Georg Baselitz, the fiercely uncompromising German painter and sculptor who turned the world upside down—literally and figuratively—in his quest to reinvent the language of postwar art, has died at 88. Emerging from the rubble of the Third Reich, he belonged to a generation of artists burdened with an unpaintable, shattered history. Yet, rather than retreating into the cool detachment of Conceptualism or the sleek irony of Pop Art, he charged headlong into the visceral, messy realities of paint and wood. His passing robs the art world of a towering, combative titan of Neo-Expressionism, a creator whose work was as crude, grotesque, and monumental as the traumatized national identity he so relentlessly mined.
Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938, he grew up in a fractured society and later adopted the name of his Saxon birthplace as a geographical anchor in an unmoored era. After being expelled from an East Berlin art academy for “sociopolitical immaturity,” he moved to the West, only to find the prevailing vogues of American abstraction equally insufficient. His solution was an act of profound, aggressive genius: in 1969, he began painting his subjects upside down. This audacious maneuver severed the figure from its narrative, forcing the viewer to confront the raw, physical reality of the brushstrokes. Whether hacking at massive tree trunks with a chainsaw to create brutalist sculptures or attacking canvases with violent, swirling impasto, he proved that the human form could survive on purely painterly terms.
In his astonishing final act, Mr. Baselitz laid bare the vulnerabilities of aging with the same unflinching intensity he once applied to history. Despite declining mobility, he adapted his methods, wielding extended brushes to produce radiant, spectral portraits of himself and his lifelong muse and wife, Elke, often suspended against luminous grounds of gold. These late masterpieces, stripped of his youthful fury but brimming with a profound, almost medieval solemnity, suggest that his career was not merely a reaction to a broken world, but a lifelong, fiercely tender reconstruction of it. He leaves behind an indelible, inverted legacy, one that will forever force us to reexamine how we look at the canvas.