Georg Baselitz/Anselm Kiefer/Sigmar Polke - art by Germans exhibited in United Kingdom

GAGOSIAN GALLERY/ANTHONY D'OFFAY GALLERY, LONDON

Gusts of Teutonic air swept into London this fall and winter. The 2000 Turner Prize went to German-born London resident Wolfgang Tillmans; a strong selection of works by Germans--from Otto Dix and Max Beckmann to Hans Haacke and A.R. Penck--was included in the National Portrait Gallery's survey of twentieth-century portraits; and three postwar heavyweights had major gallery shows--Georg Baselitz at Gagosian and Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke successively at Anthony d'Offay. Here was an opportune moment to reconsider the work of all three artists, who, along with Gerhard Richter, have represented, in Britain as elsewhere, the north face of European painting over the last two decades.

Recent German art is still viewed with some apprehension in Britain, even with that indelible native testiness reserved for international success. An endorsement of the often highly specific content of German art has not accompanied the undeniable, liberating influence of its technical procedures. In Britain, it was French and then American content that manured, even smothered, its artists during the twentieth century. Two world wars strangled the infiltration of German visual modernism, just beginning to be felt in the years before 1914 and again in the '30s. The summer of 1938 saw the unprecedented exhibition in London of modern art from Germany, a huge show from Lovis Corinth to Beckmann, organized in support of the "degenerate art" by artists then scuttling from their homeland across the safer floors of the Continent (though few holed up in Britain). After 1945, the going was slow, and the old British resistance to German art seemed more entrenched than ever. Even early German modernist painting and scul pture went largely ignored. It was not until 1960, for example, that Blue Rider painters such as August Macke and Franz Marc were comprehensively seen in Britain. Beckmann had no great public airing until his 1980 show of triptychs at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. (It was not until the following year that the Tate acquired its first work by him.)

These two events were part of the new German invasion, fueled by exhibitions of contemporary Berlin art at the ICA and the Whitechapel in 1978 and subsequent showings of Baselitz, Markus Lupertz, and Richter. In 1981 the Royal Academy mounted its celebrated exhibition "A New Spirit in Painting" (funded in part by the West German government and the Berlin Senate), which at last opened blinkered British eyes to a whole range of new German art. It included Baselitz and Kiefer (by then internationally notorious from their showing in the controversial German Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale, viewed, above all in Germany, as ideologically and aesthetically reactionary) as well as Polke, Richter, and Lupertz. The dealers quickly homed in and, as the "New Spirit" organizers had intended, American hegemony was challenged. But much to the annoyance of the German audience, who found their work flagrantly nationalistic, Baselitz and especially Kiefer were quickly espoused in the United States by, in the main, Jewish collectors who appeared to see their work as historically conciliatory. The critical beating meted out in Germany to these two artists at that period died down only after a cooler mid-'80s reappraisal.

Although the reception in Britain was not unwelcoming, the immediate impact on British painting was dire, and the two traditions clashed head-on. Mercifully the influence was short-lived (though it still rumbles on in Scotland). The real benefits for the British were a broadening of the scene, a reassessment of the possibilities of paint, and the reevaluation of somewhat marginalized British figurative artists (leading, however, to wand-waving attempts to turn local ducks into international swans). A little later the contrasting influences of Beuys and Richter began to predominate in the art schools. The Young British Artists emerging in the late '80s and early '90s had little or no use for the Sturm und Drang of Baselitz and Kiefer; their loyalties lay with the more distancing, even playful effects of Polke and Richter. The German moment of influence was pretty much over, though dealers and collectors remained in thrall.

The three recent London exhibitions allowed a look at a trio of godfather figures now old enough to be entering their late phases (though by no means on walkers). They remain internationally grand but are subject to almost wholesale dismissal under the chilly critical gaze of artists who were in diapers when Baselitz flipped his world head over heels. Born in 1938, Baselitz is the Nordic elder statesman of the three, the tamed and cultured "wild man" of Schloss Derneburg. As David Sylvester notes in his very brief catalogue preface, Baselitz is unsurpassed by any living European painter in his "creativeness... sustained decade after decade." Jumping from his habitual selling point at Anthony d'Offay, Baselitz showed his recent work in the newly attentive pastures of the Gagosian. There were five large paintings (all 2000), each with carved wooden frames, and a substantial number of impressive prints (1998/1999 and 2000). The paintings are extremely schematic, with much rubato black outline drawing and scatte red black dots on unsucculent grounds, mainly in creams, whites, and grays. Dogs (slothlike, being upside down) feature in four of the paintings and possibly the fifth, their domestic role contrasted with bare mountainous scenery; this canine theme continues in the majority of the prints. The frames, uniformly notched and gouged by the artist, provide a deadening surround rather than a reviving contrast to the whimsical images on the canvases, as though a hobby has supplanted a profession. Invention is not necessarily the same as creativeness, and the rebarbative urgency of Baselitz's greatest work is missing. Even so, "late phases" have a way of turning around years later to spit, "I told you so."