GEORG BASELITZ — Tableaux récents, dessins et linogravures, Gillespie-Laage-Salomon, Paris, 1983

Georg Baselitz. Tableaux récents, dessins et linogravures. Gillespie-Laage-Salomon, Paris, 26 February–2 April 1983. Exhibition invitation. Printed card on textured cream stock; 15 × 10 cm. Brush-script “G Baselitz 83” to recto; black typography to verso.

A small invitation for an exhibition of recent paintings, drawings and linocuts at Gillespie-Laage-Salomon, Paris, in early 1983. The date places it at a particularly significant point in Baselitz’s career. His first solo exhibition in Berlin in 1963 had ended with two paintings confiscated for obscenity. The Helden paintings followed in the mid-1960s, and in 1969 he began turning his motifs upside down — retaining recognisable imagery while disrupting the tendency to read a painting primarily through its subject. Through the 1970s he extended that approach across painting, drawing and printmaking, moving into sculpture around 1980.

By 1983 the wider art world had moved sharply back toward large-scale figurative painting. Baselitz had recently appeared in A New Spirit in Painting, Westkunst, Documenta 7 and Zeitgeist. But he had already been dismantling and reconstructing figurative painting for almost twenty years. He was not simply part of the early-1980s return to painting. The return to painting had caught up with him.

The works around this period were becoming larger, rougher and increasingly entangled with the history of German Expressionism. In 1983 Baselitz completed major paintings including Nachtessen in Dresden and Der Brückechor, while drawing, linocut and sculpture continued alongside painting. The apparently generic title Tableaux récents, dessins et linogravures therefore captures several parts of the practice operating simultaneously. The exhibition also coincided with Baselitz’s transition into a fully international museum figure: a major retrospective opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1983 before travelling to the Stedelijk Museum and Kunsthalle Basel.

The invitation itself is unusually good. One side contains almost nothing except the handwritten-looking inscription: G Baselitz 83. Turn it over and the gesture is converted into administration: GEORG BASELITZ / TABLEAUX RÉCENTS / DESSINS ET LINOGRAVURES. Gallery. Date. Opening hours. The unruly mark on one side; institutional classification on the other.

Nothing on the card announces that Baselitz was entering a period of major international recognition. It simply performs the ordinary work of circulation: a name, an exhibition, an address, six weeks in Paris. Before art history becomes art history, it circulates as information.

Condition: very good. Light age toning and minor handling consistent with period ephemera.

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