Baselitz, Georg

Baselitz, Georg (1938– ). German painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and sculptor, born at Deutschbaselitz, Saxony. He began his training in East Berlin, but moved to West Berlin in 1956 and studied at the Academy. It was at this time that he gave up his original surname, Kern, and adopted a name derived from his place of birth. In the 1960s he became controversial for producing deliberately crude paintings that give him a place as one of the pioneers of Neo-Expressionism. The most notorious of these pictures is The Great Piss-Up (also called Big Night Down the Drain, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 1962–3); it shows a man with an enormous penis ( Edward Lucie-Smith says it was ‘perhaps intended as a self-portrait') and it was seized by the police when it was first shown in Berlin in 1963. Baselitz attracted more controversy in 1969 when he began painting the images in his pictures upside down. In the catalogue of the exhibition ‘A New Spirit in Painting’ (Royal Academy, London, 1981), Christos M. Joachimides, one of the show's organizers, wrote that in doing this Baselitz ‘not only liberated himself from the bonds of a traditional conception of painting but took up, by this affront, a position of resistance within the context of art'. Jonathan Fineberg (Art Since 1940, 1995) describes ‘the idea of turning whole paintings upside down’ as ‘a signature device to take the focus off the subject matter and redirect it toward the expressive surface'. Since 1979 Baselitz has also made sculptures; in these the figures are the normal way up. He has become one of the best-known European artists of his generation, but critical opinion on him is divided. Daniel Wheeler (Art Since Mid-Century, 1991) praises his ‘exceptionally full, ripe color’ and considers that his work exudes ‘a Renaissance dignity and presence suggesting a culture determined to become whole again through inventive reintegration with its rich but problematic past'. Robert Hughes, on the other hand, describes Baselitz as a ‘fountain of overwrought mediocrity'.