Georg Baselitz

Hans-Georg Bruno Kern was born on January 23, 1938, in Deutschbaselitz, a village in Upper Lusatia near Kamenz in Saxony. His father, Johannes Kern, was the headteacher of the village elementary school, and the family lived in the school building. His mother was Lieselotte (née Block). According to Artnet, his father was later barred from teaching in East Germany because he had joined the Nazi party, and his mother taught instead.

The war shaped him. With his father away at the front, he and his mother hid in the school's basement as Soviet troops arrived. From the village the family could see Dresden burning in February 1945. After the war they remained in what became the German Democratic Republic.

His first contact with art came from the painters who visited the countryside around his village and from a reproduction of Ferdinand von Rayski's Wermsdorf Forest (about 1859) that hung in his school in Kamenz. He also read the mystic Jakob Böhme. By 15 he was already painting portraits, religious subjects, still lifes and landscapes.

In 1955 he applied to the art academy in Dresden and was rejected. In 1956 he enrolled at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in East Berlin (Weißensee), studying under Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangeler and befriending Peter Graf and Ralf Winkler, later known as A. R. Penck. After two semesters he was expelled for "sociopolitical immaturity" for failing to conform to the socialist line.

Facing the prospect of labour in a coal-mining collective, he moved to West Berlin in 1957 and resumed his studies at the Hochschule der Künste (now the Berlin University of the Arts). A travelling exhibition of American Abstract Expressionism in 1958 left a deep impression, especially the work of Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston. He studied the theories of Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, joined Hann Trier's master class in 1961, and completed his studies in 1962.

In 1961 he adopted the name Georg Baselitz and, with fellow student Eugen Schönebeck, issued the Pandemonium manifestos as posters around West Berlin. His first solo exhibition, at Galerie Werner and Katz in 1963, caused a scandal: the public prosecutor confiscated The Big Night Down the Drain (1962 to 1963) and The Naked Man (1962) as obscene, and the case dragged on until 1965.

In 1964 he made his first etchings at Schloss Wolfsburg, and in 1965 a Villa Romana scholarship took him to Florence, where he studied Mannerist prints. Back in Berlin he painted the Heroes (also called New Types) of 1965 and 1966, including The Great Friends and Rebel, and then the Fracture paintings. In 1969 came The Wood on Its Head, his first picture with an inverted motif, based on the Rayski painting from his school. From then on he painted almost all his subjects upside down, to empty them of narrative and confront viewers with the painted surface.

In the 1970s he showed regularly at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Munich, took part in documenta 5 in 1972 and the São Paulo Biennial in 1975, and moved from Forst an der Weinstraße to Schloss Derneburg near Hildesheim. He was appointed professor at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe in 1978. In 1980 he and Anselm Kiefer represented West Germany at the Venice Biennale, where his first sculpture, Model for a Sculpture, caused uproar. From 1983 he taught at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.

The 1980s brought Christian motifs, the large painting Dinner in Dresden (1983), carved and painted wooden sculptures and international fame. A first major US retrospective opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1995. He designed sets for Harrison Birtwistle's Punch and Judy (Amsterdam, 1993), Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre (Chemnitz, 2013) and Wagner's Parsifal at the Bavarian State Opera (2018).

Later milestones included a Royal Academy retrospective in London (2007), a double survey in Baden-Baden (2009 to 2010), 80th birthday retrospectives at the Fondation Beyeler, Kunstmuseum Basel and the Hirshhorn in 2018, an exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia during the 2019 Venice Biennale, and a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2021 to 2022. His late series, from Avignon (2015) through the Sofa Pictures of Elke to the gold-ground Eroi d'Oro, were widely praised. He was represented by Thaddaeus Ropac, Gagosian and White Cube.

Baselitz met Johanna Elke Kretzschmar, a graphic design student, soon after moving to West Berlin. In their early, penniless years they hitchhiked across Europe to museums and exhibitions, living on refugee grants and odd jobs. They married in 1962, and Elke became his adviser and, from 1969, the most frequent subject of his portraits. Elke once said they were "like two old apes picking the fleas from each other's fur."

They had two sons, Daniel Blau and Anton Kern, both of whom became art dealers. The family lived in Forst an der Weinstraße from 1971, at Schloss Derneburg near Hildesheim from 1975 to 2006, then at Buch near Inning am Ammersee in Bavaria, with a second base in Imperia, Italy. From 2013 the couple lived in Salzburg, Austria, and in May 2015 they were granted Austrian citizenship.

