Georg Baselitz: Akademie Rousseau Exhibition Catalogue CFA Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin

"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. Marie Laurencin was Apollinaire’s muse, and Clémence Rousseau was Rousseau’s muse. As it happens, Franz Marc painted a portrait of Rousseau for Der Blaue Reiter, and Picasso also had a self-portrait by Henri. There’s a quite intimate photograph, taken by André Gomés, 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. (…)" —Georg Baselitz

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. He was director of the Cologne Kunsthalle (1978–1985), director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne (1985–1991), professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe from 1993 to 2004 and at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 2006 to 2014. 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. He became known with figurative, expressive paintings, sculptures and prints.