Georg Baselitz (B. 1938)

Like all the rebels and partisans in Baselitz's oeuvre, this monumental Faustkämpfer ('fist fighter') harks back to more heroic periods of painting and printmaking, to Italian Mannerism in particular, but also to a period of a more dubious heroism in art, that of both fascist and socialist 'realism', to which the artist had been exposed to during his childhood and youth in Germany.

Baselitz's fighter-figures are thus an appropriation and a revolt against artistic and social ideals of the past, which had become anachronistic and irrelevant at best (the old masters), or exposed as ideological monstrosities at worst (the 'social realism' of the Nazis and Stalinist Russia and its satelites). The Faustkämpfer is a fallen hero, an Icarus. As the figure is upside down, so does the drawing style with its seemingly botched, awkward lines mimick failure and call the concept of heroism and monumentality into question.