Georg Baselitz’s series of over-life-size carved wood heads, called Women of Dres den, made an impressive ensemble at the Pace Gallery on Fifty-seventh Street in Oc tober and November. These rough-hewn portraits, which range from three to five feet high and are mounted on tall bases, look like fragmentary remains of the monumental stat uary of some ancient civilization. (They’re the size of colossal heads from the Roman Im perial period.) The uniform cadmium yellow with which Baselitz has painted the wood was the least likable element in the show; but once I had gotten beyond that lurid tint, I was stirred by Baselitz’s taste for bold, no-nonsense forms. If the crudely worked wood brings to mind the German Expressionists of the Teens and Twenties, Baselitz’s cautious Cubism, and his sense of female chic, bring to mind the Picasso of the Fifties. Though Baselitz has conceived the heads as free-stand ing works and given them long, trunklike necks, the faces are rendered in terms of bas-relief. (Picasso’s Woman in a Long Dress, 1943-44, and Man with Sheep, 1944, could have been inspirations.) The planes of the face—the tilt of a cheekbone, the curve of a chin—are often described by a series of cross-hatched cuts. Frequently, Baselitz uses re verse relief, carving a concavity in the wood to suggest the volume of a nose. He gets a movement going with his hatched incisions; he uses the carving tool pictorially, to create a sense of light and color.