![\"FRANKFURT](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-544004632.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tHe \u201ctaps into one of German art\u2019s oldest themes \u2013 the omnipresence of death and inevitability of decay,\u201d\u00a0 critic Jonathan Jones wrote in the Guardian <\/em>in 2016. \u201cJust as Renaissance artists saw the skull stare back at them from the mirror, so this modern master faces human decline and sees a strange beauty in it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBy the 1980s, Baselitz\u2019s profile began to expand beyond Germany, when he was exhibited in dialogue with figurative painters sharing his expressionist leanings, including Italy\u2019s Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente. His place in contemporary art history grew more complex as, alongside German contemporaries such as Anselm Kiefer, he rebuffed the preceding decade\u2019s en vogue movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHans-Georg Bruno Kern was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a village outside Dresden, during the height of Nazi rule. His father, Johannes Kern, a schoolteacher, was required to join the Nazi Party\u2014a membership that, in the postwar period, led to his being barred from teaching by the East German government. His mother, Lieselotte, began teaching to support the family, while a young Hans-Georg studied social realism in East Berlin. (The artist would take Baselitz, the latter half of his hometown, as his surname in 1961, after he left East Germany.)<\/p>\n \n\tInterviews and anecdotes from Baselitz and his peers over the years paint a portrait of a charismatic, talented student\u2014albeit one with authority issues: He was expelled from art school in 1957,\u00a0 after which he moved to West Berlin to study at the Staatliche Hochschule f\u00fcr Bildende K\u00fcnste. As a young art student in Communist East Germany during the mid-1950s, he recounted, \u201cyou could paint realistically or abstractly. Realism was linked to socialism while abstraction meant you supported capitalism.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tStudying in West Germany in 1958, Baselitz had a pivotal encounter with Abstract Expressionism when the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s survey of Jackson Pollock traveled to the Hochschule. Alongside the Pollock exhibition was another MoMA show, the landmark \u201cNew American Painting.\u201d \u201cIt was so incredible,\u201d he said. \u201cI could touch it.\u201d Seeing works by Pollock, Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, and Willem de Kooning, Baselitz recalled that he \u201cfelt I could not be better than they were.\u201d So he decided to remain firmly a figurative artist\u2014or, as he put it, \u201cI didn\u2019t take part in this modern style. It was an existential decision. I remained an outsider.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAs a young artist, Baselitz first drew attention in Berlin\u2019s then small art scene, via a two-person exhibition alongside his peer Eugen Sch\u00f6nebeck. The exhibition poster doubled as a manifesto, titled Pandamonisches Manifest I, 1. Version<\/em> (Pandemonium Manifesto, First Version<\/em>), a portion of which he authored read: \u201cIn me there are prepubertal enclaves [the smell when I was born]; in me there is the greening of youth, love in decoration, the tower-building idea.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tArtist Carroll Dunham, writing in Artforum<\/em> in 2018 on the occasion of Baselitz\u2019s exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, described his early work as \u201cprovincial\u201d in light of his mature oeuvre, \u201cbut it must be understood as his rebellion against both the political and academic proscriptions of his art education under Communism, and against the timid postwar abstractions being made in a still thoroughly traumatized Germany.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tHis first solo exhibition of paintings, in 1963 at Galerie Werner & Katz in Berlin, provoked a critical uproar. Labeled \u201cdisturbing\u201d by visitors, the works introduced his signature palette of decay. Die gro\u00dfe Nacht im Eimer<\/em> (The Big Night Down the Drain<\/em>), made that year, depicts a figure of indiscernible age with a cadaverous pallor and yellow splotches, brandishing an oversized phallus beneath a soot-black veil. Art historian Klaus Gallwitz described the motif as representative of anxiously performed masculinity: \u201cThe shape of the face, like the upper body covered with informal brushstrokes, has no other physiognomic features apart from the eyes and a large ear,\u201d Gallwitz said of Die gro\u00dfe Nacht im Eimer<\/em>.<\/p>\n \n\tBaselitz\u2019s longstanding conceptual entanglements of power, masculinity, and art were cast in a stark new light in 2013, when the artist told Der Spiegel<\/em>, \u201cWomen don\u2019t paint very well.\u201d Despite swift backlash, two years later he reiterated the view in an interview with the Guardian<\/em>, arguing that when it comes to the talent of women painters and how much their work sell for: \u201cThe market doesn\u2019t lie.