At the age of 88: painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz died

Baselitz was often referred to as a “rage artist”. His motto in life was: contradiction! Baselitz even turned the laws of nature upside down: he painted upside down, feet and roots at the top, head and treetops at the bottom. It became his trademark. In 1969, “The Forest Upside Down,” the first “reversal image,” was created.

Sometimes impressionistic, sometimes cubist

He always painted outside of the trend: representationally, when abstract was popular in art, and large, when small formats sold better. He experimented with different painting styles, sometimes impressionistic, sometimes cubist.

Museums and the public loved the non-conformist. In 2023, there were several major exhibitions in the year of his 85th birthday, including “Naked Masters” at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) in Vienna.

The works selected by Baselitz himself, spanning 50 years, dealt with the nudity of the painter and his wife, and they were shown in dialogue with oil paintings by old masters that dealt with nudity. It became clear: Baselitz rejects idealized beauty as empty pathos.

His stage name is a homage to his birthplace, Deutschbaselitz

Baselitz was born in Saxony, whose real name was Hans-Georg Kern. The stage name is a homage to his birthplace, Deutschbaselitz.

His first exhibition in 1963 was met with both announcements and scandal. The moral police saw pornography in his oil paintings “Naked Man” (with an oversized penis) and “The Big Night in the Bucket” (with a boy masturbating) and confiscated them. He had set out on the scandal, as he openly said, in order to get attention despite the rejection he faced everywhere.

His monumental paintings hang in the world’s most important museums. In 2004, Baselitz received the Japanese Praemium Imperiale prize, one of the world’s most important prizes for art. In 2019 he was elected to the venerable Academy of Fine Arts in Paris.