Art's raging bull loses his punch

No movement in art has expressed the angst of history better than the German Neo-Expressionists, the post-war movement that specialised in visceral, impassioned oil painting.

And no Neo-Expressionist expressed more angst in his work than Georg Baselitz, who became famous for painting the icons of German history - eagles, soldiers and forests - upside-down.

As this exhibition - a first retrospective for the artist in this country - quickly reveals, the inverted canvas was just one of the ways Baselitz painted pain.

A serious student of Goya, Antonin Artaud and of outsider art, Baselitz's first important series of works from the early Sixties depicted vulnerable human figures, or parts thereof, set against a dark background in a thickly-applied, oily palette of red and brown.

Titles like Sex with Dumplings suggest the sensations of psychological perversion and torment with which these paintings overwhelm the viewer.

Over the following two decades, Baselitz continued to develop, making paintings, woodcuts and sculptures. There were stark biblical images of soldiers and shepherds; then came fragmented pictures of men with dogs and roughly hewn, crudely painted wooden sculptures of human figures, which looked like the totems of a lost tribe. The climax of this development is revealed in one central room of the exhibition in which one sees Baselitz's compositions rotate through 180 degrees until they are upside down.

His inverted eagle, the symbol of the German state, painted not with a brush but with the artist's fingers, a mass of anguished gooey grey and brown swabs of paint against a heavenly blue sky, is one of the iconic images of our time.

If it wasn't for the second half of the exhibition one could align Baselitz with De Kooning, Francis Bacon and Philip Guston as one of the top five painters of the post-war period, but after the late Eighties his work nosedives.

Suddenly his palette becomes brightly decorative and he starts rehashing the old paintings that made him famous.

By the last room, Baselitz has become modern art's Jake La Motta, the boxer in Raging Bull, a giant who has run out of ideas. The nadir is a reversioning of one of his raw wooden monoliths of human suffering into a hulk in purple pyjamas with Day-Glo paint on top.

It's incomprehensible how one of the great painters of German history failed to find new inspiration in the world of post-unification Germany.

Until 9 December. Information: 020 7300 8000, www.royalacademy.org.uk

Georg Baselitz
Royal Academy Of Arts
Burlington House, Piccadilly, W1J 0BD