Creativity Quote by Georg Baselitz

Baselitz’s line is a cold shower aimed at one of modern art’s most flattering myths: that the painter is secretly a social engineer with better lighting. By invoking “the expressionists,” he’s not just name-checking a style; he’s poking at the moral ambition that clung to early 20th-century art, when distortion and intensity were often sold as a route to spiritual or political renewal. His refusal isn’t modesty. It’s a boundary-drawing exercise, a way of keeping art from being drafted into uplift.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Renewing the world” is grand, vaguely messianic language; “through the vehicle of art” sounds like an institutional brochure. Baselitz treats both with a faint sneer, as if that whole program has become a cliché that flatters artists and reassures audiences that beauty is also virtue. The subtext: you want redemption, go elsewhere. Art is not a public policy tool, and artists who claim it is may be selling you a narrative rather than making you a picture.

Context matters. Baselitz comes of age in postwar Germany, where art carries the uncomfortable expectation of moral repair after catastrophe, and where avant-garde gestures are easily pressured into becoming proofs of enlightenment. His work, with its inverted figures and bruised, confrontational surfaces, doesn’t read like withdrawal so much as resistance: not apathy, but distrust of tidy “progress” stories. He’s defending art’s right to be difficult, even compromised, without pretending it can launder history.