{"id":559671,"date":"2026-05-01T00:33:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T00:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/559671\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T00:33:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T00:33:11","slug":"german-artist-of-upside-down-paintings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/559671\/","title":{"rendered":"German artist of upside-down paintings"},"content":{"rendered":"

The German painter, sculptor and printmaker Georg Baselitz owed his considerable international reputation to his habit, begun in 1969, of making and hanging his pictures upside down. He was thus able to explore the space between figuration and abstraction, an exercise which, for him, had political implications. While figuration was then commonly associated with art in East Germany, where Baselitz grew up, abstraction was the dominant style in the West, where Baselitz chose to live. For him, one was as pointless as the other.<\/p>\n

Whichever way up, Baselitz\u2019s painting played an important role in shaping German art in the later 20th century. He gave it international relevance, paradoxically by stressing its peculiarly German qualities and evoking recent German history. His art, he proclaimed, \u201cis brutal as Germany is brutal. Brutality has been evident very often in our history. This has had stylistic consequences.\u201d So Baselitz\u2019s painting and sculpture looks as if it was subjected to rough treatment. It gives the impression of speedy and direct execution devoid of preliminaries and forethought. His rich and often opaque imagery includes ruins, swastikas, crucifixes, handcarts, Russians, partisans, refugees, and even, in one of his violently sawn and painted wood sculptures, a figure giving the Hitler salute. It was as though he was attempting to revive the practice of history painting. \u201cI grew up during a very eventful period,\u201d Baselitz once said, \u201cand the events were bad almost without exception. The tenacity of these bad events in the memory is also part of my material.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baselitz was born in 1938 as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, some 20 miles from Dresden, in what would become the Soviet zone. The son of a primary school teacher, he grew up during the Nazi period and the war and saw from a distance the terrifying fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945 as well as the arrival of the victorious, rampaging Russians not long after. Having experienced the Nazi dictatorship he then lived for more than a decade under its communist equivalent. The anger and aggression that shaped Baselitz\u2019s work at every stage should not surprise us.<\/p>\n

\"ArtBaselitz in 1964 Czechatz\/ullstein bild\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In 1956 he enrolled at the Art Academy in East Berlin, where the only acceptable style was socialist realism. There was no alternative because no one was allowed to suggest that an alternative existed. Baselitz\u2019s curiosity could not be satisfied, however. After just one year he was suspended from the academy because of his supposed \u201csociopolitical immaturity\u201d and put to work in a factory producing brown coal briquettes. Instead of coming to his senses, which the authorities intended, he crossed into West Berlin and enrolled at the academy there. In 1957 this was relatively straightforward, requiring only a short train ride in the right direction and a modest amount of luck. However, because the move might have caused the Stasi to take too close an interest in his parents, it was then that he changed his name to Baselitz.<\/p>\n

In West Berlin Baselitz was impressed by American abstract expressionism but quickly came to think it indulgent. So he turned to modern French art, especially the work of the mentally unbalanced Antonin Artaud. Baselitz\u2019s two Pandemonium manifestos of 1961 and 1962 (written with his friend and fellow painter Eugen Sch\u00f6nebeck), with which his career can be said properly to have begun, reveal the extent of his debt to Artaud.<\/p>\n

He nevertheless saw himself as thoroughly German<\/a>, the inheritor of a tradition defined, in his words, by \u201cprimitive qualities, expressivity, religiosity, and a philosophical element\u201d. What he liked was the kind of figuration with distorted forms and heightened colour practised by the likes of Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Baselitz, who exaggerated the seeming crudeness and rawness of their styles, also responded to African tribal art and the art of the mentally disturbed. He wanted his paintings to shock and disturb a Germany that he considered intellectually bankrupt and complacent, to confront it with provocative and repulsive imagery. In 1962, he married Elke Kretzschmar and they had a son named Daniel. It was a long and happy marriage.<\/p>\n

