Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz – Studies with Hann Trier; interest in Expressionism

Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselitz in Upper Lusatia, Saxony. His childhood was overshadowed by the havoc of the Second World War which transformed his hometown into a pile of rubble and which cost his father an eye – perhaps the cause of the difficult relationship between father and son, which carried over to later authorities when he was expelled from what is now the Berlin Weißensee School of Art in 1956 after just one year of painting studies due to “socio-political immaturity”. Without further ado, Baselitz went to West Berlin to continue his studies at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin with Hann Trier. He explored the ideas of Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malewitsch and Ernst Wilhelm Nay and undertook study trips to Amsterdam and Paris where he became acquainted with the art of Antonin Artaud and Jean Dubuffet. In 1961, Hans-Georg Kern put aside his birth name and took on the pseudonym Georg Baselitz, in tribute to his East German birthplace. 

Targeted controversies and celebrated ‘upside-down pictures’

Georg Baselitz did not shy away from controversy and even sometimes sought it. Already at the start of his career in the West, he soon clashed with the authorities because of his deliberately provocative pictures, some of which contained drastically obscene depictions, such as his early work Die Nacht im großen Eimer which shows a young boy masturbating. The artist himself describes the work today as “puberty slime”; the ensuing scandal was calculated and deliberate, including the subsequent confiscation of the picture by the public prosecutor’s office. Together with his colleague Eugen Schönebeck, Baselitz compiled two treatises with the provocative name ‘Pandemonic Manifestos’ but his artistic breakthrough came with his ‘upside-down pictures’ in which he recomposed conventional content and thus pushed it behind colour and form. These pictures were so successful that they are found in all the major galleries and collections of the world. 

International success with German themes

Georg Baselitz taught at the art schools in Karlsruhe and Berlin, exerting a formative influence on entire generations of artists. As a sculptor he created rough, figural sculptures out of wood with the brute use of axe and chainsaw. Baselitz himself names his artistic role models as Joseph Beuys, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso and as an artist concentrated on ‘German’ themes – initially the GDR and its unjust state and his painful experiences, but also later countering the West German economic miracle with his Hero paintings in which grimy figures from the repressed past rise up again as a reminder. Georg Baselitz has received prizes and awards for his art including the Villa Romana Prize in 1964, the Goslarer Kaiserring in 1986, Lower Saxony State Prize in 2003, Japanese Praemium Imperiale in 2004, and membership of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2019.

Georg Baselitz has lived in Austrian Salzburg since 2013 and also has a studio in Italy.