Yet Baselitz is more like a folk artist than a salon or society artist. For over 30 years he has painted in rough confident strokes direct from the can, and sculpted giant wood figures with a chainsaw, all the while slightly varying his passion for mangled and deformed he-man louts with small heads and sentimental poetic hearts. Often they gaze upward, drenched in muck and toil, like Siegfrieds toward Valhalla. Since 1969 he's painted them upside-down, if only to make them -- or him -- different. And it worked, for that's the kind of bravura that gets our eye.

The installation is chronological, tracing a course from the autumn-colored fragmented figures he made in the 60s, through a broadening of brushstrokes in the 1970s, when his palette was faster and had more contrast, through a next decade of big brashy paintings and hacked monochrome linocuts, to his most recent works of the 1990s, which include loose near- abstractions in one or two colors and some with parts of figures under black splotchy footprints that track across the surface. There is also a 1996 series of watery portraits of his family as youths, all bearing comic Alfred E. Newman grimaces.

Time and success have refined Baselitz, for the later works are more mannered. Yet they retain the same chunky anti-hero hugeness of the early works, which for all their funk and bruteness are undeniable, even in these transitional times.

JEFF RIAN is a writer living in Paris.