Georg Baselitz obituary German artist of upside-down paintings

The German painter, sculptor and printmaker Georg Baselitz owed his considerable international reputation to his habit, begun in 1969, of making and hanging his pictures upside down. He was thus able to explore the space between figuration and abstraction, an exercise which, for him, had political implications. While figuration was then commonly associated with art in East Germany, where Baselitz grew up, abstraction was the dominant style in the West, where Baselitz chose to live. For him, one was as pointless as the other.

Whichever way up, Baselitz’s painting played an important role in shaping German art in the later 20th century. He gave it international relevance, paradoxically by stressing its peculiarly German qualities and evoking recent German history. His art, he proclaimed, “is brutal as Germany is brutal. Brutality has been evident very often in our history. This has had stylistic consequences.” So Baselitz’s painting and sculpture looks as if it was subjected to rough treatment. It gives the impression of speedy and direct execution devoid of preliminaries and forethought. His rich and often opaque imagery includes ruins, swastikas, crucifixes, handcarts, Russians, partisans, refugees, and even, in one of his violently sawn and painted wood sculptures, a figure giving the Hitler salute. It was as though he was attempting to revive the practice of history painting. “I grew up during a very eventful period,” Baselitz once said, “and the events were bad almost without exception. The tenacity of these bad events in the memory is also part of my material.”