Like many of Baselitz’s most significant paintings made over the last four decades, the motif is painted upside down, distancing the viewer from the densely layered subject matter and heightening the interrelationship between serial image and painting as self-contained object. In addition, they were exhibited in contrasting pairs facing each other across the gallery thereby confronting and, on occasion, trapping the viewer in an inverted face-off.

The sixteen paintings also allude to the fifteen states of the former Soviet Union created by Lenin and later ruled with unprecedented brutality by Stalin (known as ‘the Nightingale’ because he had been a chorister as a boy) with the series being completed by what has sometimes been described as the sixteenth state or Soviet Republic – the former German Democratic Republic.

Baselitz was born in 1938 in the village of Deutschbaselitz in Saxony, twenty kilometres from Dresden, and grew up in the GDR. ‘Mrs Lenin and the Nightingale’ is therefore political and personal, an evocation of the historical landscape of the artist’s childhood and a satirical attack on Totalitarianism and the banality of evil. ‘In his recent work’, observes Sir Norman Rosenthal, ‘Baselitz seems to have achieved a lightness of being, a lightness of execution, a sense of spontaneity that overcomes the agony of the hard-won image however serious the motif or subject matter’.

Georg Baselitz emerged as one of the most important painters of the post-War period in Berlin in the early sixties. His work has been exhibited in almost every major museum in the world. Baselitz’s art was first introduced to a British audience in the seminal exhibition ‘A New Spirit in Painting’ at the Royal Academy, London in 1981 which also staged a major Baselitz retrospective in 2007 both of which were curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal.

A fully illustrated catalogue, with a text by Sir Norman Rosenthal, accompanied the exhibition.