The death of Georg Baselitz The great painter of a world in turmoil

By Judith Benhamou

On April 30th, the painter Georg Baselitz, an artist with a colossal body of work spanning 60 years, died at the age of 88. His work is inextricably linked to the history of his country. The son of a schoolteacher, he was born in 1937 in Saxony as Hans-Georg Bruno Kern. He adopted the name Baselitz in 1961. He left East Germany in 1957 after being expelled from the Dresden Academy and suspended from the Academy of Applied Arts in East Berlin. He clearly did not fit neatly into the neat categories of socialist ideology. He was even accused of "sociopolitical immaturity."

In the West, his first steps were no easier, as the press considered his first exhibition in Berlin in 1963 to be "pornographic." He was even fined by the police, and two of his works were confiscated. Less than two years later, he received a scholarship and went to study in Florence. A new life was about to begin. Regarding his early life, he stated: "I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I did not want to restore order."

Baselitz's painting, and the man himself, were serious and their path convoluted. It would prove important for the history of art in the second half of the 20th century, as demonstrated by the meticulously curated retrospective of around one hundred works organized in 2021 at the Centre Pompidou by Bernard Blistène, then director of the institution.