Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern; 23 January 1938 – 30 April 2026) was a German-Austrian painter, sculptor and graphic artist. In the 1960s he became well known for his figurative, expressive paintings. In 1969 he began painting his subjects upside down in an effort to overcome the representational, content-driven character of his earlier work and stress the artifice of painting, which would become a defining feature of his later work. Drawing from myriad influences, including Socialist Realism, Mannerism, and African sculpture, he developed his own, distinct artistic language. Baselitz was born in Deutschbaselitz, Upper Lusatia, Germany. He grew up in the desolation and ruin of post-World War II East Germany, circumstances which informed his future work. After being rejected by East German artistic authorities for his experimental style, Baselitz moved to West Berlin in the early 1960s, where his paintings caused public scandal for their obscenity. This initial controversy jump-started his career in the west, which expanded from painting to printmaking, sculpture, and scenic design. Baselitz's oeuvre is defined by his rejection of order and challenging of conventional forms of perception. His work was well-received by critics and performed well at auction, but he gained a reputation for his outspokenness, particularly with regard to women artists.
Background Hans-Georg Bruno Kern was born on 23 January 1938, in Deutschbaselitz (now a part of Kamenz, Saxony), in what was later East Germany. His father was an elementary school teacher, and the family lived in the local school building.Baselitz attended the local school in Kamenz. In its assembly hall hung a reproduction of the painting Wermsdorfer Wald (1859) by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski, an artist whose grasp of realism was a formative influence on Baselitz. Baselitz also became interested in the writings of Jakob Böhme. By the age of 15, he had already painted portraits, religious subjects, still lifes, and landscapes, some in a futuristic style. In 1955, he applied to study at the Kunstakademie in Dresden but was rejected. In 1956, he successfully enrolled at the Hochschule für Bildende und Angewandte Kunst in East Berlin. There he studied under professors Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangeler and befriended Peter Graf and Ralf Winkler (later known as A. R. Penck). After two semesters, however, he was expelled for "sociopolitical immaturity" because he did not comply with the socialist ideas of the GDR. In 1957, he resumed his studies at the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin, where he settled down and met his future wife, Johanna Elke Kretzschmar. In 1961, he adopted the name of Georg Baselitz, after his birthplace. Also in 1961, he attended Hann Trier's master class and completed his studies the following year. Trier's classes were described as a creative environment largely dominated by the gestural abstraction of Tachism and Art Informel. At the Hochschule der Künste, Baselitz immersed himself in the theories of Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Wassily Kandinsky, and Kasimir Malevich. During this time he became friends with Eugen Schönebeck and Benjamin Katz. Art historian Andreas Franzke describes Baselitz's primary artistic influences at this time as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston. In 1961, he adopted the name Georg Baselitz as a tribute to his home town. From 2013, he and his wife lived together in Salzburg, Austria, and both also obtained Austrian citizenship in 2015. He married Kretzschmar in 1962 and was the father of two sons, Daniel Blau and Anton Kern, both gallerists. Baselitz died on 30 April 2026, at the age of 88.
Work
1957–1969
At the turn of 1959 to 1960, Baselitz began to produce his first original works in a distinct style of his own, among them the Rayski-Head (Rayski-Kopf) series and the painting G. Head (G. Kopf). In 1963, Baselitz's first solo exhibition in West Berlin, at Galerie Werner & Katz, caused a public scandal. Two of the pictures, The Big Night Down The Drain (Die große Nacht im Eimer) (1962/63) and The Naked Man (Der Nackte Mann) (1962), were seized two days after the opening of the show by the public prosecutor on the ground of their lewd and obscene content, after a friend of the gallerist Michael Werner had likely already reported the seizure via the German News Agency in the local newspaper B.Z. – a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentional scandal. The ensuing court case did not end until October 1965. Baselitz spent the spring of 1964 at Schloss Wolfsburg and produced his first etchings in the printing shop there, which were exhibited later that year. Printmaking, a medium which he describes as having "symbolic power which has nothing to do with a painting", has since become an intrinsic part of his artistic repertoire. The next year, he won a six-month scholarship to study at the Villa Romana in Florence. While there, he studied mannerist graphics and produced the Animal Piece (Tierstück) pictures. In general, Baselitz's greatest inspiration stemmed from writers and artists such as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Edvard Munch, Jean Dubuffet, and Willem de Kooning, as well as from the expressionist artist association Die Brücke.
Series of Heroes and Fractures After returning from Florence to West Berlin, Baselitz created the series of Heroes (Helden, also known as Neue Typen), between 1965 and 1966, which includes, among others, the large-format composition The Great Friends (Die großen Freunde, Museum Ludwig, Cologne). These figures represent a metaphorical image of a man who, having neither nationality nor an affiliation to a place, throws the illusory and megalomaniacal ideals of the Third Reich and East Germany overboard with his desolate, broken, ragged appearance (for example, Rebel, held by the Tate Modern). Baselitz's Helden typically appear alone in a barren landscape with naked arms and legs, and hands opened in a summoning gesture. At times they bear attributes associated with the biography of the artist, who referred to his own childhood in the countryside and identified himself with all of them. Through early 1969, he produced further large-format pictures, such as Woodsmen (Waldarbeiter) as part of a group of pictures known as Fracture Pictures (Frakturbilder).
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