BERLIN — Georg Baselitz, an acclaimed German artist prominent in the Neo-expressionist movement who had a penchant for provocation and was known for painting images upside down, has died. He was 88.
The Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, which represented Baselitz, said the artist died on Thursday, citing his family. It said he died “peacefully” but did not give a cause of death. The gallery called him “a titan of contemporary painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking” and “one of the most important artists of our time,” who influenced fellow artists and the international art world.
Born Hans-Georg Kern, Baselitz took his artistic name from the village of Deutschbaselitz in the eastern Saxony region, where he was born on Jan. 23, 1938, in Nazi-ruled Germany before the outbreak of World War II. After growing up in the ruins of the war, he left then-East Germany in 1957, at a time of rising political pressure, and emigrated to the West.
“I was born into a destroyed order, into a destroyed landscape, into a destroyed people, into a destroyed society,” he told German news agency dpa before his 85th birthday.
His first exhibition in 1963 reportedly caused a stir, with a vice squad identifying pornography in at least two of his paintings and confiscating them.
In a 1995 interview for a retrospective at LACMA, Baselitz told The Times, “Early on, I felt it necessary to be explicit, crass and dramatic in trying to make clear what I wanted to do. I was also intent on rejecting the dominant styles of that period — Social Realism and Abstract Expressionism — but that’s part of the coming-of-age of every young artist.”
He was often described as an “artist of rage” and had a motto of “contradiction,” according to dpa.
His works hang in some of the world’s great galleries and have fetched millions at auction. In 2017, German police announced they had recovered 15 stolen paintings and drawings by Baselitz worth around $2.9 million.
German artist Georg Baselitz poses with his work “Schwester Rosi III” (1995) in 2018.
(Jens Meyer / Associated Press)
Baselitz recalled that some of his earliest recognition came in the 1960s through his series of golden-colored “Hero” paintings, based on fictional characters from Russian civil war novels. The works depicted broken figures staggering toward the viewer in ragged uniforms — in distorted sizes, giant hands and small heads. His battle-weary hero, “Der Hirte (The Shepherd)” from 1966 won international acclaim.
In 1969, Baselitz created “Der Wald auf dem Kopf” (The Forest on its Head), his first “inverted” painting — featuring trees upside down, a theme that would become one of his trademarks.
“Georg Baselitz did not just turn his paintings upside down; he also turned our thinking routines upside down,” said President Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany. “Having experienced the destruction and suffering of the Second World War as a child, the collapse of all order forced him to question everything around him.”
Baselitz mused about his long career in a recent video, commenting that “typical painting has never appealed to me.”
“I actually wanted to be more of a black-and-white painter, and above all, I didn’t want to work spatially, perspectively, with shadows and light and such things that arise with the imitation of nature,” he said while seated in a wheelchair in a paint-smudged jacket.
“I must say that throughout my life, I was not aware that I was a painter of color, even though I am constantly told that I have such wonderful colors,” Baselitz said.
Baselitz said he sought to “construct my connection to the world, to myself and to my wife,” using the most “simple and ordinary” means possible. He spoke in a video from the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, which is hosting an exhibition of Baselitz’s “Golden Heroes” works from May 6 to Sept. 27.
A “Naked Masters” exhibit at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2023 spanned his half-century career and dealt with controversial themes of nudity — notably of the painter and his wife, Elke — displayed alongside oil paintings by old masters also evoking nudity.
He is survived by his wife and sons, Daniel Blau and Anton Kern, the gallery said.