Georg Baselitz Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life
Georg Baselitz, born Hans-Georg Kern on January 23, 1938, in Deutschbaselitz in Saxony, grew up in a rural village marked by the upheavals of the Second World War and its aftermath. His father taught at the local school, and the family lived in a schoolhouse environment that exposed the young artist to books and images even as the surrounding social order was collapsing. The ruins and dislocations of postwar Germany, as well as the contradictory power of official images and propaganda, left an imprint that would later surface in his fractured, self-questioning view of history and representation.

Education and Name
In 1956 he entered the Hochschule fuer bildende und angewandte Kunst in East Berlin but was expelled after two semesters for what the administration called socio-political immaturity, a rebuke that reflected the rigidity of Socialist Realism rather than a lack of discipline. He moved to West Berlin in 1957 and continued his studies at the Hochschule der Kunste, where the painter Hann Trier was an important mentor. In 1961 he adopted the name Baselitz, taken from his birthplace, signaling a self-fashioned identity distinct from East or West and from the strictures of academic convention. Around this time he forged a close alliance with the painter Eugen Schoenebeck; together they issued the provocative Pandemonium manifestos (1961, 1962), texts that embraced excess, rupture, and the grotesque as antidotes to conformity and moral complacency.

Breakthrough and Controversy
His first solo exhibition in 1963 at Galerie Werner & Katz in Berlin, led by Michael Werner and Benjamin Katz, became a scandal. Police confiscated several canvases, including The Big Night Down the Drain, citing obscenity. The incident announced Baselitz as a defiant figure intent on testing the limits of representation. In the mid-1960s he painted the Helden (Heroes) pictures, monumental figures in tattered uniforms wandering through blasted landscapes. Neither heroic nor defeated, these protagonists embodied the ambiguity of a generation raised among ruins. Michael Werner continued to champion the work, placing it with collectors and museums even as controversy persisted.

Inversion and Formal Strategies
In 1969 Baselitz began painting motifs upside down, a device that became his signature approach. By inverting the subject, he denied the viewer an easy, narrative read and forced attention onto color, rhythm, and the material facts of paint. Trees, eagles, portraits, and later images of his wife, Elke, appeared inverted, their legibility destabilized to expose the mechanics of looking. This strategy grew from a conviction that painting should be rebuilt from its own means rather than from received stories or ideologies. Related to inversion were his Fracture paintings, in which the image is split or dislocated, and an ongoing engagement with expressive drawing and printmaking, especially woodcut, where stark contrasts and rough carving intensified the tension between figure and ground.

Sculpture, Exhibitions, and Public Debates
From the late 1970s he developed a parallel sculptural practice, carving blocky, polychrome figures from wood with axes and chainsaws. In 1980 his roughly hewn Model for a Sculpture, with its upraised arm, was shown at the Venice Biennale and ignited heated debate about memory, symbolism, and Germanys recent past. The ambiguity of gesture in that work encapsulated his refusal to offer reassuring narratives. Baselitz participated in multiple editions of Documenta in Kassel, and his inclusion under the curatorial leadership of figures like Harald Szeemann placed him within the central debates of postwar art. He also became a prolific printmaker, translating the directness of his painting into woodcuts, etchings, and lithographs whose raw edges and repeated motifs extended his pictorial vocabulary.

Studios, Teaching, and Networks
In the mid-1970s he established a long-term base at Derneburg Castle near Hildesheim, converting the sprawling former monastery into studios that allowed him to work at ambitious scale. Teaching positions followed, including a professorship at the Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin, where his example influenced younger artists to treat history, identity, and material with unvarnished directness. Though independent from any single movement, he was a crucial touchstone for painters loosely associated with the revival of expressive figuration in Germany, a generation that included Anselm Kiefer, Jorg Immendorff, Markus Luepertz, and A. R. Penck. Dealers such as Michael Werner and, later, Thaddaeus Ropac anchored his international presence, while the photographer Benjamin Katz documented him and his circle in studio and exhibition settings.

Later Work and Reconsideration
From the 1990s onward, Baselitz returned to earlier themes in a body of paintings sometimes referred to as Remix, restaging motifs from the Heroes, eagles, and upside-down portraits with a freer, more summary handling. The figure of Elke Baselitz (born Kretzschmar), whom he married in 1962, appears repeatedly as a constant partner and muse, her likeness a ground for ongoing formal experiments in color and reversal. Late self-portraits and nudes confront age and vulnerability without sentimentality. Throughout, he maintained a steady output of carved sculptures and bronzes, as well as extensive print portfolios. Major museums in Europe and the United States organized retrospectives that tracked his persistent interrogation of images, history, and the act of painting. Among various honors, international awards such as the Kaiserring of Goslar and the Praemium Imperiale recognized his impact on contemporary art.

Artistic Outlook and Legacy
Baselitz has consistently argued that painting must be rebuilt against the grain of expectation. Inversion, fracture, and a deliberately rough handling became not stylistic tics but methods for stripping representation to its essentials. His work does not reconcile the past; it keeps the past unsettled, insisting that memory be worked through materially rather than narrated decoratively. As a teacher and public figure, he encouraged directness and independence, and as a studio artist he sustained a dialogue with German and international traditions from Mannerism to Expressionism. Supported by figures including Hann Trier, Eugen Schoenebeck, Michael Werner, Benjamin Katz, and curators such as Harald Szeemann, and grounded by his partnership with Elke, Baselitz fashioned one of the most distinctive and consequential bodies of work in postwar European art.

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