I saw “Woodmen”, completed by George Baselitz in 1968, on a recent trip to the permanent collection at MoMA. I think of Baselitz as an artist who made it big in the 1980s, with the Neo-Ex return to figuration – but the date of this picture proves me wrong to so think. More importantly, I was instantly struck by how the discombobulations in this painting, with body parts fractured and rotated and repeated here and there across the surface, foretell the much later decompositions of digital imagery.
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