The masterpiece of this early period is the painting Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain), its subject improbably suggested by an article about the Irish writer Brendan Behan who had exposed himself during a public reading. First exhibited in 1963 in Berlin at the artist\u2019s first solo show, it depicts a gnome-like figure with acne holding a penis as big as a baseball bat. Since masturbation was implied the painting provoked outrage and caused the police to confiscate it. At the subsequent trial Baselitz and his dealers were fined. The artist was too poor to pay so bailiffs stripped his flat, confiscating everything, including his wife\u2019s sewing machine. At the time he thought he\u2019d been ruined. In fact, with the assistance of the press, his future was assured.<\/p>\n

\"GermanBaselitz with Grosse Nacht im Eimer (Big Night Down the Drain) in 2012 JOHN MACDOUGALL\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In the mid-1960s Baselitz turned to the subject of anonymous \u201cheroes\u201d, solitary, awkward, ill-proportioned and often wounded figures set in landscapes which often included ruins. In 1966, still confronting the difficulty of producing figurative art during a period dominated by abstraction, he began to break up his motifs and distribute the fragments across each picture. This then led to the idea of painting each composition upside down. The earliest of them was first exhibited in 1970 in Cologne. Intriguingly, it may have been Masaccio\u2019s Crucifixion of St Peter that provoked this unconventional working method. The small predella painting, which Baselitz copied twice, shows the saint being crucified upside down.<\/p>\n

Baselitz exploited a wide variety of media, chiefly the woodcut, linocut and sculpture. The last, always in wood carved with a chainsaw<\/a> and then often crudely painted in black and red, initially attracted derision. Joseph Beuys condemned the sculptures as \u201cno better than the work of a first-year student\u201d when he saw them at the 1980 Venice Biennale. Baselitz\u2019s painting, too, attracted criticism. In 1984, wondering at the sheer number of works the artist had produced, Robert Hughes asked: \u201cHow many pictures does Georg Baselitz, that sturdy German fountain of overwrought mediocrity, paint a year?\u201d<\/p>\n

During the 1980s, following the example of his own sculpture, Baselitz\u2019s paintings became rougher. An example is Nachtessen in Dresden (Supper in Dresden, 1983), said to portray (upside down, of course) Edvard Munch together with members of the expressionist group Die Br\u00fccke a style reminiscent of one of them, Emil Nolde. The picture alludes to The Last Supper, a subject that Nolde also painted.<\/p>\n

A major work in scale and conception, Nachtessen was nevertheless put in the shade by the huge blockbuster called \u201945 (1989). Consisting of 20 large panels, painted in a single year, and reminiscent of a medieval German altarpiece produced by a ham-fisted amateur, it obviously alludes to the end of the Second World War and the burning of Dresden. Many of the panels are black, as though burnt or scorched, and most of them bear the marks of scratching or gouging. It\u2019s probably also significant that \u201945 was made in the year the GDR collapsed and reunification became almost certain. It was the year in which Baselitz was able to visit his homeland for the first time.<\/p>\n

\"GeorgBaselitz saw himself as thoroughly German despite his American influencesL\u00fcttgen\/ullstein bild\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Given his prodigious productivity, it was inevitable that Baselitz should run out of ideas if not steam. In 2005 he turned in on himself, reviewing his career thus far. The result was a series of rapid transcriptions of earlier work on a smaller scale that he called Remixes, borrowing the word from the record industry.<\/p>\n

Baselitz, his head shaven, his face mobile, was always energetic and lively. Once successful, he moved away from the main art centres, most spectacularly to a large castle, Schloss Derneburg near Hildesheim, where he was based from 1975 to 2006. He finally moved into a building, designed by Herzog and de Meuron, the architects of Tate Modern, on a lake in the foothills of the Alps.<\/p>\n

Baselitz\u2019s oeuvre registered repeated stylistic shifts. His central subject, however, remained the same: it was the experience of being German after 1945. \u201cAs a German, you\u2019re always told what a pariah you are,\u201d he said, \u201cwhat a dog, and how you\u2019ve got to travel the world with a bad conscience. Many do just that. How can you avoid it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Georg Baselitz, artist, was born on January 23, 1938. He died on April 30, 2026, aged 88<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The German painter, sculptor and printmaker Georg Baselitz owed his considerable international reputation to his habit, begun in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":559672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-559671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/559672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}