GEORGE BASELITZ

George Baselitz (1938 )German Expressionist Artist.

Born 23 January 1938 as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz/Saxony, in what was later East Germany. His father is an elementary schoolteacher and the family lives in the local schoolhouse; in its library, Baselitz comes across albums of nineteenth-century pencil drawings – his first encounter with art. He acts as assistant to nature photographer Helmut Drechsler on occasional “ornithological shoots.”

1950-1955 The family moves to the county town of Kamenz. Baselitz attends the local ‘Gymnasium,’ in the assembly hall of which hangs a reproduction of the painting “Wermsdorfer Wald” (1859) by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski. He reads the writings of Jakob Böhme. At the age of 14-15, he paints portraits, religious subjects, still lifes and landscapes, some in a futuristic style.

Baselitz’s style is Expressionist. His speciality is to paint his subjects the other way around to free the subject from its content. Baslitz is one of the world’s best-selling living artists. He is a professor at the renowned Hochschule der Künste in Berlin.

In 1955, he applies to study at the Kunstakademie in Dresden but is rejected. . In 1956, he began to study art at the Hochschule für Bildende und Angewandte Künste in East Berlin , from which he was expelled in 1957 for “socio-political immaturity.” Nonetheless, the same year he continued to pursue his art studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in West Berlin . Leaving East Germany , where Socialist Realism served to further the state’s ideology, he then discovered that in the West the “uniform language of an abstract expressionism had degenerated to become mere design.” Baselitz’s status as an outsider had not changed.

Autobiographical elements were present in Baselitz’s painting from the outset, especially in his representation of people and landscapes. However, it was not until Baselitz’s 1996 series “Family Pictures” that they became the artist’s dominant theme.