Baselitz described his work as a reckoning with German history. "All German painters have neuroses when it comes to Germany's past," he told Der Spiegel in 2013. "If you want, my paintings are battles." He rejected both East German socialist realism and the American abstraction that dominated postwar West Germany, insisting on the human figure while undermining it through inversion and fragmentation.

He was outspoken and often combative. In 1977 he withdrew his works from documenta 6 in protest at the inclusion of East German state painters, and in 1992 he resigned from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. In 2015 he withdrew loans from German museums in protest at a planned tightening of Germany's cultural property protection law. He also courted controversy with remarks about women artists (see Controversies).

Baselitz is regarded, alongside Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Anselm Kiefer, as one of the defining German artists of the postwar era. His return to the figure in the early 1960s, against the grain of abstraction, and his inverted paintings from 1969 onwards helped pave the way for Neo-Expressionism and changed how painters thought about subject and surface. He was equally important as a sculptor and printmaker.

His work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (which received six inverted paintings from the family in 2020), Tate, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Fondation Beyeler and many others. Former chancellor Gerhard Schröder hung one of his upside-down eagles behind his desk in the chancellery. At auction, his painting With Red Flag (1965) sold for £7,471,250 at Sotheby's London in 2017, and the sculpture Women of Dresden, Visit from Prague (1990) sold for $11.24 million at Sotheby's New York in 2022.

On his death, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that Baselitz "turned not only his pictures but our thinking routines upside down" and that his work had become classic for the art of our time. Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer also paid tribute, and his galleries Gagosian, White Cube and Thaddaeus Ropac published a joint notice of mourning.

Villa Romana Prize (1965). Ars viva prize of the Cultural Committee of German Business (1968). Member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin (1984 to 1992). Goslarer Kaiserring (1986). Chevalier (1987), Officier (1992) and Commandeur (2002) of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Honorary Royal Academician, London (1999). Rhenus Art Prize, Mönchengladbach (1999). Honorary professor at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków (2000). Julio González Prize, Valencia (2001). Lower Saxony State Prize (2003). Praemium Imperiale (2004). Honorary professor at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, Florence (2004). Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2005). Honorary citizen of Imperia (2006). B.Z. Culture Prize (2008). Member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (2009 to 2021). Cologne Fine Art Award (2009). Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur (2012). Foreign associate member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2019).

Key publications include Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, edited by Detlev Gretenkort (Ridinghouse, 2010), Georg Baselitz: Paintings 1962 to 2001 (2002) and Georg Baselitz: Retrospektive 1964 to 1991, edited by Siegfried Gohr (Hirmer, 1992). He gave long filmed interviews to the Louisiana Channel and the Fondation Beyeler, and his career was profiled by CBS Sunday Morning.

Major exhibitions included the Guggenheim retrospective (1995), the Royal Academy of Arts (2007), Baselitz: A Retrospective in Baden-Baden (2009 to 2010), Pivotal Turn at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2021), the Centre Pompidou retrospective (2021 to 2022), Six Decades of Drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum (2022 to 2023), the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (2023), The Last Decade at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul (2024 to 2025), Feet First at the Munch Museum in Oslo (2025), Back Again at White Cube (2026), Baselitz Jetzt at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (2026) and Eroi d'Oro at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice (May to September 2026).

Controversy followed Baselitz throughout his career, often by design. The 1963 seizure of two paintings for obscenity made his name. At documenta 5 in 1972 his work drew harsh criticism, and at the 1980 Venice Biennale his sculpture Model for a Sculpture was read by many as giving a Nazi salute. He said it never occurred to him and that the gesture came from a Lobi carving.

In a 2013 interview with Der Spiegel he said "women don't paint very well. It's a fact," citing the art market as proof,. The remarks were widely criticised as sexist, and the critic Sarah Thornton countered that "the market gets it wrong all the time." His 2018 designs for Parsifal in Munich were named the "annoyance of the year" in the Opernwelt critics' poll.

Georg Baselitz died peacefully on April 30, 2026, at the age of 88. His death was announced that day by his gallery Thaddaeus Ropac, citing his family, together with an obituary written for the family by the poet Robert Isaf. No cause of death was made public, and news reports did not specify where he died. He had lived in Salzburg since 2013, and Wikipedia gives Salzburg as his place of death. Details of his funeral and resting place have not been made public.

He had continued working until shortly before his death, painting his final canvases on the floor from a wheeled chair with a brush fixed to a pole. At the time, the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg was showing Baselitz Jetzt, and his final series, Eroi d'Oro, opened at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice on May 6, 2026, alongside the 61st Venice Biennale. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer and museums around the world paid tribute. He was survived by his wife Elke and their sons Daniel Blau and Anton Kern.