Painter Georg Baselitz dies, a titan of contemporary art

BarcelonaThe German painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz, known for his images of raw bodies and inverted landscapes, died this Thursday at the age of 88, according to reports from Reuters and his gallery, the French Thaddaeus Ropac. In recent years, Baselitz painted large canvases from his wheelchair and transported brushes and paints in a wheeled cart. “The most sensible thing, in my situation, would be to say: ‘I’ll stick to small formats’,” he declared to El País at 87, on the occasion of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao. “But, of course, I don’t do what is sensible. What is right for me is what is senseless.”

Georg Baselitz liked to insist, sometimes as a provocation, sometimes as a shield, that he didn't know how to paint. That he “had no talent.” Rejected at 17 by the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, he managed to enter an academy in East Berlin, from which he was expelled two semesters later for “sociopolitical immaturity.” “I was stupid. I had no education, but I was a rebel,” he recalled. From this rebellion, Baselitz forged a career that would turn that son of Nazi Germany, educated under Soviet communism, into one of the defining artists of postwar Germany. Baselitz was married to Johanna Elke Kretzschmar, known as Elke, with whom he had two children.

Marked by Nazi discipline

Hans-Georg Bruno Kern, better known as Georg Baselitz, was born on January 23, 1938, in the Saxon town of Deutschbaselitz. His father, a schoolteacher and member of the Nazi Party, registered Hans-Georg's birth in his diary. Inexplicably, he did not register the birth of any of his other four children, as reported by the newspaper Sächsische Zeitung in 2018. After the war, his father was disqualified from teaching. Baselitz's mother took over his duties at the school.

Baselitz spent his childhood under the relentless discipline of Nazi Germany, and his adolescence amidst the ruins and ideological re-education of the Soviet occupation zone. "I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed town, a destroyed society —he would later recall—. And I didn't want to re-establish any order: I had seen enough of this supposed order. I was forced to question everything, to be naive, to start over."

After being expelled from the East Berlin academy, he moved to West Berlin, where he completed his studies and assimilated modernism in a way that, according to him, was like a sudden intake of oxygen. He recalled the impact of seeing works by Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists for the first time —proof, he said, that the United States had a serious culture despite what he had been taught. But instead of imitating an American style, Baselitz returned to German sources, drawing on expressionism, folk traditions, and iconography often considered by critics as ugly or even "degenerate."

A scandalous painter

In a solo exhibition in Berlin in 1963, authorities confiscated two of his paintings —The Great Night Has Been Ruined and The Naked Man— for obscenity. In both works, rudimentary, “elections emerge from abject bodies,” as described by The Art Newspaper. This episode made him famous, and the early paintings, marked by raw bodies, frustrated masculinity, and abrasive humor, were widely interpreted as a provocation. His defenders and various museum curators have also read them as a direct portrait of post-war German life: damaged, compromised, and struggling to find new balance. This sensibility was prolonged in the Heroes series of the mid-1960s, with enormous, damaged figures that seemed more like survivors than victors, stumbling out of a defeated national myth.

But Baselitz's most recognizable works would arrive in 1969, when he began painting motifs upside down. After previous experiments in which he fragmented or partially inverted figures, he produced completely inverted works such as Cork Head and The Man by the Tree. Baselitz did not limit himself to turning finished images upside down: he conceived and painted them inverted from the start. This approach altered how viewers read his works. By breaking recognition, it forced attention to the mechanisms of painting — color, balance, and composition. “An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object,” Baselitz said.

These inversions made him an international figure in the 1970s and 80s, as the market and institutions that had previously considered him scandalous positioned him as a pillar of post-war European art. Nevertheless, his public reputation did not stabilize into quiet respectability. He repeatedly provoked controversy with statements about women painters, including a widely circulated assertion that women “don't paint very well.”

He also confronted the limits that German history imposes on gestures and images: a wooden sculpture presented at the 1980 Venice Art Biennale was widely interpreted as an evocation of the Nazi salute, a reading that Baselitz denied.