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Born: 1938
Summary of Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz had a significant impact on a new generation of German artists by demonstrating how, in the years after World War II, they might reconcile questions of art and national identity. After receiving a rudimentary education in East Berlin’s officially sanctioned social realism, he relocated to West Berlin, where he discovered abstract art. But in the end, he was going to turn down both possibilities. At contrast to other artists, Baselitz restored German Expressionism, which the Nazis had decried, and put the human form back in the centre of painting. Baselitz inspired a resurgence of Neo-Expressionist painting in Germany in the 1970s and his example encouraged many more to take up similar styles both in Europe and the United States in the 1980s. He was controversial when he first appeared in 1963 and controversial again nearly two decades later when he began to produce sculpture. Baselitz.
Many of Baselitz’s works try to restore German national emblems that had been tarnished as a result of the Second World War. Even as a budding painter, Georg Baselitz refused to paint in the gestural abstraction popular at the time, instead choosing Expressionism, which would become crucial to his work. They were trying to connect with an aesthetic and cultural legacy that had been derided by the Nazis, and it showed. It also reaffirms his faith in romantic traditions, which previous Expressionists had embraced as a kind of resistance to modernity.
If you look closely at Baselitz’s paintings, his treatment of the human form shows a great trepidation about the prospect of glorifying humanity after the Holocaust and World War Two. Heroes and Partisans appear in his early work, although they’re shown as ungainly giants in ragged clothes. Using figures in an upside-down position in his later work may be seen as an acknowledgement of the same problem.
With their joint manifestos of 1962, Baselitz and fellow painter Eugen Schönebeck depicted themselves as romantic outsiders, and many of their works depict people who have historically been considered social misfits. While German society was remaking itself in the image of American materialism, his artwork marked a rejection and a protest. As a result, the characters in his Heroes series may be seen as archetypes from a bygone age of romantic German history.
However, others see Baselitz’s love of painting as a sign of trepidation about its future viability in a world of mass communication. His application of oil paint occasionally evokes uncomfortable scrapes and streaks, an effect that amplifies the suffering of the characters he represents rather than delighting in its sumptuous hues.
Biography of Georg Baselitz
Childhood
He was born Hans-Georg Kern on January 23, 1938, in Deutschbaselitz and became known as Georg Baselitz in the 1960s. His father was an elementary school teacher, and the family resided in an apartment above the school. During World War II, the school served as a garrison for troops, and it was demolished by the Russians while the family was hiding in the basements below the structure. Georg stumbled across some old pencil sketches in the school library. They were from the 19th century. Baselitz’s first encounter with art sparked a lifelong interest in creating art of his own. On an ornithological picture session in 1949, he accompanied wildlife photographer Helmut Drechsler and the work that resulted led to Baselitz’ subsequent vistas of the Saxon countryside and inspired his painting Wo ist der gelbe Milchkrug, Frau Vogel?
Early Life
Georg Baselitz attended secondary school in Kamens when his family relocated there in 1950. Baselitz’s first inverted painting, Der Wald auf der Kopf, was inspired by Ferdinand von Rayski’s picture Interlude During a Hunt in Wermersdorf Forest, which was shown in the school’s exercise hall in its original size oleograph (The Wood on its Head). Baselitz was influenced by the landscape paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement when he started painting during his high school years. Despite being rejected by the Dresden Art Academy, he started studying painting in 1956 at the Academy of Visual and Applied Art in Weissensee, East Berlin, under Herbert Behrens-Hangler. Baselitz was dismissed from school after two terms for “socio-political immaturity” His fascination in Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Ernst-Wilhelm Nay began when he enrolled in the Academy of Visual Arts in Charlottenburg, West Berlin, in 1957.
Mid Life
In 1958, Georg Kern changed his surname to Baselitz in honour of his home state of Saxony. As a result of this period of time, Baselitz made a number of fantastical portraits, including Onkel Bernard and the Rayski Head. It was inspired by German troops stationed near Baselitz’s house during World War II who helped shape the series’ theme of German identity. The paintings used broad, flowing brushstrokes, and the subjects seemed more like caricatures than standard realism portraiture. Baselitz married his studio helper Elke Kretzschmar, who gave birth to their son Daniel, at this period.
