Georg Baselitz The great German painter who turned the world upside down has died
By Ana Marcos
The German painter Georg Baselitz based his art and his life on one premise: “What is right, for me, is foolish.” For this reason, the great visual artist, who died this Thursday at the age of 88, according to the German press citing his studio, dedicated himself to painting until the very end. He never stopped, day or night. He could have devoted himself to smaller formats at the end of his career instead of his monumental works of more than three meters. He could have simply retired, because the machinery of retrospectives in major museums and the scholarly studies of his work was so well-oiled that his legacy practically ran itself. But he continued until the very end, brush in hand, turning his characters inside out, as he had done almost as an act of defiance since the 1960s.
Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, he borrowed Baselitz from his village. His father was a schoolteacher. A member of the Nazi party, he was demoted after the fall of the Third Reich and banned from teaching; his mother took his place at the village school. He was seven years old when the war ended. He was a child who grew up under Nazism and was raised in communism .
His life and work unfolded during the years of the German economic miracle. His professors expelled him from the East Berlin Academy of Fine Arts for, they claimed, his “social and political immaturity.” Baselitz used that expulsion as an uncomfortable avenue to propose new, unprecedented images. “It was in no way a rebellion against society,” he explained in an interview with EL PAÍS .
In the late 1950s, he moved to West Berlin, and then, one day in the late 1960s, he decided to turn the figures he painted upside down: head down, feet up. It was his way of reflecting the German trauma on his canvases. “At first, while Expressionism and Pop Art were producing those wonderful paintings, I was doing obscenities. Who was going to like that?” he told this newspaper, recalling the painting Die große Nacht im Eimer (“The Great Night Under the Drain”), which depicted a monstrous being displaying its penis, and which earned him scandalous headlines and a trial for offending public decency. It was 1963, and Baselitz rose to fame in his country in the worst—or best—way possible.
