Georg Baselitz

Biography

In 1963, two days after the opening of Georg Baselitz’s first solo exhibition at the Werner & Katz gallery in Berlin, the public prosecutor seized two paintings: “The Big Night Down the Drain” (1962–1963) and “The Naked Man” (1962). The stated reason was obscenity. The court case dragged on until October 1965. There are indications that a newspaper had learned of the coming seizure in advance, so the scandal may have been partly staged.

He was twenty-five.

Hans-Georg Bruno Kern was born on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselitz in Upper Lusatia, now part of Kamenz. His father was an elementary school teacher, and the family lived in the school building. In the assembly hall of the school in Kamenz hung a reproduction of Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski’s “Wermsdorf Woods” (around 1859); Baselitz described Rayski’s realism as a formative influence. By the age of fifteen he was already painting portraits, religious subjects, still lifes and landscapes. In 1955 he was turned down by the Dresden academy, and in 1956 he enrolled at the University of Fine and Applied Arts in East Berlin (Weissensee), studying under Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangeler. After two semesters he was expelled for “sociopolitical immaturity”. By one account, he had not gone to the compulsory work placement at an industrial combine and had been painting pictures after Picasso instead. He himself said later that he was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed country, and did not want to introduce new orders: he had seen enough of the old ones.

He continued his studies at the University of the Arts in West Berlin under Hann Trier; the sources differ on when he crossed to the West, 1957 or 1958. There he met Johanna Elke Kretzschmar, whom he married in 1962. In 1961 he took the name Georg Baselitz, after his birthplace. That same year, together with Eugen Schönebeck, he put on an exhibition and issued the first “Pandemonium Manifesto”; the second followed in 1962.

From the end of the 1950s a language of his own took shape: the “Rayski Heads” series and the painting “Head G”. In 1965 he won a six-month scholarship to the Villa Romana in Florence, studied Mannerist graphics and made the “Animal Pieces” cycle. After his return to Berlin, the “Heroes”, or “New Types”, appeared in 1965–1966: in a single year about sixty paintings, a hundred and thirty drawings and thirty-eight prints. Typically it is a solitary, wounded, half-naked figure in a barren landscape, as in “The Great Friends” (Museum Ludwig, Cologne). Critics see in them a rejection of the illusions of the Third Reich and East Germany. He then began to break the motif into horizontal strips and reassemble it, which produced the “Fracture Pictures”, among them “Woodsmen”.

From these he arrived at “The Wood on Its Head”. The model was that same “Wermsdorf Woods” by Rayski from the school hall. By turning the image over, he meant to strip the picture of its conventional content and confront the viewer with the organisation of colour and form on the surface. The first exhibition made up entirely of inverted works took place in 1970 at Franz Dahlem’s gallery in Cologne. I think it matters that he laid out the composition upside down from the start, rather than turning a finished canvas over. From the 1990s he painted on canvases lying on the floor, and traces of paint pots and shoe soles remain in the works.

In 1964 he made his first etchings in Wolfsburg, in 1966 colour woodcuts were added, and from 1977 he began large linocuts. In 1971 the family moved to Forst an der Weinstraße, where the old village school became his studio. In 1972 he took part in documenta 5 in Kassel, and the work drew harsh criticism. In 1975 the family settled at Schloss Derneburg near Hildesheim, and Baselitz worked in New York for the first time and took part in the São Paulo Biennial. From 1977 he taught in Karlsruhe, and in 1978 became a professor there. In 1979–1980 he made his first sculptures, from roughly worked wood painted with oil or tempera; for large pieces he used a chainsaw. At the Venice Biennale in 1980 he showed a sculpture. In 1983 Christian motifs entered his work, and he painted “Dinner in Dresden”. From 1983 to 1988 and from 1992 to 2003 he was a professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin. In 1986 he received the Kaiserring of the city of Goslar.

In 1990 the first large exhibition of Baselitz’s work in East Germany was held at the Alte Nationalgalerie in the Old Museum in Berlin. In 1993 he designed the sets for Harrison Birtwistle’s opera “Punch and Judy” in Amsterdam, and in 1995 a retrospective opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and then travelled to Washington and Los Angeles. Between 1998 and 2005 he made more than sixty “Russian Pictures”: reworkings of Socialist Realist models he had known from his youth in East Germany. They were shown at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg in 2007–2008. Later he designed the sets for Ligeti’s “Le Grand Macabre” in Chemnitz (2013) and for Wagner’s “Parsifal” at the Bavarian State Opera (2018). For the latter, critics polled by the magazine Opernwelt named it “Annoyance of the Year”.

His remarks of 2013, that women do not paint well, are well known and drew criticism. In 2013 he settled in Salzburg, and in 2015 he and his wife received Austrian citizenship.

For his eightieth birthday, in 2018, retrospectives were held in Munich, Basel and Washington. In 2019 an exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice was the first in that museum by a living artist, and in 2021 a major retrospective opened at the Centre Pompidou. He painted his last pictures from a wheeled chair with a brush fixed to a pole, on canvases lying on the floor; they were shown in the exhibition “Back Again” at White Cube in 2026. Georg Baselitz died on 30 April 2026 at the age of 88.