Baselitz X Schiavone – Etched Across Time

Contemporary Prints and Renaissance Etchings from the Collection of Museum of Fine Arts Budapest

The exhibition is open every week from Thursday to Sunday with a permanent exhibition ticket. The exhibition hall of Prints and Drawings is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. 

What links an artist from contemporary Germany with one from sixteenth-century Venice? Can there even be a connection between two creative minds almost five hundred years apart? Can two masters affected by completely different social and cultural influences share similarities in approach? Is it possible to compare the work of an Italian mannerist with that of a German living today? What aspects can reveal parallels between one of the most significant artists of our age and an unconventional sixteenth-century Venetian master?

The exhibition entitled Baselitz X Schiavone is the first in a series of shows at the Collection of Prints and Drawings intended to reinforce the dialogue between contemporary artworks and those by old masters. This exhibition focuses on the works of Georg Baselitz, who turns 85 this year: in 2020, on the 150^th anniversary of the Collection of Prints and Drawings, the artist generously donated thirty large prints to the museum – a selection of these will now be shown to the public for the first time. To accompany Baselitz, we have chosen Andrea Schiavone, a sixteenth-century Italian master who is linked in multiple ways to the contemporary German artist, who started collecting the Italian’s etchings in the 1960s. For this show, Baselitz loaned one of his paintings made in 2011, that he has selected specifically for this occasion. The painting’s richly linear visuality makes it the perfect complement to his own prints and to Schiavone’s etchings alike.

Baselitz and Schiavone were both fundamentally painters who took an avid interest in printmaking. There are many similarities in their thinking about the genre and in how their uniquely innovative attitude towards the creation of images is manifested in their works on paper. One of the key factors that inspired this exhibition was yet another major point of connection between them: Georg Baselitz, besides being one of the most eminent artists of our times, is also a collector with an extraordinary taste for mannerist prints, who has built up a first-rate collection of such works. He has more than eighty sheets by Andrea Schiavone in his possession. As Baselitz himself explained concerning our exhibition, “Schiavone used the etching technique in a very undisciplined and immensely experimental way, which resulted in unusual, avant-garde plates and sheets.”

Our exhibition offers insight into the works on paper of two artists who were active in two different ages, presenting sheets held by the Collection of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Fine Arts. Visitors will now have the chance to see more than twenty large prints by Baselitz, and around thirty by Schiavone, which are on a much smaller scale. The majority of the pieces by both artists are being displayed to the public for the first time. When selecting the works, we concentrated on the use of irregular forms: most of the pieces on display feature full-length or half-length figures, close-ups of parts of the body, paired portraits, or multi-figural scenes.

Works on paper by two unparalleled artists from two completely different periods are now being shown together, revealing that the gap between “old” and “new” prints may not be so unbridgeable after all.

A 60-page booklet accompanies the exhibition in Hungarian and English.

Curators: Kinga Bódi and Eszter Kardos, art historians

Special thanks to Georg Baselitz for the loan of his painting Asger Jorn Makes Me Melt to our exhibition. We would like to thank Chiara Callegari, Giorgio Marini, Detlev Gretenkort, Julia Westner for their help in making the exhibition possible.