Death of Georg Baselitz, a giant of German painting, at the age of 88
By Valérie Duponchelle
The great painter, draughtsman and engraver was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in October 2021. He leaves behind a colossal and sensitive body of work.
He had just spoken, on camera, about an artist’s twilight years, about the need to paint that remains ingrained in one’s being, even when the body fails, about the regret of having painted less this past year, and about the question of ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’, that is to say, the inevitable future. Georg Baselitz, the giant of German painting, suddenly seemed fragile, almost hesitant – he, the rebel of a totalitarian Germany, who drew from it the strength and will to fight throughout his splendid and daring career. He sat there, in that wheelchair that did not suit him. Did he not defy the weight of the years by incorporating the tracks of his walking frame into his very large final paintings, exhibited at his gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac’s in Pantin in 2023 to mark his 85th birthday? The German newspapers announced his death at the age of 88 on Thursday 30 April: “Georg Baselitz ist tot.”
“It was one of the most formative encounters of my life. He was an exceptional artist and human being. His immense erudition, the depth of his work, and the beauty and sheer number of his paintings will leave a lasting mark as one of the great artists of his time, undoubtedly one of the greatest,” tells Le Figaro Bernard Blistène, former director of the Musée national d’art moderne, who curated his magnificent retrospective at Beaubourg in the winter of 2021–2022, and who has just dedicated a final exhibition to him—poignant and bold—entitled ‘Georg Baselitz, Paintings 2014–2025. Something Everywhere” at the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in the Basque Country.
Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern in 1938, near Dresden. He grew up during Germany’s darkest hours in Saxony, attending the village school in Großbaselitz in Upper Lusatia, a village with a population of around a hundred. His father, Johannes, was a schoolteacher who was gradually drawn into the Nazi regime. A soldier during the war, he was taken prisoner. The school building was occupied by the military: ‘I played with ammunition. I played with soldiers. I ate in the field kitchen. There were no lessons. The school where we lived was requisitioned by the soldiers, who had their radio station in the basement. There was the chaos and the gunfire, my mother, my brothers and sisters screaming, and above all the countless refugees who thought the end of the world was nigh. It was absolute chaos, an apocalyptic world in which you had to watch your step. ‘The streets no longer existed when we crossed Dresden,’ he confided to curator Martin Schwander during his exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in 2018. (...)
