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(c) Georg Baselitz

During the winter of 1986, Baselitz worked on the theme of the pastorale. He created a lot of drawings, and two oil paintings representing a naked woman and a man's head. Fragmented figures of things and animals are blended over them like signs, as they have been studied in hand drawings. In 1987, the Sammlung Ludwig in Cologne bought the two big canvases Pastorale (bei Tag) and Pastorale (bei Nacht). With these marks, Baselitz revolves round the pastoral and the bucolic themes. They remind of Arcadian landscapes, of the rural idyll with amorous shepherd's scenes. The pastorale is well-known since the antiquity, and was at its prime with the French landscapes of the 18^th century (Watteau, Fragonard etc.).

Baselitz succeeds in adapting this motif to his art. Hirtenkopf (shepherd's head), dated March 16^th 1986, varies a passage of the pastorales in Cologne, above all Pastorale (bei Tag), the young man's blonde head standing out to the left against the grey background. Two complementary signs are arranged over his eyes and neck respectively: a green fir tree and a house with red bricks, and burning fires and water. For Baselitz, those are the characteristics of the pastorale: the tree as the epitome of nature, and the house as its contrary; elements fighting each other, fire and water, round off this idea.