Meissen woodmen 1969 is one of five similarly sized paintings using woodmen as the subject that were painted by Baselitz between 1967 and 1969. The Gallery’s work, painted in 1969, is the last of this series of related paintings and was made just before Baselitz began to invert his images.
The woodman developed from ‘der neuer Typ’ (the new man), the hero figure that appeared in Baselitz’s works at the time he was working at the Villa Romana in Italy in 1965. This figure combines elements taken from Mannerist prints that Baselitz collected, especially those showing the various professions, with the heroic iconography of social realism; the phrase ‘der neuer Typ’, used in the title of a number of works of this period, comes from the literature of the Russian Revolution. The rustic setting for these hero figures may derive from Baselitz’s move, in 1966, to the small village of Osthofen, near Worms, where he worked in relative isolation.
Concurrent with the development of this type of imagery, Baselitz initiated ways of dividing the image to undermine the narrative implication of his motifs while not altogether eliminating them. The works of 1967-69 divided in this manner are known as ‘fracture’ paintings. The earliest of these paintings are fractured by a single division usually cutting the image in two. In later works the fractures become progressively more complex, climaxing in the kind of shattered mosaic that can be seen in the Gallery’s painting.
