Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Discover the compelling life story, artistic journey, and memorable quotes of Georg Baselitz, the German neo-expressionist who transformed the language of postwar painting by turning his images upside down.

Introduction

Georg Baselitz stands among the most provocative and influential German artists of the postwar era. Born in 1938 in Saxony, he became known not only for his bold, expressive style, but for a signature gesture: inverting his painted subjects to break from traditional representation and emphasize the medium itself. Over six decades, he has challenged conventions, confronted Germany’s fractured history, and left a deep mark on contemporary art. Today, his work continues to generate discourse—about memory, identity, technique, and the role of the artist.

Early Life and Family

Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a village in Upper Lusatia, Saxony (then in Germany).

The war’s ravages and its aftermath left deep psychological and visual impressions on Baselitz. He later remarked that he was born into a “destroyed order” — destroyed landscapes, society, and cultural norms — which drove him to question assumptions and conventions from early on.

Youth and Education

From an early age, Baselitz showed artistic inclinations: by his mid-teens he was painting portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and religious subjects, experimenting in styles that occasionally hinted at futurism.

In 1956, he enrolled at the Hochschule für Bildende und Angewandte Kunst in East Berlin (Berlin-Weißensee), where he studied under Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangler, and formed friendships with future artists like Peter Graf and Ralf Winkler (later known as A. R. Penck).

In 1957, Baselitz moved to West Berlin and continued his studies at the Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts, formerly West Berlin).

In 1962, he formally changed his professional name to Georg Baselitz, adopting the name from his birthplace, Deutschbaselitz.

Career and Achievements

Early Work & Controversy

In the early 1960s, Baselitz began developing a distinctive expressive figurative style. In 1963, his solo exhibition in West Berlin attracted scandal: two works, Die große Nacht im Eimer (“The Big Night Down the Drain”) and Der Nackte Mann (“The Naked Man”), were confiscated by prosecutors for alleged obscenity.

During this period he also began printmaking—etchings and graphic works—which he viewed as having symbolic power distinct from painting.

He produced the Heroes (Helden) series in 1965–66, in which fragmented, isolated figures stand in barren settings. These became metaphors for alienation, broken identity, and the postwar psychological state.

Upside-Down (Inverted) Painting

One of the most radical moves in Baselitz's career came in 1969, when he deliberately began painting his figures and landscapes upside down. The first such work was Der Wald auf dem Kopf (“The Forest on Its Head”).

This inversion served to disrupt normal visual expectations and end the “tyranny of meaning”—the tendency to read a painting as a clear, fixed narrative.

Later Evolution & Remixing

In subsequent decades, Baselitz’s style evolved. While continuing to invert images, he experimented with layers, varied surfaces, gestural marks, and sometimes more lucid, graphic forms. Remix—reworking earlier images into new forms, reinterpreting and repeating motifs from his own visual history.

Baselitz has also produced sculptures and three-dimensional work. His graphic works, woodcuts, prints, and sculptures have expanded his reach across media.

Recognition & Awards

Over decades, Baselitz has received numerous honors:

• Villa Romana Prize (1965)

• Goslarer Kaiserring (1986)

• Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (various ranks) in France

• Praemium Imperiale (Japan)

• Honorary memberships and professorships in institutions across Europe

He has also been the subject of major retrospectives in museums worldwide, including exhibitions at the Fondation Beyeler, Hirshhorn Museum, Royal Academy (London), and many others.

Historical Milestones & Context

Baselitz’s career unfolded against the backdrop of a divided postwar Germany. Born just before World War II, his childhood was shaped by physical and moral destruction. He matured during the era of East vs. West Germany, the Cold War, reconstruction, and the struggle of German artists to reconcile national guilt and identity.

His choice to invert imagery in 1969 can also be seen as a symbolic rebellion against the burden of representation and historical narrative. It responded to the urgent need, in German postwar art, to break from the past while acknowledging its shards.

In the 1980s and beyond, Baselitz’s reputation grew internationally, particularly as neo-expressionism rose in prominence. He, along with contemporaries, shifted German art from abstraction-dominated discourses toward a re-centering of figure, emotion, and memory.

As Germany reunified and Europe confronted the legacies of war and ideology, Baselitz’s work continued to provoke: challenging notions of heroism, nationalism, and the resilience of trauma.

Legacy and Influence

Georg Baselitz’s influence on contemporary art is both formal and conceptual. His inversion strategy opened the path for subsequent artists to question the relationship between subject and medium. He reframed the figure and narrative in painting as unstable, provisional, and charged with tension.

His legacy also lies in how postwar German art confronts memory, guilt, and identity. He remains a touchstone for debates about German history in art, the moral responsibility of the artist, and the balance between provocation and reflection.

Many younger painters and sculptors cite Baselitz as a precursor to re-engaging figuration, expressive gesture, and personal content. His experiments in remixing and reworking earlier works also influence artists who revisit archival or self-referential practices.

In institutional terms, numerous museums hold his work; he is frequently featured in retrospectives and is a staple in dialogues about twentieth- and twenty-first-century European art.

Personality and Talents

Baselitz is often described as uncompromising, provocative, and outspoken. He has made controversial statements about gender and art, provoking strong reactions. His personality is deeply tied to his artistic stance: he resists being comfortable or complacent. In interviews he has spoken about living with uncertainty, about art as struggle, and about the artist’s isolation.

Technically, Baselitz is a master of painterly gesture, textural layering, and controlled chaos. He combines expressive brushwork with structural coherence. Even in his most anguished or violent works, there is an underlying rigor to his composition and palette.

He is also a strategic thinker: the inversion of imagery, the remixing of past works, and his provocations—all show a mind engaged with the politics of seeing and the power of interruption.

Famous Quotes of Georg Baselitz

To glimpse his philosophical orientation, here are some of his notable quotes:

• “The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial… his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.”

• “I don’t like things that can be reproduced. Wood isn’t important in itself but rather in the fact that objects made in it are unique, simple, unpretentious.”

• “I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting’s finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns… your thought process goes on.”

• “An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object.”

• “I always feel attacked when I’m asked about my painting.”

• “I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father’s generation.”

• “I paint German artists whom I admire … but oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair.”

These lines reflect his tension between assertion and ambivalence, between control and disruption.

Lessons from Georg Baselitz

1. Embrace uncertainty. Baselitz’s process often begins in not knowing. The image “takes over” as he works.

2. Disrupt expectations. His upside-down strategy is a radical refusal of conventional seeing, encouraging deeper engagement with form.

3. Rework and revisit. Instead of always striving for novelty, Baselitz returns to his own past imagery (Remix)—transforming memory into new creation.

4. Confront history honestly. In Germany’s fraught cultural landscape, his art asks not for erasure but for confrontation.

5. Maintain integrity and voice. Despite controversies, Baselitz remained true to his internal logic and resisted prevailing fashions.

Conclusion

Georg Baselitz transformed the terrain of postwar art in Germany and beyond. Through inversion, destruction, reworking, and provocative speech, he pushed painting into territories of rupture and introspection. His life story—born amid war, educated amid ideological divides, always questioning—mirrors the complexity and challenge of his art. His images do not comfort or narrate easily; rather, they demand reckoning, re-viewing, and rethinking.

Explore more of his provocative, upside-down canvases, and let his words continue prompting reflection: about art, identity, uncertainty, and the balance between form and meaning.