ABSTRACT
The fracture paintings are a continuation of, and a turning within, work undertaken without the reassuring ground of either self-knowledge or confidence in the other. The 'fracture paintings' of Georg Baselitz were produced between 1966 and 1969. Echoes of Expressionism are most strong here. To liberate his work from the tyranny of the false unity of the perceiving ego, Baselitz expresses through his brushes what the object does not express in itself. The exploded fracture paintings, like B for Larry, are cultural signifiers of fragmented subjectivity. The horizontally lined fracture paintings are cultural signifiers of the minimally riven postmodern context in which this fragmented subjectivity forge its contingent self-compromises. Artists and art critics alike take no comfort from cultural theory. The fracture paintings are explorations of fragmentation as a given. The unified subject is gone, leaked down the drain. Die Grossen Freunde and the manifesto accompanying it are outgrowths of splitting and distortion as condition of being.