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cEven though painting classes in art academies are more than 90% made up of women, it\u2019s a fact that very few of them succeed,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s nothing to do with education, or chances, or male gallery owners. It\u2019s to do with something else, and it\u2019s not my job to answer why it\u2019s so. It doesn\u2019t just apply to painting, either, but also music.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tDoubling down, he rejected the idea of structural bias in favor of male artists, instead attributing the disparity to a personal failing: \u201cWhat does it matter so much? If women are ambitious enough to succeed, they can do so, thank you very much. But up until now, they have failed to prove that they want to. Normally, women sell themselves well, but not as painters.\u201d (The comments resurfaced among critics in 2019 amid the broader #MeToo movement, which had exposed sexual misconduct by powerful men across virtually all sectors of arts and culture.)<\/p>\n \n\tThat year, Gagosian New York opened \u201cGeorg Baselitz: Devotion,\u201d which prominently featured portraits by Baselitz paying homage to painters he had encountered in his formative viewing of New American Painting<\/em>, as well as portraits of his peers. As ARTnews<\/em> noted at the time, almost all of the living artists depicted in the show were women (including Cecily Brown and Tracey Emin), most of them born in the years just before and after his first solo show in 1963.<\/p>\n \n\tBaselitz courted controversy of a different sort shortly after, during the Covid-19 pandemic. He was among those in Germany who decried government measures intended to curb the spread of the disease, including the Infection Protection Act, under which districts or towns could be ordered to close if there were more than 100 Covid cases in a seven-day period. In an interview with Welt am Sonntag<\/em> in 2021, he dismissed the \u201chorror stories\u201d about Covid on primetime news as \u201cbullshit.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tBaselitz later resigned from his post at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, a prominent art association in Munich, as its then-president Winfried Nerdinger became embroiled in controversy following criticism of lockdown policy. Nerdinger had accused the German government of viewing artists as \u201ccompletely unimportant\u201d due to the temporary closure of art spaces. Baselitz said he resigned in response to the backlash against Nerdinger, not the remarks themselves, calling the protesters\u2019 behavior \u201cdisgusting.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBaselitz\u2019s reputation, however, absorbed each controversy and seemed little impacted by it. In the last five years, it has been reinforced by solo exhibitions at the Munch Museum, the Morgan Library & Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pinakothek der Moderne, and the Centre Pompidou, among others worldwide. His litany of honors includes the L\u00e9gion d\u2019Honneur and the Chevalier de l\u2019Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, Austria\u2019s Decoration of Honour for Science and Art in Vienna, and an honorary professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krak\u00f3w. He has repeatedly shown in the Venice Biennale\u2013related events, collateral or curated exhibitions, starting in the 1980s.<\/p>\n \n\tIn interviews conducted late in his life, he often returned to his past, retrospectively locating the start of his artistic journey to the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombing raids in early 1945. \u201cI always thought that what I do is real-life melancholy,\u201d he said. \u201cBeing dystopian means nothing other than inventing a bad future. The utopians invent paradise and the dystopians invent hell. But both are futures. And my position is far away from this. I do not reflect into the distance.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHe is survived by his son, the art dealer Anton Kern.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/georg-baselitz-pioneering-german-postwar-painter-dies-at-88-1234783326\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-545961433.jpg?w=1024″] Georg Baselitz, a preeminent painter of postwar Germany and an engine of the 1980s Neo-Expressionist movement that rebuked Minimalism, and who would later come under fire for his comments about women artists, has died at 88. His death was announced in a press release by Thaddaeus Ropac, one of the galleries that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1913825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1913825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1913825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1913825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1913825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1913825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![German artist Georg Baselitz poses in front of his painting \"Self Portrait\" during an exhibition of his work in the southern German city of Baden Baden on November 19, 2009. The exhibition runs from on November 21, 2009 to March 14, 2010. AFP PHOTO DDP \/ SASCHA SCHUERMANN GERMANY OUT (Photo credit should read SASCHA SCHUERMANN\/DDP\/AFP via Getty Images)](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-95600648.jpg?w=400\")
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