Georg Baselitz: The artist who turned the century upside down
By Hans-Joachim Müller
Lately, it's been like a bountiful harvest. One exhibition follows another. Old paintings, new paintings, always new ones. And the Basel art fair had barely opened when the statistics were already reporting further gains in the share price of the highly sought-after Georg Baselitz. The track record of a contemporary artist could hardly be more impressive. The painter has achieved it all: fame, controversy, recognition, enmity, followers, a place of honor in museums, a prime position in the art market. Even in circles far removed from art, his name has become synonymous with the ever-present enigma of art. And if there truly is such a thing as a German idiom in the interconnected art world, then Baselitz has made a decisive contribution to its formation.
Georg Baselitz – a painter from Germany. “What other choice did I have?” – and it didn’t exactly sound like an apology when we visited him at his studio residence on Lake Ammersee. “My first exhibitions were in Holland. And the first thing people said to me was that I was German. Which is true, but why say it with such an accusatory tone? It was like a trap. And I knew that the only way out of it was to immediately declare myself a German artist.”
It can't exactly be said that he whispered it. The artist's voice was always clearly audible, and from the very beginning, his public appearances possessed a self-confidence that was unheard of in the art world. It wasn't intellectual arrogance. Rather, it was irritability, anger, a readiness to attack. A frivolous delight, too, in taking on everyone and alienating them all. A Baselitz biography, therefore, would have little choice. It would have to truthfully recount all the painter's scandals, the reliable provocations of his work, and his unsettling self-presentation as a perpetually blustering stubborn man.
When Hans-Georg Kern, born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz in Upper Lusatia, decided to pursue art, it took some time before he, as he put it, "felt the usable tradition through his own skin." In East Germany, the art student was soon expelled from the academy for social immaturity. And in West Berlin, where he remained at the end of the 1950s, he found himself in an art world where the paths to virtue and success seemed no less predetermined. Baselitz, as he now called himself, remained rootless. His teacher, Hann Trier, tried in vain to convert him to abstraction. In vain, the master student dabbed blue, green, and brown onto the paper, thinking "only of sky, grass, and earth, because I simply can't do anything else."
