Georg Baselitz German artist who turned figurative painting on its head, has died, aged 88

By Matthew Holman

Georg Baselitz, who died today (30 April) at age 88, was one of the most consequential German painters of the post-war era—a figure of productive contradiction whose career spanned six decades of sustained formal invention and restless self-examination. Thaddaeus Ropac, the gallery that has represented Baselitz for many years, announced the news of his death but did not specify a cause of death.

Born Hans-Georg Kern on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a village in Upper Lusatia, he grew up amid the ruins of the Third Reich. That formative immersion in literal as much as moral destruction would become the ground of everything he made. As he once said: “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society.” He adopted the name Baselitz as a tribute to his Saxon birthplace.

His trajectory was shaped by a dogged refusal to bend to any kind of political or aesthetic expectations. Expelled from the East Berlin Academy for “sociopolitical immaturity”—a charge that, under the circumstances, amounted to a kind of honour—he crossed to West Berlin, where he encountered gestural abstraction (particularly during an especially formative experience seeing The New American Painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künst in 1958) and the legacy of European Expressionism. He admired both but rejected each as insufficient.

“When I work, I always think about my past. My background was very ordinary and rural in a place far off the beaten track,” he told The Art Newspaper in a 2023 interview. “The kinds of statements on daily politics that we see a lot in contemporary art are not my thing.”