Georg Baselitz, the German painter who turned postwar art upside down, dies at 88
The Life and Legacy of Georg Baselitz
By Maria Martinez
April 30 (Reuters) - Georg Baselitz liked to insist — sometimes as a taunt, sometimes as a shield — that he did not know how to paint. That he had "no talent".
Rejected at 17 by the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, he talked his way into an academy in East Berlin only to be expelled two semesters later for "sociopolitical immaturity".
"I was stupid," he recalled. "I was uneducated, but I was a rebel."
From that rebellion, Baselitz forged a career that made the child of Nazi Germany, schooled under Soviet communism, into one of the defining artists of postwar Germany.
The painter and sculptor, known for his depictions of raw bodies and inverted landscapes, has died at the age of 88, Germany's Die Welt newspaper reported on Thursday. No cause of death was given.
A Rebel Shaped by Two Dictatorships
Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern on January 23, 1938, in the Saxon village of Deutschbaselitz, a name he later adopted.
His father, a village schoolteacher and Nazi Party member, recorded Hans-Georg's birth in his diary. Inexplicably, he recorded the birth of none of his other four children, the Sächsische Zeitung daily reported in 2018.
After the war, his father was barred from teaching. Baselitz's mother took over his duties at the school.
Baselitz spent his childhood amid the unforgiving discipline of Nazi Germany, and his adolescence amid the rubble and ideological re-education of the country's Soviet occupation zone.
"I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society," he later recalled. "And I didn't want to reestablish an order: I had seen enough of so-called order. I was forced to question everything, to be 'naive', to start again."
Early Education and Artistic Awakening
After he was expelled from the East Berlin academy, he moved to West Berlin, where he finished his studies and absorbed modernism in a way that felt, he said, like a sudden intake of oxygen.
He recalled the shock of first seeing works by Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists — evidence, in his telling, that the United States had a serious culture despite what he had been taught.
But rather than imitate an American style, Baselitz turned back to German sources, drawing on expressionism, folk traditions and imagery often dismissed by critics as ugly or even "degenerate".
Scandal as a Calling Card
Controversial Works and Public Reaction
At a 1963 solo show in Berlin, authorities seized two of his paintings — "The Big Night Down the Drain" and "The Naked Man" — on obscenity grounds. In both crudely made works, "erections emerge from abject bodies", as The Art Newspaper put it.
The episode made Baselitz famous.
The early pictures, marked by raw bodies, stunted masculinity and abrasive humour, were widely seen as provocation.
Supporters and museum curators have also framed them as a blunt report on postwar German life: damaged, compromised and struggling to find a new footing.
The "Heroes" Series and Artistic Evolution
That sensibility carried into his mid-1960s "Heroes" paintings, which presented hulking, battered figures that looked less like victors than survivors stumbling out of a defeated national myth.
Inverted Motifs and International Recognition
But Baselitz's most recognisable works came in 1969, when he began painting motifs upside down.
After earlier experiments that fractured or partially inverted figures, he produced fully inverted works including "The Wood on Its Head" and "The Man by the Tree".
He did not simply flip finished images, he composed and painted them inverted from the start.
That approach altered how viewers read his works. By disrupting recognition, it forced attention onto the mechanics of painting — its colour, balance and composition.
"An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object," Baselitz said.
The inversions made Baselitz an international figure in the 1970s and 1980s, as the market and institutions that once treated him as scandalous increasingly positioned him as a pillar of European postwar art.
Later Years and Personal Life
His public reputation, however, did not settle into quiet respectability.
He repeatedly sparked backlash with remarks about female painters, including a widely reported claim that women "don't paint very well".
He also confronted the limits Germany's history places on gesture and imagery: a wooden sculpture shown at the 1980 Venice Biennale was widely read as evoking a Nazi salute, a reading he denied.
He was married to Johanna Elke Kretzschmar, known as Elke, with whom he had two sons.
In later life, Baselitz painted huge canvases from his wheelchair and moved his brushes and paints in a rolling cart.
"The sensible thing, in my situation, would naturally be to say: 'I stick to small formats'," he told Spanish newspaper El Pais at age 87. "But of course I don't do what's sensible. What's right for me is the nonsensical."
(Editing by Olivier Holmey)
