Georg Baselitz - the painter with the pictures on his head

Georg Baselitz largest German painters and sculptors for almost half a century , he may be the most famous contemporary German artist, and yet many Germans do not think of his name more than one: "Isn't that with the pictures upside down?"

Yes, he is, but there is a little more to tell about Baselitz: Georg Baselitz was born in Deutschbaselitz in Oberlausitz in 1938, after graduating from high school in 1956 he studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin-Weißensee. His professors were the system-independent Lovis-Corinth student Herbert Behrens-Hangeler, but also “Comrade artist” (Axel Hecht in Arte 12/2008, pp. 74-79) Walter Womacka.

GDR showed quickly , after two semesters he was thrown by the university because of “civic immature”.

He continued his studies at the West Berlin University of Fine Arts and also moved to Berlin . Here he had free access to all the knowledge of art, especially the young Baselitz impressed the works of Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malewitsch and Ernst Wilhelm Nay, whose theories he was particularly concerned with.

He also traveled to Paris and Amsterdam, explored the work of Antonin Artaud and Jean Dubuffet and was fascinated by the Prinzhorn collection, the first anthology of artistic works from the psychiatric context.

In 1961 he felt ready for the beginning of his own work and happily accepted the artist name Georg Baselitz (which was based on his place of birth, as smart combiners already suspected at the beginning of the article).

The art of the capital, this “entire harmony soup, in which only everything bland was in the other” (Baselitz in Welt Online, 4/4/2012), was also not based on Baselitz. The art college was occupied by the esoterics, Buddhism had the ruling fashion, he and his colleague Eugen Schönebeck had to draw attention to himself.

So together they organized their first exhibition in Charlottenburger Schaperstrasse, which was not rewarded by sales and z. B. in the Berlin daily newspaper “Tagesspiegel” with devastating criticism.

Baselitz and Schönebeck now wrote against this petty -bourgeois art view, also in 1961, the "1st Pandemonic Manifesto", in 1962 the "2nd Pandemonic Manifesto", critical writings, which with strong rhetorical guns will go through the determined attitude against everything that is coherent and conventional, the Baselitz 'entire work.

However, this attitude led to a mighty art scandal when Baselitz led by a newspaper article about the rebellious Irish poet Brendan, who had drunk and declated with open pants on a big stage, painted three variants of his big night, on everyone a "strange guy who fits his dick." (Baselitz, Sun).

"The big night in the bucket" was taken in at his first solo exhibition in the Werner & Katz gallery with the Berliners with a disruptive, the picture was finally confiscated by the Berlin public prosecutor's office together with another Baselitz plant due to alleged immorality.

However, there was even a (later canceled) conviction to pay DM 400,-Baselitz, the unrest around his art could escape because (without his own application) the Villa-Romana Prize in 1965 was awarded. He accepted the scholarship associated with the price and spent large parts of the year in the Künstlerhaus in Florence.

In 1966 Baselitz then left Berlin angrily, his outrage over what he had happened had now started to develop his fracture images, for a while all the image motifs in this way were broken down into strips and re -assembled.

The fracture pictures finally led him to turn his pictures upside down in 1969, a attitude with which he was to be known and famous. As early as 1970, the Cologne gallery Franz Dahlem showed an exhibition from him, which showed head pictures without exception.

With these “upside down” , he was now famous, from around 1975 Baselitz images hung at all important exhibitions and museums, in Germany and abroad. The painter was no longer close to money either, in 1971 he moved to a villa in Forst on the Weinstraße, in 1975 he bought Derneburg Castle in Lower Saxony (that he sold again in 2006, he lives on Ammersee in Upper Bavaria today).

His artistic development was not completed with the up-to-head images, there was a phase of so-called “Russian images” , in which Baselitz alienated the images of socialist realism known from the GDR youth, and a phase of the “remix”, in which he made older images from a fresh perspective and sharper.

In addition, from 1977 to 1983, Baselitz taught in a professorship at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and was appointed professor to the University of the Arts in Berlin (from 2001 in University of the Arts Berlin) from 1977 to 1988, 1992 to 2003.

He was able to accept countless honors , including the Goslarer Kaiserring, the French Order of the Arts and the literature, an honorary professorship at the Royal Academy of Arts London, the Praemium Imperial Award and (honor) memberships regarding the “Nobel Prize of the Arts” His works are represented in around 30 public collections in Germany and in various European collections.

Even at that time it felt that it was characterized by a stronger tendency to irony as characteristic of the established artistry and the morale of the 1960s that the comparatively harmless (because clearly artistic) representation of two naked men could trigger such a reaction and that a clearly meant ironically exaggerated exaggeration in Baselitz, which later brought him to head. And they find it consistent when this art, which was upside down, was the Baselitz “money and power and fame in the art world”.

Further information:

• Works of art to be sold and selected exhibitions on Georg Baselitz
• Contribution from the mirror "Baselitz painting brings 2.7 million euros"
• Interview with Georg Baselitz

Lina cream

Passionate author with lively art interest

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