On the death of the painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz Painting as a way of coming to terms with the past

By Stefan Trinks

It all began with an upside-down tree; the year is 1969. But this wasn't just any tree, but rather the tree of the artist Georg Baselitz from his homeland, a mighty, leafless, gnarled oak from the 1859 oil painting "Wermsdorf Forest" by the Saxon painter Ferdinand von Rayski. Following the model of this late-Romantic oak, Baselitz painted "Forest on its Head," his first picture in which the subject is upside down – a reversal of perspective for which he subsequently became primarily known and with which he was almost inextricably associated, even in the most extreme forms of caricature.

However, Baselitz had already come to know and love Rayski's painting as a teenager in the mid-1950s in the Dresden art collections, along with other major works by the so-called Old Masters, which, like Rembrandt, would later be important for his marshy dark coloring.