- Original name:
- Hans-Georg Kern
- Born:
- January 23, 1938, Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Germany
- Died:
- April 30, 2026 (aged 88)
- Awards And Honors:
- Praemium Imperiale (2004)
- Movement / Style:
- Neo-Expressionism
Georg Baselitz
-
Who is Georg Baselitz?
Georg Baselitz, born on January 23, 1938, is a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor and a pioneering Neo-Expressionist.
In the late 1970s, Baselitz, along with other German painters, rejected abstraction in favor of highly expressive paintings with recognizable subjects. His trademark is painting and displaying works upside down to emphasize the surface and highlight what he viewed as his country’s madness during World War II atrocities.
Interested in German Expressionism, Baselitz employed a crude rendering style and heightened palette to convey raw emotion, often using shocking imagery to provoke viewers. In 1969, he began painting subjects upside down. His art found market success in the 1980s, with his first American retrospective in 1995 at the Guggenheim Museum.
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What kind of art is Georg Baselitz known for creating?
Georg Baselitz is a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor known as a pioneering Neo-Expressionist. He rejected abstraction in favor of highly expressive paintings with recognizable subject matter. His trademark is painting and displaying works upside down to emphasize the surface and highlight what he viewed as his country’s madness during World War II atrocities. Baselitz’s style is deliberately crude, with a heightened palette to convey raw emotion, similar to German Expressionists. In the mid-1960s, he depicted heroes, rebels, and shepherds, often fragmenting the figures and using thick impasto to carry emotional content.
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Where did Georg Baselitz grow up and study art?
Georg Baselitz was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Germany. He began his art studies in 1956 at the Academy of Fine and Applied Art in East Berlin but was expelled. In 1957, he moved to West Berlin and entered the Academy of Fine Arts, completing postgraduate studies in 1962. During this time, he changed his surname to Baselitz. From his youth, he was interested in German Expressionist painting.
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Why does Georg Baselitz paint many of his images upside down?
Georg Baselitz painted his works upside down to emphasize the surface of the painting rather than the subject. He also aimed to highlight what he saw as the madness of his country’s atrocities during World War II.
Baselitz, a pioneering Neo-Expressionist, was part of a wave of German painters who rejected abstraction in favor of highly expressive paintings with recognizable subject matter. Like German Expressionists before him, Baselitz employed a deliberately crude style and heightened palette to convey raw emotion.
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What are some famous works by Georg Baselitz?
Georg Baselitz, born January 23, 1938, is a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor, and a pioneering Neo-Expressionist. He is known for rejecting abstraction in favor of expressive paintings with recognizable subjects.
Baselitz’s trademark is painting and displaying works upside down. He did this to emphasize the surface and highlight what he viewed as his country’s madness during World War II atrocities.
Some of his noted works include his emotionally charged etchings, woodcuts, wood sculptures, and paintings of heroes, rebels, and shepherds, often fragmented to convey raw emotion. His art often features shocking or disturbing imagery.
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How did Georg Baselitz influence modern art in Germany and beyond?
Georg Baselitz, a pioneering Neo-Expressionist, significantly influenced modern art by rejecting abstraction in favor of highly expressive, figurative painting. Along with other German painters, Baselitz employed crude rendering and intense colors to convey raw emotion, reminiscent of German Expressionism. His trademark upside-down paintings, starting in 1969, emphasized the surface and challenged viewers, reflecting on Germany's history.
Baselitz's success in the 1980s and his impact on the international art scene, particularly through Neo-Expressionism, marked a resurgence of painting with expressive humanist content. His work, alongside artists like Anselm Kiefer and Markus Lüpertz, made ironic comments on Germany's historical fate, contributing to a distinctly postmodern phenomenon.
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Georg Baselitz (born January 23, 1938, Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, Germany—died April 30, 2026) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor who is considered to be a pioneering Neo-Expressionist. Baselitz was part of a wave of German painters from what was in their formative years East Germany who in the late 1970s rejected abstraction for highly expressive paintings with recognizable subject matter. His trademark works were painted and displayed upside down to emphasize surface rather than subject matter and to underscore what he saw as the madness of his country’s atrocities during World War II.
Baselitz began art studies in 1956 at the Academy of Fine and Applied Art in East Berlin. He was expelled and left East Berlin in 1957 for West Berlin. There he entered the Academy of Fine Arts, where he completed postgraduate studies in 1962. During this period he also changed his surname to Baselitz. From his youth he was interested in the tradition of German Expressionist painting and its reliance on sources such as non-Western art, folk art, children’s art, and the art of those with mental illness. Like his predecessors Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Emil Nolde (both involved in a group known as Die Brücke), Baselitz employed a deliberately crude style of rendering and a heightened palette in order to convey raw emotion. In the mid-1960s Baselitz turned to the subject of heroes, rebels, and shepherds, often fragmenting the figures and continuing to make the thick impasto carry much of his paintings’ emotional content. He also often used shocking or disturbing imagery to provoke a response in the viewer. Indeed paintings shown at Baselitz’s first solo exhibition (Berlin, 1963) were confiscated by police for obscenity. In 1969 he began to paint and display his subjects upside down. Baselitz also created art in other media; his etchings, woodcuts, and wood sculptures are as direct and expressionistically charged as his mature paintings.
Baselitz found success in the art market in the 1980s, and his first American retrospective was organized in 1995 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In 2004 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for painting. A retrospective was organized by the Hirshhorn Museum in 2018 to celebrate his 80th birthday. Despite his achievements, Baselitz still regarded himself as an outsider. He no longer courted controversy through his art but rather through unapologetic remarks in interviews, namely a number of sexist comments in 2013 and 2015.
