Georg Baselitz, the German artist whose expressive paintings and sculptures stirred controversy before winning him global acclaim, has died at the age of 88. The Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, which had a longstanding professional relationship with the artist, confirmed his death on Thursday, stating that Baselitz had "defined German visual art for a generation" and had died peacefully.
Born Hans-Georg Kern, Baselitz was among Germany's most prominent contemporary visual artists, with a body of work spanning over six decades and encompassing a range of techniques. Like his peers Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, Baselitz's works grappled with the traumas of German history and questions of collective guilt. In 2013, he told Der Spiegel: "All German painters have neuroses when it comes to Germany's past, be it war, especially the aftermath of war, or the GDR. All that weighed on me in the form of a strong bout of depression, and with strong force. If you want, my paintings are battles."
The Upside-Down Technique
In 1969, Baselitz began painting canvases upside down and inverting motifs, a technique he said sought to find a way between abstraction and straightforward figurative art. This method yielded a series of paintings of eagles—the emblem of both the Third Reich and the postwar Federal German Republic. Finger-painted with blotchy paint, the birds of prey were depicted mid-air, the painting's inversion making it seem as if they were tumbling down to earth. One of these eagle paintings drew the attention of Gerhard Schröder, then leader of the Social Democratic party and Germany's chancellor from 1998 to 2005. Schröder hung the upside-down eagle prominently behind his desk in the chancellery, ensuring the motif was featured in his portraits.
Controversial Sculpture at Venice Biennale
Baselitz not only painted but also worked in graphic arts and was a noted sculptor. A wooden sculpture he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1980 caused a stir: made from linden wood attacked by the artist with an axe and a chainsaw, it depicted a seated figure performing what appeared to be a Nazi salute. Baselitz later said he had never intended to evoke the Third Reich with the sculpture, explaining that it was meant to show a gesture of deference, inspired by an artefact of the Lobi people, a tribe from Burkina Faso.
Early Life and Rise to Fame
Baselitz spent his early childhood in Nazi Germany and grew up in socialist East Germany. He initially studied art in East Berlin but moved to West Berlin in 1957. He adopted the name Baselitz in 1961 as a nod to Deutschbaselitz, the town near Dresden in eastern Germany where he was born in 1938. He rose to national attention in 1963 when authorities confiscated two paintings laden with sexual symbolism from the art gallery where they were on display, leading to a high-profile court battle. "I am an avant-gardist," he told Der Spiegel. "What I do is quite aggressive and quite evil."
Baselitz achieved his international breakthrough in the early 1980s and in recent decades was among the most sought-after—and highest-priced—living German painters, his pictures outpriced only by Richter. Strong-headed and full of trenchant opinions on the state of the art market, Baselitz was dismissive of seemingly more technically talented peers, saying artists were better off if they were not obviously gifted. An admirer of Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism, he was critical of the realist tradition practised by East German artists who continued to work in the GDR, calling them "assholes" when the Iron Curtain came down. In 1977, during the sixth edition of documenta, the Kassel art festival, he took down his works in protest against the presence of painters from East Germany.
Controversial Statements on Female Artists
Baselitz often appeared to patronise female artists, telling Der Spiegel in 2013 that "women don't paint very well." He doubled down on the message in a 2022 interview with the Guardian, stating: "The market doesn't lie. Even though the painting classes in art academies are more than 90% made up by women, it's a fact that very few of them succeed." He later withdrew some of his statements about art made by women and expressed his admiration for Tracey Emin and Artemisia Gentileschi.
Baselitz's death marks the end of an era for German contemporary art, leaving behind a legacy of provocative and influential works that continue to challenge and inspire.
