here because the Royal Academy, by showing Baselitz at full throttle across 10 towering galleries, makes grand claims that the oeuvre cannot sustain.

You sense it as soon as the gimmickry begins: first the stripe paintings, where the canvas is divided into horizontal layers, each containing an unconnected fragment or body part as in the surrealist game “exquisite corpse”, then the inverted landscapes and portraits – “Finger Painting – Eagle”, “Cement Factory”, “Triangle Between Arm and Torso” – where Baselitz vainly tries to pretend repetitive narrative content is somehow about abstract form. The scratched, gouged, painted wooden sculptures, rough and boisterous, struck me as more of the same. The drawings and woodcuts, a tangle of lines and scribbled metamorphosing bodies, are by contrast muted, surprisingly elegant, and a relief.

In the early 1980s, German neo-expressionism hit New York and Baselitz achieved international prominence. With nothing to fight against, his work became even soggier. Brushstrokes are looser and messier, contortion turns to posturing, a sense of the historic moment to banality, overstatement to – well, more overstatement.

A little of Baselitz goes a very long way – partly because it does not in fact go very far at all. The final large gallery here is dedicated to Baselitz’s recent “Remix” series, which returns full circle to his works from the 1960s, recapitulating them in conscious parodies. Of course this is Baselitz’s latest gimmick: sketchy, dashed-off, thinly painted, often near-monochrome renderings of the furious, dense canvases that made him famous. Looking down four galleries, the black and white outlines of heads in “Oberon (Remix)” (2005) face the bloody red originals in the “Oberon” of 1963-64. The clumsy giants of “The Great Friends (Remix)” are similarly ghostly, disembodied figures, painted in almost transparent washes of dirty grey and white.

And so half a century on, the grey images still come. Yet I found these paintings, and some of the accompanying work – especially “Ekely” (2004), depicting the legs and feet of the elderly, reclusive Munch against a skeletal Munch-like snowscape, and a velvet-grey/rose “Little Boys II” – oddly poignant. “As a painter, if you don’t jump out of the window in time, you’ll just grow old, and then it’ll be up to you to find a way to fill the rest of your days,” Baselitz said when launching the “Remixes” at Vienna’s Albertina earlier this year. At nearly 70, he has again found something to fight against: no longer the Nazi legacy or the hegemony of abstraction but his own old age and mortality. It has given life all over again to his sense of the absurd, futilely heroic activity of painting.

Georg Baselitz, Royal Academy, London W1, to December 9; www.royalacademy.org.uk