When Baselitz was working on his paintings and woodcuts in the 1960s, he was focusing on archetypes such as revolutionaries, heroes, and heroism. Anamorphosis, or the deformed or monstrous portrayal of a picture, piqued his curiosity, as seen by the figures’ disproportions and facial traits. Many of his most obscene works, such as Der Nackte Mann (Naked Man) and Die grobe Nacht im Eimer (Big Night Down the Drain), were confiscated by the State Attorney after his first solo show in 1963 because they were judged too contentious for public consumption. Baselitz kept experimenting with his exaggerated style in order to keep it fresh. Der Wald auf dem Kopf (The Wood on its Head) was Baselitz’s first upside-down painting, made in 1969 in an effort to separate style from subject matter. Baselitz’s intention was to construct painted things rather than painstakingly portrayed images of the actual environment via this upending of the picture he created.
Late Life
In 1975, eorg Baselitz went to Derneburg, Germany, where he worked as a professor of painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe and the Hochschule der Bildenden Kunste in Berlin. As a post-World War II German, he continued to express himself primarily via painting, using twisted forms and bright, dramatic brushwork to represent his inner emotional anguish.
In 1979, when he started constructing massive wooden sculptures, Baselitz completely reimagined his body of work. In keeping with his paintings, the sculptures were rough, unrefined, and unpolished. Without “polishing” he would leave the piece with chips, scratches, and other irregularities that accentuated its rough-hewn character. When he was selected to represent Germany at the Biennale of Venice in 1980, Baselitz’s position as an important visual artist was cemented. On display was his first sculpture, Model for an Artistic Work, which was controversial because of the similarities between its raised arm motion and the one used in Nazi salutes. As an active set designer for operas like Punch and Judy at the Dutch Opera in Amsterdam and a continuing artist since the 1990s, he has produced many drawings, woodcuts, paintings, and sculptures. The Guggenheim Museum in New York City had his first major retrospective in the United States in 1995.
Georg Baselitz is now based in Munich and Imeria, where he works and resides.
Using a wide range of creative mediums, Georg Baselitz has made a name for himself as an internationally recognised visual artist. A lot of his work deals with the horrors and tragedies of post-World War II Germany. Baselitz was well-known for his inverted, or upside-down, paintings, which shifted the focus from the subject to the qualities of paint, resulting in a work of art that was more like a sculpture than a painting. His heroic and rebellious figures’ anamorphic quality influenced a generation of Neo-Expressionist painters all over the world.
Famous Art by Georg Baselitz
Die grobe Nacht im Eimer (Big Night down the Drain)
1963
One of Baselitz’s most contentious works, Die grobe Nacht am Eimer (Big Night in the Drain), portrays a young kid, maybe a self-portrait, grasping an inflated phallus. As with many of Baselitz’s subsequent photographs of the artist, this one was inspired by an article on the notoriously sozzled Irish dramatist Brendan Behan. The picture was taken by the public prosecutor’s office during his first solo Berlin gallery show in 1963 for “infringement of public morality.” To urge a reawakening in a post-WWII Germany that had become numb to its own recent history, Baselitz chose a frightening topic. For him, confronting ugliness was essential in order to deal with the brutality of 20th-century history. He once remarked, “I proceed from a state of disharmony, from ugly things,”
Rebel
1965
Baselitz’s early portraiture is shown by The Rebel. Anatomical structure and proportions are warped to absurd levels. The picture is one of several he created in the 1960s that include iconic characters such as “heroes,” “rebels,” and “shepherds,” among others. There is a wounded and bleeding hero in this painting; his body is practically translucent as we get a peek of his viscous, entangled internal organs. As a boy growing up in Saxony, where he was directly affected by WWII, Baselitz was inspired to create this artwork. German Romanticism’s use of nature and the landscape as a focal point for patriotic and religious feelings is also evident in this work.
Der Wald auf dem Kopf (The Wood On Its Head)
1969
This is Baselitz’s first inverted painting, The Wood on Its Head, in which he turns his subject matter on its head to make it difficult to recognise the items represented. The theme, which is based on a painting by Louis Ferdinand von Rayski from the early nineteenth century, is comparable to those seen in his past work, but here he places emphasis on the material’s physical attributes. Due to this unconventional approach, we’re left wondering whether we’re looking at an abstraction or just a regular landscape flipped upside down. It may be seen as a sign of Baselitz’s ongoing quest to discover an alternative route to the ones that were prevalent when he debuted – the gestural abstraction of Paris and New York and the Socialist Realism of the Eastern Bloc.
