P. D.

Exhibition label: The letters P. D. stand for Pandemonium, coined by English poet John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667) as the name of the capital of Hell. This drawing relates to the "Pandemonic Manifestos" that Baselitz wrote in 1961 and 1962 with his friend Eugen Schönebeck to accompany their first exhibition. Referencing sex, death, and religion, the text expresses postwar German disorder and confusion in a forceful language influenced by the writings of Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Comte de Lautréamont. Baselitz later described the manifesto as "nothing but fury with rather half-baked ideas." Mirroring its gruesome and violent descriptions, his drawings of this period show deformed figures and organic masses of twisted, shapeless bodies.