Georg Baselitz: Akademie Rousseau

Georg Baselitz says about the paintings of ROUSSEAU ACADEMY, how it came to the portraits in this book: There is a remarkable painting in the Picasso room at Kunstmuseum in Basel: a full-length portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire with his muse, Marie Laurencin. It was Henri Rousseau who ­painted this wonderful picture. Only I had remembered it as a self-portrait of Rousseau with ­Madame Rousseau. As it happens, Franz Marc painted a portrait of Rousseau for Der Blaue Reiter. And Picasso also had a self-portrait by Henri. There is a quite intimate photograph of Picasso holding Rousseau's self-portrait in his right hand and the portrait of Rousseau's wife in his left hand. Picasso, that constructor of novel objects and ­audacious paintings, loved Rousseau, the painter of things in rigidified grace. Even Rousseau's gaze in his self-portrait is stiff, directed at his own work, in which objects that we ourselves are familiar with look different: Gothic, Byzantine, somehow not the way we are used to seeing them. I have painted a lot of portraits of my wife and myself in recent years, many showing us dressed as others.

Nicole Hackert and Bruno Brunnet (the founder of the gallery in 1992) are a permanent part of the international gallery world with CFA situated now at Grolmanstraße in Berlin/Charlottenburg. Siegfried Gohr, born in 1949, is a German art historian, curator, and freelance publicist. Georg Baselitz, born as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz in 1938, is one of the most internationally renowned German artists of the post-war period.