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FILE – German artist Georg Baselitz talks with journalists during the press preview of the exhibition ‘Georg Baselitz’ in the Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz, Germany, on April 16, 2018.<\/p>\n
Jens Meyer\/AP<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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The Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, which represented Baselitz, said the artist died on Thursday, citing his family. It said he died \u201cpeacefully,\u201d but did not give a cause of death.<\/p>\n
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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 the then-East Germany in 1957 at a time of rising political pressure, and emigrated to the West.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was born into a destroyed order, into a destroyed landscape, into a destroyed people, into a destroyed society,\u201d he told German news agency dpa before his 85th birthday.<\/p>\n
The gallery called him \u201ca titan of contemporary painting, sculpture, drawing and printmaking” and \u201cone of the most important artists of our time,” who influenced fellow artists and the international art world.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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He was often described as an \u201cartist of rage,\u201d and had a motto of “contradiction,” according to dpa.<\/p>\n
His works hang in some of the world’s top galleries and have fetched millions at auction. In 2017, German police announced they had recovered 15 stolen paintings and drawings by Baselitz worth around 2.5 million euros ($2.9 million).<\/p>\n
Baselitz recalled that some of his earliest recognition came in the 1960s through his series of golden-colored \u201cHero\u201d paintings, based on fictional characters from Russian civil war novels. The works depicted broken figures staggering toward the viewer in ragged uniforms \u2014 in distorted sizes, giant hands and small heads. His battle-weary hero, \u201cDer Hirte (The Shepherd)\u201d from 1966 won international acclaim.<\/p>\n
In 1969, Baselitz created \u201cDer Wald auf dem Kopf,\u201d (The Forest on its Head), his first \u201cinverted\u201d painting \u2014 featuring trees upside down, a theme that would become one of his trademarks.<\/p>\n
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\u201cGeorg Baselitz did not just turn his paintings upside down; he also turned our thinking routines upside down,\u201d German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. \u201cHaving 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Baselitz mused about his long career in a recent video, commenting that \u201ctypical painting has never appealed to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI actually wanted to be more of a black-and-white painter, and above all, I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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,\u201d Baselitz said.<\/p>\n
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Baselitz said he sought to \u201cconstruct my connection to the world, to myself and to my wife,\u201d using the most \u201csimple and ordinary” means possible. He spoke in a video from the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, which is hosting an exhibition of Baselitz’s \u201cGolden Heroes\u201d works from May 6 to Sept. 27.<\/p>\n
A \u201cNaked Masters\u201d exhibit at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2023 spanned his half-century career and dealt with controversial themes of nudity \u2014 notably of the painter and his wife, Elke \u2014 displayed alongside oil paintings by old masters also evoking nudity.<\/p>\n
He is survived by his wife and sons, Daniel Blau and Anton Kern, the gallery said.<\/p>\n
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