German artist honored for Nazi defiance work
Print Edition
GEORG Baselitz, a provocative German artist who inspired a generation with challenging depictions of the Nazi era and the post-war division of Germany, is being honored by a retrospective to mark his 80th birthday.
Born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz in 1938, Baselitz gained worldwide fame in the 1970s with his portraits — often bizarrely showing his subjects upside down — which he painted in a neo-expressionist style.
“Seeing 60 years of one own’s pictures is a difficult undertaking,” Baselitz said at the opening of the exhibition at the Swiss Fondation Beyeler in Basel. “But I don’t recognize it (the art) any more. It’s almost as if I were to re-encounter myself now as a baby, I can’t.”
In a manifesto in 1961 when he was 23, he said he was “swollen and bloated” with memories of the Nazi era — his father had been a party member — and the aftermath of a divided Germany and the socialist East, which he fled in 1957.
His early paintings in the 1960s were “aggressive, wholly malicious,” referring to works which at the time German prosecutors seized as lewd. Bringing together some 90 paintings and 12 sculptures from 1959 to the present day, the exhibit is open to the public until April 29.
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