Remembering Georg Baselitz: 1938-2026

As a youth, Hans-Georg Kern was encouraged by his parents to become a forester. The family lived in a heavily wooded part of Saxony, in East Germany, so it seemed a sensible career path. Kern was accepted into a forestry school in 1956. However, he chose to take up studies at the Academy of Fine and Applied Arts in East Berlin instead.

As would prove to be the case throughout his professional life, the young man — known to us today as Georg Baselitz — did things his own way. What followed was a stunning seven-decade career as a painter, sculptor and printmaker, one which was provocative and prolific in equal measure. ‘There is a reason for rules,’ Baselitz said. ‘But for an artist, it is only breaking the rules that’s interesting.’

Kern was born in 1938, a year before the outbreak of the Second World War. In later life, his memories of the conflict included seeing the city of Dresden, some 20 miles from his home, burning in the distance, after Allied firebombing in 1945.

His spell at art school in East Berlin lasted just two semesters, before Kern was expelled for ‘socio-political immaturity’. In essence, this meant painting in a manner indebted to Picasso (whose work he encountered in books tucked away in remote corners of the library) rather than in the officially approved style of Socialist Realism.

Kern relocated to West Berlin, completing his art studies there in 1962 — by which time the Berlin Wall had gone up. Partly as a way of staying connected to his roots, he henceforth adopted the surname Baselitz, after his home village of Deutschbaselitz.

In the mid-1960s, the artist produced one of his most acclaimed bodies of works: the series ‘Heroes’ (sometimes called ‘New Types’). This comprised paintings of solitary young men — with small heads upon well-built bodies — wandering a bleak landscape, looking dishevelled. In some cases, the men are disfigured. They have widely been interpreted as personifications of the battered German spirit after the war.

As Baselitz’s career took off, many of his compatriots were embracing then-fashionable movements such as Art Informel and Pop art. He, however, engaged in a more personal quest. ‘I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to re-establish an order: I had seen enough of so-called order. I was forced to question everything… to start again.’

In the late 1960s, the artist made his most famous pictorial innovation: depicting his subjects upside down. These subjects included humans, eagles and trees, and appeared regularly in his oeuvre thereafter. In part, the move was Baselitz’s response to the longstanding debate between abstraction and figuration, allowing him to embrace elements of both at the same time. (He felt that inverting his images encouraged viewers to focus on painterly qualities such as colour and brushwork as much as on content.)

Other innovations in Baselitz’s practice included regularly applying paint to canvas with his fingers. Controversies weren’t uncommon. Two of the pictures from his debut exhibition were confiscated by police on grounds of obscenity. Then, when representing Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980, Baselitz showed a massive wooden sculpture of a prostrate male whose right arm is raised in a manner that some saw as reminiscent of a Nazi salute (an interpretation Baselitz himself disavowed).

Although the artist took up sculpture later than he did painting, the results were no less striking. His favourite material was wood, large lumps of which he tackled with axes, chainsaws and chisels, producing rough-hewn totemic figures. ‘I want to avoid all manual dexterity, all artistic elegance,’ he said. His sculptures are renowned for their expressive power.

One well-known series, ‘Dresdner Frauen’ (1989-90), comprises a number of huge heads painted cadmium yellow, each face a crude mix of hollows and incisions. It was inspired by the so-called ‘rubble women’ who had helped clear the ruins from Dresden’s streets after the war. The subjects’ expressions suggest the trauma that the women witnessed, but also a sense of the resilience they showed in assisting the city’s rebirth.

The artistic influences on Baselitz across his career were myriad, from the Italian Mannerists to Art Brut, via African sculpture and Lucas Cranach the Elder. All of them, along with German history, he assimilated and adapted for his artistic ends.

Many awards came Baselitz’s way, such as the prestigious Praemium Imperiale arts prize, in 2004, from Japan’s imperial family. He was the subject of major exhibitions across the globe, too, including retrospectives at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995 (which later toured elsewhere) and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2021-22.

Baselitz’s art continued to evolve over the years. With his paintings of the early 1980s, for example — in series such as ‘Trinker’, depicting solitary drinkers — he adopted a blazing colour palette and fervent gestural brushwork. For many observers, such works put him at the forefront of the burgeoning Neo-Expressionist movement (though Baselitz himself denied any affiliation).

In 2005, the artist began a set of works known as the ‘Remix’ paintings — in which he revisited and reworked imagery from earlier in his career. Late in life, he also confronted his own mortality with pictures of ageing human bodies.

Baselitz died on 30 April 2026, aged 88, days before the opening of Georg Baselitz. Eroi d’Oro at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, a collateral exhibition at the 61st Venice Biennale.

He was an artist who had consistently — and radically — reinvented himself, while never disengaging from the past. He once compared his career to a fast-moving train, on which he ‘stood in the rear… looking at the tracks flying back below’.

Georg Baselitz. Eroi d’Oro is at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, 6 May to 27 September 2026

Related artists: Georg Baselitz