Georg Baselitz, the East German–born artist famous for expressive figurative painting and sculptures—and for turning images upside down—has died on April 30 at 88.
Born Hans-Georg Bruno Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, he moved to East Berlin in 1956 to study art. At 18 he was expelled from the academy for refusing assigned industrial work in Rostock and preferring to paint in a style influenced by Pablo Picasso. Before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 he relocated to West Berlin, where he encountered the dominant abstract movements but chose instead to pursue expressive realism.
In 1961 he adopted the name Georg Baselitz and quickly became controversial. Two paintings from 1963, Der Nackte Mann (The Naked Man) and Die grosse Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night down the Drain), were seized after accusations of presenting pornographic material because they showed a figure with an exaggerated penis. Baselitz and two gallery owners faced court proceedings, including testimony before Berlin’s state court and the Federal Court of Justice; the case was later suspended. Michael Werner, a gallery owner alleged to have stoked sensationalist reporting around the episode, played a key role in the ensuing market attention that helped Baselitz sell his work.
Baselitz cultivated a maverick public image throughout his career, often making provocative remarks—such as claiming women cannot paint and dismissing the Documenta exhibition as “Paralympics”—which reinforced his reputation as both rebellious and divisive.
He protested cultural policy in 2015 by withdrawing works loaned to German museums after planned changes to a law on the protection of cultural goods threatened restrictions on exporting entire collections. That move reflected how valuable his work had become: his paintings have fetched hundreds of thousands of euros, with older pieces selling for more than €1 million. “I want to remain en vogue, to remain young,” he told Der Spiegel in 2013. In 2025 the Kunstkompass ranked him third among the most important living contemporary artists in Germany.
In the mid-1960s Baselitz produced about 60 paintings called “Heroes.” Growing tired of the exhaustive subject, he reworked many and treated the series as a completed biographical chapter. He then found the signature device that secured his global reputation: turning images upside down. By inverting motifs—an apple tree or an eagle, he said—he could paint in a more conservative, realistic manner while forcing viewers to re-evaluate composition and perception. This inversion sharpened how people looked at painting and became his trademark.
Baselitz influenced Neo-Expressionist painters worldwide, particularly through works confronting World War II’s horrors. Yet he downplayed the artist’s social role: “The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous,” he once said. “Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse.”
He fostered the image of an art-world maverick throughout his career. The upside-down paintings became his trademark style.
This article was translated from German.