BaselitzAVANTI! | Beauty/Adventure | FYNBOS POLLINATION | Guto Cidreira’s Depth is the New Luxury
Good Morning
The Museo Novecento in Florence is currently showing a retrospective titled BaselitzAVANTI!. It closes in a week. It opened a month before Georg Baselitz died, at the age of 88, in April this year. Visiting the show raised the question of what draws us to art if it is not beauty?
UC Berkeley friend Christine Human had seen AVANTI! and said ‘Not sure what I think of his art, but definitely interesting’. My husband Barry Gould declined a visit, claiming a depletion of capacity for anything new. I turned to my go-to The Guardian, and Jonothan Jones’ writings were compelling. It was the last day of my winter break. I set off to see BaselitzAVANTI! knowing that on hot Firenze summer days the Novecento is cool, quiet, spacious and the shows fill all three floors of the ancient Leopoldine Hospital on Piazza Santa Maria Novella.
Much has been written about Baselitz’s sixty years of making art. To find a compromise between figuration and abstraction, from the age of 31 (1969) Baselitz intentionally painted and hung his works upside down. He made work that inverted the figure, refusing ‘easy meaning, and unsettling the viewer’s sense of what a painting should do’. This became his artistic identity.
After the inversion of his paintings, and to further remove attention to content, his subject was limited to his wife Elke Kretzschmar and himself. In 2023 Christie’s presented two Baselitz works for auction, timed with the artist turning 85 years. Elke I, 1975 (pictured) fetched the princely sum of 3 million British Pounds.
‘Georg Baselitz was a living thread of history and his death robs us of the truth he knew when we need it more than ever. He was one of the only two people I have spoken to for whom Nazi Germany was a living memory: Baselitz was born in 1938, making him far too young to bear any personal guilt but old enough – seven when the Third Reich fell – to retain direct experience and images of it.’ Jonothan Jones The Guardian
‘What I could never escape was Germany, and being a German,’ Baselitz pointed out in 2007. ‘That is something, whether you want it to or not, that sticks to you… You cannot renounce it.’
‘Perhaps the most iconic work of his career was the painting series ‘Heroes’, from 1965-66. Titled with great irony, this featured depictions of solitary males wandering a bleak landscape, disfigured and dishevelled. The subjects have widely been interpreted as personifications of the battered German spirit after the Second World War.’ christies.com
I would love to visit the inevitable retrospective that might include these pictured works. Much still to be learned about this painter, German Neo Expressionism, wooden sculptures, The Big Night Down the Drain, his 1980 Venice Biennale controversy, his 2013 statement that ‘women don’t paint very well’, and his depiction of ageing bodies. I have this weekend read fairly widely, but nowhere can I find his clear views on ageing, as recorded in the filmed interviews shown at Novecento. My dark film booth scrawled notes are illegible – end-crisis (vs mid-life), ‘I only want clarity’. In his last days he worked from a wheeled office chair, moving over his canvas spread out on the floor, with brush on end of stick in hand.
Turning my attention swiftly to the now, and the natural beauty of the Elgin and Bot River Valleys. The question of whether our walking trails are restorative through their beauty, or adventurous through hikers reaching new heights, both physical and emotional, is often debated here at home office. This week’s walking of the Green Mountain Trail illustrated well that this depends on the walker and can be both. Hiking 55kms in four days is no mean feat but entirely doable. The extraordinary beauty of the Cape Floral Kingdom ticks all the boxes of aesthetically pleasing. Trails to be joined on 25 October, 30 November and 7 December. Trails can be booked online greenmountain.co.za
Walking our gardens this weekend and seeing the results of what seemed a brutal winter cutback together with new planting, leads me to say that you need to pick one of two weekends and visit Wildekrans Country House over the Elgin Open Garden charity show; last weekend October and first weekend November.
‘FYNBOS POLLINATION – not just the bees’, will be the subject of talks by Green Mountain Trail guide Andreas Groenewald. At 09h00 and 10h30 on each of the four days and for twenty peeps max per session. R100pp. Book by reply mail to learn about the wasps, long tongue flies, moths, mice, monkey beetles and birds that pollinate our Cape Floral Kingdom.
It’s been an inspiring week chatting to our guest writers about self publishing and the onslaught of information in today’s world, about being tech savvy to manage this, and about privacy. We are giving thought to a weekend of learning how to manage your digital self in this exponentially changing world.
The preparation of good food is what grounds us here at Wildekrans Country House. Carrot cake should be made from carrots, lots of them. Rosy Kroukamp bakes a carrot cake each week using pecans from our two elderly trees and tasty carrots from @terramadre_elgin ‘s veggie garden. Book online to spend a weekend. wildekrans.co.za
On the 10th of September our neighbouring farmer Dave Evans called to ask whether I had heard the first of this year’s Piet-My-Vrou that morning? Love my ‘hood. Remember the words of Arundhati Roy ‘you need to know about the earth, your neighbours, the birds and the dogs’. See 8 July Farmer Dave post @wildekranscountryhouse
Signing off with sound advice from Brazilian writer Guto Cidreira @gutocidreira
Depth is the new luxury.
Finishing a book. Talking without a phone at the table. Thinking about a problem for more than ten minutes. Listening to a whole album. Writing without interruption. Being in a place without posting.
In a world that sells mass distraction, sustained attention has become the privilege of those who decide. And live
– Guto Cidreira
With love
PS: This weekend brings art retreat PHYSICALITY. Daytrippers are welcome to drop in and out of the group of artists that are booked to spend the weekend here at Wildekrans Country House under the gentle and astute eye of artist and teacher Jill Trappler. With Cidreira in mind, problems will be thought about for more than ten minutes and sustained attention will be practised. To book a drop in day, reply by email.
PPS: Links to writings on Georg Baselitz:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/apr/30/holocaust-georg-baselitz-nazism-hitler
https://www.christies.com/en/stories/george-baselitz-frau-and-elke-698746db61cb442a99b0ec5f718ca54b
https://www.museonovecento.it/en/mostre/georg-baselitz-avanti/
https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/10-things-to-know-about-georg-baselitz/
PPPS: Available Trail Dates:
• 📅 05 October 2026 – Green Mountain Trail
• 📅 26 October 2026 – Green Mountain Trail
• 📅 30 November 2026 – Green Mountain Trail
• 📅 07 December 2026 – Green Mountain Trail
To walk with your own group, book these dates: 🏞️
• 📅 14 September 2026 – Green or Blue Mountain Trail
• 📅 19 October 2026 – Green or Blue Mountain Trail
• 📅 26 October 2026 – Green or Blue Mountain Trail
• 📅 9 November 2026 – Green or Blue Mountain Trail
A 10% discount is offered on groups of ten and 7% on groups of six.
Follow @greenmountaintrail for trail news.
