After World War II, This German Artist Turned the Art World Upside Down—Literally, by Inverting His Paintings

Georg Baselitz, the renowned painter who played with perspective and flipped canvases on their head, died recently at age 88

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

May 6, 2026 3:42 p.m.

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In East Berlin in 1956, an 18-year-old upstart named Hans-Georg Bruno Kern found an art school requirement utterly disagreeable. While his classmates put in time working at an industrial site—a mandatory duty under East Germany’s communist regime—he resisted.

The teenager’s subsequent expulsion for “socio-political immaturity” set the stage for a decades-long career in art that rarely paid heed to tradition or order. Kern moved to West Berlin, changed his name to Georg Baselitz (after his hometown, Deutschbaselitz), and made a name for himself with a prolific catalogue of paintings that earned international acclaim.

Baselitz died on April 30 at 88 years old. He is best remembered as the painter who turned his canvases—and the artistic circles of postwar Germany—upside down.

“I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society,” Baselitz told Artforum’s Donald Kuspit in 1995. “And I didn’t want to reestablish an order: I had seen enough of so-called order. I was forced to question everything, to be ‘naive,’ to start again.”

Baselitz was provocative from the start. His first solo exhibition, in 1963, ended with the police seizing two paintings of men with enormous penises. The government charged him with offending public morality, but it didn’t stick.

“As a human being, I am a citizen, but as an artist, I am asocial,” Baselitz told Deborah Gimelson in a 2014 interview for Interview magazine. “A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.”

In the late 1960s, Baselitz broke again from artistic norms in a series of so-called “Fracture Paintings,” in which he portrayed woodsmen, animals and forests in irregular, segmented pieces. This disorienting style—evocative of a Germany that was physically, ideologically and emotionally split in two—found a particular resonance with the public when the subjects were displayed completely upside down. The Man In the Tree and The Wood On Its Head, both of which drew inspiration from small German villages like the one where Baselitz grew up, were among the first in this style to receive acclaim.

He continued to explore this look with a series of six portraits, all painted in 1969, of working Germans. In subsequent decades this upside-down style became his trademark, and his work was regularly featured around the world. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oslo’s Munch Museum, Hong Kong’s Gagosian and Venice’s Fondazione Giorgio Cini all recently exhibited Baselitz.

Ever the provocateur, Baselitz contributed a sculpture to the German pavilion of the 1980 Venice Biennale of a figure with a raised arm that some observers said looked like a Nazi salute. For years, Baselitz denied this was his intention.

Collectors covet Baselitz’s art, with expensive sales showing how much he had grown from being a self-described “bullheaded” art pupil. His 1938 artwork Der Brückechor (The Brücke Chorus) sold at auction in 2014 for $7.4 million, while his 1965 artwork Mit Roter Fahne (With Red Flag) fetched £7.5 million (about $10 million in today’s currency) in 2017.

“This idea of ‘looking toward the future’ is nonsense,” Baselitz said. “I realized that simply going backwards is better. You stand in the rear of the train—looking at the tracks flying back below—or you stand at the stern of a boat and look back—looking back at what’s gone.”

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.