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<\/p>\nGeorg Baselitz has been looking back over his life. His latest exhibition, A Life in Print, is about to open at the Kode art museum in Bergen. It will prove the most comprehensive display of his printed images ever to be assembled. <\/p>\n
How does it feel for the artist, now 87, to cast his eye back to the beginning? Does he stand by his earlier artworks? \u201cYes. When I see them, I think they are fantastic,\u201d Baselitz proclaims. Germany\u2019s art world megastar is not one for false modesty. What about his more recent pieces? Are they equally superlative? \u201cI really morphed from a pig into a man with a tie,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n
He won\u2019t elaborate. Across the more than six decades of his career, the legendary painter has delighted in throwing the art world off balance \u2014 often quite literally. After all, he is the artist who, in his effort to \u201cfree painting from narrative\u201d and so, escaping the \u201ctyranny of meaning\u201d, to thwart simple answers, became famous for painting pictures that are upside down. Images created from the late Sixties onwards have flipped on their head anything from human figures to flying eagles to pine forests. As a spectator it\u2019s hard to avoid trying to make sense of them by twisting your head upside down. It can start off a bit of a blood rush and make you feel giddy. <\/p>\n
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Waldweg \u2014 or \u201ca walk in the woods\u201d, 2004<\/p>\n
JOCHEN LITTKEMANN<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to know quite how to approach this notoriously challenging figure. Speaking on Zoom from the book-lined study of his Salzburg home, a painting by Picasso on the wall behind him, he is sitting cross-legged, cross-armed and, to be frank, rather cross-faced. He seems annoyed by my need for someone to translate his German. Answers, as the interview goes on, grow increasingly brusque. From time to time he is stubbornly silent or offers a reply that seems intended to throw a question off course. I feel I am less meeting the man than confronting his suit of armour, which may not be surprising given the hard shell of myth that has accreted about him.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Why I was wrong about Georg Baselitz and his upside-down paintings<\/a><\/p>\n Baselitz\u2019s childhood biography has become part of his legend. Born in 1938 and named Hans-Georg Kern, he grew up in the village of Deutschbaselitz in Saxony, eastern Germany. His father, a schoolteacher, was a committed Nazi. But Hans-Georg was barely seven when the Third Reich fell. He remembers walking through the ruined streets of Dresden. He grew up amid \u201ca destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society\u201d, he has said.<\/p>\n Expelled from art school in East Berlin for \u201csociopolitical immaturity\u201d \u2014 he refused to conform to the Stalinist aesthetic of the GDR in which, by that time, he lived \u2014 he crossed to the West in 1958, three years before the wall was built. From then on he adopted the surname Baselitz, taken from his home town.<\/p>\n At the opening party for his exhibition at the Royal Academy with Sir Norman Rosenthal and Tracey Emin in 2007<\/p>\n ALAMY<\/p>\n It was while he was at art school in West Berlin that he discovered modernism, most dramatically in the landmark 1958 New American Painting exhibition which, showcasing the works of Pollock and De Kooning among others of the New York School, caused a sensation as it toured the cities of Europe. \u201cIt was like somebody beat me on the head with a big baseball bat,\u201d was how he once described the experience.<\/p>\n You may have expected that, as with many of his contemporaries, he would have fallen into line with abstraction, or adopted the prevalent vogue for pop, or tried out the novelties of land art, or experimented with the conceptual. Instead he eschewed fashion. \u201cI\u2019ve never wanted to be a modern human being,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve never wanted to be fashionable, to be in the time.\u201d So although, as he says, \u201cI\u2019ve never met anyone who was happy to be German because of our history\u201d, rather than trying to ignore or erase the past he did precisely the opposite.<\/p>\n Plunging straight back into the burnt-out ruins of his culture he confronted his German history head on. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to apologise for something that I had nothing to do with. I was seven when the war ended,\u201d he says. But then, typically, he chucks a curve ball. \u201cI was not even in the Hitler Youth \u2026 at the time I was not happy with that.\u201d<\/p>\n Baselitz, at the vanguard of postwar Germany\u2019s cultural rebirth, is considered (along with Markus L\u00fcpertz) to be a pioneer of German neo-expressionism. Inspired by such predecessors as Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Edvard Munch, he embarked on a rough and often abrasively emotional return to paint. As a sculptor he used chainsaws and axes to hack crudely totemic figures out of lumps of wood; as a printmaker he shunned Andy Warhol\u2019s voguish silk screens, adopting instead the rough woodcuts of his northern European ancestors. \u201cI was once called a Kraut painter.\u201d That, he suggests, says it all.<\/p>\n![\"Sir](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/\/850aee6b-6ff0-4a26-9df5-4af2bccf4e0a.jpg\")
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