Georg Baselitz - Reclaiming Gold

The colour gold has had a rather bad rap of late. Associations with Donald Trump and his dearth of taste mean that he’s the first thing you think of when it’s mentioned. And so, listening to a speech by the late Austrian artist Georg Baselitz, and his remarks that ‘gold is popular again’, causes Trump and his creepy and perennial Midas touch to spring unbidden into my mind.  

Baselitz was actually talking about something else, as far as I understand it, the gesturing of modern day artists towards the kind of gold shimmering in the background of Sienese masterpieces. 

No matter, when I walked out of White Cube Bermondsey’s video space and into the Baselitz exhibition proper, I was annoyingly primed to see things through the prism of Mar-a-Lago and the carbuncular White House ballroom extension. Encountering the below painting, I could not unsee the U.S. President hanging upside down.

Georg Baselitz, Untitled, 2025

The trick to getting rid of this notion was to place these works back into the long and ongoing conversation of art history. Baselitz had already gestured towards Sienese icons, but it was an image from Spain that leapt into my mind’s eye: Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco that I had seen only the day before at the National Gallery.

Francisco de Zurbarán, The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco (1629)

St Peter, crucified upside down, also lay against a gloomy and ethereal half-golden background, out of time and out of any recognisable space. The gold of Baselitz’s figure against a black abyss seemed all of a sudden to take on a secular version of Ecclesiastical vanity, all earthly riches and experience flanked only by the void.

What of the reverse formulas in these paintings though? The black figures on the golden base? Well, the formula can work either way: the emptiness of gold against the void; the black emptiness of the body and soul amidst gold. 

Georg Baselitz, Indian Dances in Pittsburgh, 2025

Again, though, I’m back to interpreting gold as a negative, certainly in aesthetic terms. And that’s not quite fair, as many of these paintings shimmer and arrest. And when other colours are brought to bear, Siena is inescapable. 

Georg Baselitz, Untitled

The Siena connection, leads me to wonder how these paintings would look in a more gloomy, candlelit space. White Cube is a gorgeous and airy gallery, but its cleanness can chill.  

Less impressive were the deeper dives towards total abstraction, with Baselitz drifting further and further away from his figurative silhouettes. Object Naive felt like a lazy Cy Twombly pastiche.  

Georg Baselitz, Object Naive, 2024

And the smaller drawings, though intriguing and curious, tended to pall against the enormity of the larger canvases.  

Georg Baselitz, Untitled, 2025 

At last, then, those reminders of Trump have surely been forgotten? Not quite. Many of these paintings are a celebration of his wife and long-time muse Elke Kretzschmar. Yet remarks that he gave to Der Spiegel and The Guardian usher women towards only the role of muse rather than artist:

“Women don’t paint very well” and “The market doesn’t lie. Even though the painting classes in art academies are more than 90% made up by women, it’s a fact that very few of them succeed. It’s nothing to do with education, or chances, or male gallery owners. It’s to do with something else and it’s not my job to answer why”. 

The old chestnut of ‘he was just being provocative’ was trotted out, a ridiculous and - on the part of those who ‘explained’ him - a cowardly excuse. Championing the market as the only barometer of success, and a healthy dose of casual misogyny: we are depressingly back in Trump Land again.

Still, for the most part, these late paintings, with their celestial glow and disintegrating form, hold the gaze long. And offer up a reminder that male artists can be both sexist and accomplished. And, in case we needed it, an assertion that from Siena through to Baselitz, gold can dazzle and need not be vulgar.