Georg Baselitz, Topsy-turvy … Orangenesser (IX), 1981. Photograph: © Georg Baselitz 2022; photo: Friedrich Rosenstiel, Köln.
Georg Baselitz, the German painter and sculptor whose inverted figures and raw, often unsettling imagery made him one of the most influential artists of the postwar era, died on April 30 at age 88. His death was announced by the gallery representing him, which said he died peacefully.
Born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern on Jan. 23, 1938, in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, he came of age amid the wreckage of Nazi Germany and the ideological constraints of East Germany. The devastation of war, national guilt, and cultural rupture would become lifelong subjects in his work. In 1961, he adopted the surname Baselitz after his hometown, signaling both reinvention and defiance.
Baselitz’s early artistic path was marked by rebellion. He was expelled from the Academy of Fine and Applied Art in East Berlin after just two semesters for what authorities described as “sociopolitical immaturity.” The expulsion proved formative. He relocated to West Berlin, where he studied at the Hochschule der Künste and began forging an abrasive visual language at odds with both Socialist Realism and Western abstraction.
His breakthrough came in the 1960s with paintings that shocked audiences and censors alike. Works such as Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain), depicting a grotesque adolescent figure, were seized by prosecutors on obscenity charges. Baselitz embraced scandal as part of his artistic vocabulary, insisting that painting should disturb rather than console.
In 1969, he made the move that would define his career: he began painting his subjects upside down. The inversion, first seen in works like Der Wald auf dem Kopf (“The Forest on Its Head”), was not intended as a gimmick but as a conceptual strategy. By reversing figures, landscapes, and portraits, Baselitz sought to shift attention away from narrative and toward form, surface, and painterly process.
The upside-down paintings became his signature and secured his place in international art. Alongside contemporaries such as Anselm Kiefer and Jörg Immendorff, Baselitz helped revive figurative painting in Germany during the rise of Neo-Expressionism. His canvases, often monumental in scale, combined thick impasto, fractured anatomy, and an aggressive palette.
Baselitz was equally active as a sculptor and printmaker. His rough-hewn wooden sculptures, carved with chainsaws and chisels, extended the same themes of physicality and psychic fragmentation that marked his paintings.
Though celebrated, he remained a polarizing figure. His public remarks—particularly dismissive comments about women artists—drew criticism and sometimes overshadowed his artistic achievements. Yet even detractors acknowledged his singular influence on European painting.
Over a career spanning more than six decades, Baselitz exhibited at institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and Centre Pompidou. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale and became one of the country’s most internationally recognized living artists.
In later years, despite declining mobility, he continued to work with undiminished force, producing new paintings and sculptures well into his 80s.
Baselitz is survived by his wife, Elke, whom he married in 1962, and their two sons.
He once said, “Every picture contains an enemy.” For more than half a century, Georg Baselitz treated painting as a battleground—and changed its orientation forever.
