Georg Baselitz valuation
Turned the subject upside down in 1969 and kept painting it that way for more than fifty years.
Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) was born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz in Saxony and took his name from the village after moving to West Berlin, having been expelled from art school in the East.
What a work by Georg Baselitz is worth
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Bio
Georg Baselitz (1938–2026) was born Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz in Saxony and took his name from the village after moving to West Berlin, having been expelled from art school in the East. His first exhibition, in 1963, was raided and two paintings were seized, which set the tone. In 1969 he began inverting the motif — the figure, the eagle, the tree painted upside down — not as a joke but to force attention onto the paint rather than the thing depicted, and he did so consistently for more than fifty years. He represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1980 with a sculpture that caused its own scandal, and he is counted among the defining post-war German painters.
The paintings are unique and large. Alongside them sits a printed output of real substance — woodcuts, etchings, drypoints and linocuts, often in very small editions and frequently printed and reworked by the artist himself, so impressions from a single edition can differ visibly from one another. Orientation is a genuine practical issue: inverted images are hung the wrong way up more often than one would expect, and the signature and date, usually at what reads as the bottom, settle it. The sculpture is unique, in roughly worked and painted wood.
The print catalogues, and the retrospectives
His prints are catalogued first by Fred Jahn, whose volumes covering 1963 to 1982 were published in 1983 and 1987, and later volumes compiled by Rainer Michael Mason continue the record. Because he often reworked plates and printed impressions himself, the catalogue entry, with its states and the number of impressions, is what places a print.
The Royal Academy's retrospective in 2007, curated by Norman Rosenthal, brought more than sixty paintings to London with drawings, prints and sculpture, and the Centre Pompidou's retrospective, from October 2021 to March 2022, covered six decades of his work.
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