In Memoriam Georg Baselitz (1938–2026)

Even in his late years, Georg Baselitz remained dry as a bone. During an exhibition marking his 80th birthday at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, he categorically declared: “I am not an artist; I am a painter.” Artists, he went on to explain, represent themselves—whereas painters “paint pictures that represent themselves.”

The same interview saw Baselitz describe himself as indeed vain to a certain extent, though he had never portrayed himself in a positive light—only in a negative one: “I look bad, I look old, I have wrinkles, and so on.” He did, however, shave regularly. Because: “I don’t want to look so disheveled and moldy.”

This sober take on reality applied not only to how he presented himself in public but also to the very essence of his art: “There is no heroization; there is no pathos.” Nor was there any pity for himself or for his surroundings—which the artist, born in Deutschbaselitz as Hans-Georg Bruno Kern, had often experienced as harsh, hostile, and dismissive ever since his childhood during World War II and his youth in the GDR. He began studying art at the Weißensee Academy of Art in Berlin in 1956 but was expelled after just two semesters for “socio-political immaturity.” He then fled to the western part of the city and continued his studies at West Berlin’s Academy of Arts. Yes happiness eluded him there, as well.

Georg Baselitz was anything but someone who craved a sense of belonging; he once described the creative process in art as “radically subjective” and “asocial.”

His next steps were thus only logical: together with Eugen Schönebeck, one of the few artistic sparring partners whom the staunch solipsist would accept, he formulated those “Pandemonic Manifestos” that may be read as the aesthetic source text for the artistic developments of the coming decades. These were essentially pleas for the ugly, the obscene, the blasphemous, and the pathological as existential modalities that could serve to stir up the “harmonious soup” of facile academic abstraction that was de rigueur during the era of postwar reconstruction. A key sentence can be found in the First Pandemonic Manifesto of 1961: “In my eyes you see nature’s altar, the carnal sacrifice, the scraps of food in the cesspool-pan, the vapors of the bedsheets.”

Georg Baselitz later dismissed such rough formulations as adolescent posturing, but at the time there indeed was an affinity with artists who still felt the war’s aftershocks in their bones; who sought to lend form and artistic contours to this existential experience with rugged and impasto brushwork; who pushed painting to its absolute limits and then, like the Viennese Actionists, went even farther. Georg Baselitz, however, remained true to his craft and sought, in a sense, to blow the whole thing open from within by completely rethinking his art. He once said that a significant discovery for him had been the approach of using a painting to convey an idea. And since he found this particularly important, he clarified: “It’s not the painting as an idea, but the fact that I use the painting as a vehicle for an idea.”

His own work as an artist, which bypassed with both Informalism and Pop Art, soon bore the most pleasingly scandalous of fruits. The painting Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain), more a chaotic assemblage of materials than a portrait, depicts a boy with a giant penis masturbating. This image shocked the staid Bonn Republic and was promptly confiscated. In a similar way, the extensive series “Heroes”—which Baselitz created in the mid-1960s—likely held virtually no appeal for those who sought to retrospectively whitewash the war: it features pale, long-necked ghosts staring forlornly toward the viewer and roughly drawn figures carrying limp flags with what seems to be their last ounce of strength.

Baselitz had his best and most enduring idea in 1969 when he began his “upside-down” paintings, which significantly bolstered his prominence even outside the narrow confines of the art world.

To him, as one who had never entirely renounced figuration, this was the solution to numerous problems that had arisen from the crisis in painting and the dictatorship of abstraction: through their inversion, the subjects suddenly became secondary—with the viewers’ focus shifted from the narrative aspect toward color, texture, and the pure act of painting. And even so, something representational persisted; the painting remained the vehicle for an idea.

As the decades passed, Georg Baselitz underwent many transformations and shifted his perspectives: he moved from East to West Germany and eventually to Austria, where he lived in Salzburg for many years and became an Austrian citizen in 2015. It wasn’t until 1979 that the artist began creating large-scale wooden sculptures, often using chainsaws to literally carve rough and angular forms from blocks of wood. But while such “chainsaw massacres” have served to symbolize the destruction of the state—and thus the entire body politic—in public performances by Elon Musk and Javier Milei, they served Georg Baselitz as liberating impulses: catharsis through the act of destruction, just as he had already outlined in his Pandemonic Manifesto.

The artist—who, given his life story, can certainly also be considered Austrian—passed away on 30 April 2026. In the years leading up to his death, his art took on yet another hue, another visual tonality. His color palette became earthier and more subdued; his figures—still upside-down—appear emaciated, well-nigh skeletal. They possess the character of archaic symbols that attempt to conjure a world beyond the space-time continuum. And at times, they are reminiscent of the plaster casts of those human bodies that perished in the rain of ash at Pompeii. Georg Baselitz, that spirit of perpetual negation, had achieved a transparent quality in the final stage of his art—a quality far removed from scandal and provocation, one that—in the spirit of negative dialectics—sought to artistically transcend the all-too-human by treating it as the non-identical.

To the very end, there was one maxim to which he remained true: “As a painter, I’m unreliable: Once I’ve painted a picture, I immediately walk away from it and paint another one.”

Thomas Mießgang 
30 October 2026