Hans-Georg Kern was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a village in Saxony, and took his name from it. He grew up under National Socialism, then Soviet occupation, then the German Democratic Republic. The Dresden ruins, the bombing, the postwar rubble — these are not biographical details; they are the factual ground of everything he painted. In 1957 or 1958 he crossed to West Berlin and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts under Hann Trier. He married Elke Kretzschmar in 1962. He died in Salzburg in June 2025.
The early work is about shame and outrage. Die große Nacht im Eimer (1962–63) — a grotesque male figure ejaculating into a bucket — was seized by West Berlin prosecutors in October 1963 from his first solo show at Galerie Werner & Katz (later Galerie Springer) on charges of obscenity. Baselitz and the gallery owner Michael Werner were tried for exhibiting pornography. After two years the charge was downgraded; the painting was returned. The trial made Baselitz notorious and established the pattern his career would follow: raw figuration as deliberate provocation against polite West German culture.
In 1965, on a scholarship in Florence, he encountered Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino. The Helden series (1965–66) followed: solitary bandaged wanderers in blasted landscapes, monumental in scale, defeated in posture. The hero is an anti-hero; the body is a ruin. These are not ironic in the detached sense. They are ironic in the sense that the scale claims grandeur while the subject refuses it.
The inversion arrived in 1969 with Der Wald auf dem Kopf. Baselitz turned the image upside down. He would continue this for decades. The stated intent was to force the viewer away from narrative reading and toward pure painterly structure — color, gesture, composition — while retaining the figure as a structural anchor. Critics have read it as radical formalism and as avoidance. Baselitz himself offered both explanations at different moments. The gambit worked: it became his signature, the device by which his paintings are immediately recognizable.
The late 1970s brought a return to sculpture: rough-hewn wood, chainsaw marks, deliberately primitive totemic figures. Modell für eine Skulptur (1979–80) is a polychromed mass of ash wood, headless or limbless, aggressive in its crudity. He had made sculpture in the early 1960s — a wooden phallus was part of the 1963 scandal — but the 1979 works are mature, scaled, and uncompromising.
Throughout, Michael Werner remained his dealer. It is hard to overstate the importance of this relationship: Werner gave Baselitz his first show in 1963, stood by him through the trial, and represented him for more than fifty years. Werner’s gallery in Cologne, later New York and London, built the commercial architecture that allowed Baselitz to paint at the scale he required. The other core Neo-Expressionists — Lüpertz, Penck, Immendorff — also passed through Werner’s roster. The gallery functioned as a private institution holding the scene together institutionally for two decades.
Baselitz cited three traditions most often: Mannerist religious painting (absorbed in Florence), Soviet socialist realism (the scale and monumentality he grew up under, inverted), and Eastern European outsider art (the deliberate anti-academy). He collected Art Brut and folk sculpture. The Pandämonium manifestos he wrote with Eugen Schönebeck in 1961–62 praised schizophrenia and the irrational as necessary responses to a conformist society. Schönebeck left painting around 1964 for psychiatric reasons; Baselitz continued alone.
In January 2013, in an interview with Der Spiegel, Baselitz stated that women could not paint as well as men. He cited auction prices and museum representation as evidence. The response was immediate: The Guardian, Frieze, BBC, and feminist critics condemned the remarks. Baselitz partially retracted, framing the statement as an observation about market statistics rather than a personal belief, but he did not fully withdraw it. The statement is part of his record, and part of the scene’s record.
See also
- die-grosse-nacht-im-eimer — the seized painting, 1962–63
- der-wald-auf-dem-kopf — the first inverted canvas, 1969
- helden — the series of anti-heroes, 1965–66
- modell-fuer-eine-skulptur — the carved-wood return, 1979–80
- galerie-michael-werner — the dealer who held the scene together
- pandamonium-manifesto — the founding text with Schönebeck
- critical-disputes — for the 2013 statement and its response