Modell fur eine Skulptur (Model for a Sculpture)
1979-1980
For example, Baselitz’s first sculpture, Modell für eine Skulptur (Model for a Sculpture), shows his rough handling of wood in this medium, similar to how he handled paint in his prior work. As with the work of artists like Ludwig Kirchner, Baselitz’s primitivist approach was inspired by African sculpture, which he saw as a model for more spontaneous expressions of movement and human emotion than Western sculpture had previously offered. The piece was initially shown in 1980 at the Venice Biennale in the West German Pavilion. A sculpture by Baselitz was all that was delivered after the artist had meant to send paintings. The piece quickly attracted debate due to the figure’s raised arm motion, which resembles a Nazi salute. The figure’s red and black coloration has also been seen as a nod to the Nazi Party’s tricolour. Other possible inspirations for the artwork are Umberto Boccioni’s futurist bronze, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and a Dresden market’s edible memento, according to Baselitz. An expression of exasperation might be conveyed by the figure’s gesticulation, which is confined to the ground by a block of wood.
Head and Bottle
1982
The mammoth print, 1000 x 485 mm in size, finest exhibits Georg Baselitz’s vivacious vitality as a printer in Head and Bottle. In spite of the fact that the piece portrays a man’s bust, the inversion has rendered the picture muddled and almost abstract. Color seems to be peeled away from the surface in layers, exposing what’s behind each colour layer. A guy sipping from a glass and a person eating an orange are both shown in the painting, which is similar in style to previous works by the artist created around the same period. Even though the poses and items represented in this work just exacerbate viewers’ bewilderment when they see them upside-down, others have said that when depicted in such a large and unique size, daily actions take on the aspect of a religious rite.
Dresdner Frauen-Karla
1990
There are eleven gigantic sculptural busts of women in the Dresden Frauen-Karla series, all commemorating the city’s devastation during World War II. Baselitz grew up near the city and has deep memories of its devastation. He intended to honour the “rubble women,” women who, in his opinion, personified the city’s attempts to rebuild after a disaster. The rough face features were carved out of the massive block of wood that comprises the sculpture with a chainsaw. Because she is degenerating, she represents Dresden’s decrepit condition. The piercing look, massive size, and vivid yellow tone all contribute to the painting’s emotional impact. Karla is a lady who has been damaged by battle yet remains stubborn, much like the heroes in his Heroes book.
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver
- Georg Baselitz had a significant impact on a new generation of German artists by demonstrating how, in the years after World War II, they might reconcile questions of art and national identity.
- After receiving a rudimentary education in East Berlin’s officially sanctioned social realism, he relocated to West Berlin, where he discovered abstract art.
- But in the end, he was going to turn down both possibilities.
- At contrast to other artists, Baselitz restored German Expressionism, which the Nazis had decried, and put the human form back in the centre of painting.
- Baselitz inspired a resurgence of Neo-Expressionist painting in Germany in the 1970s and his example encouraged many more to take up similar styles both in Europe and the United States in the 1980s.
- He was controversial when he first appeared in 1963 and controversial again nearly two decades later when he began to produce sculpture.
- Baselitz.
- Many of Baselitz’s works try to restore German national emblems that had been tarnished as a result of the Second World War.
- Even as a budding painter, Georg Baselitz refused to paint in the gestural abstraction popular at the time, instead choosing Expressionism, which would become crucial to his work.
- They were trying to connect with an aesthetic and cultural legacy that had been derided by the Nazis, and it showed.
- It also reaffirms his faith in romantic traditions, which previous Expressionists had embraced as a kind of resistance to modernity.
- If you look closely at Baselitz’s paintings, his treatment of the human form shows a great trepidation about the prospect of glorifying humanity after the Holocaust and World War Two.
- Heroes and Partisans appear in his early work, although they’re shown as ungainly giants in ragged clothes.
- Using figures in an upside-down position in his later work may be seen as an acknowledgement of the same problem.
- With their joint manifestos of 1962, Baselitz and fellow painter Eugen Schönebeck depicted themselves as romantic outsiders, and many of their works depict people who have historically been considered social misfits.
- While German society was remaking itself in the image of American materialism, his artwork marked a rejection and a protest.
- As a result, the characters in his Heroes series may be seen as archetypes from a bygone age of romantic German history.
- However, others see Baselitz’s love of painting as a sign of trepidation about its future viability in a world of mass communication.
- His application of oil paint occasionally evokes uncomfortable scrapes and streaks, an effect that amplifies the suffering of the characters he represents rather than delighting in its sumptuous hues.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
