German artist Georg Baselitz dies at 88

German painter and sculptor Georg Baselitz, known for his depictions of raw bodies and inverted landscapes, has died at the age of 88, Germany's Die Welt newspaper reported on Thursday (April 30). No cause of death was given. The Ropac Gallery wrote in a statement that Baselitz had died peacefully.

Baselitz spent his childhood amid the unforgiving discipline of Nazi Germany, and his adolescence amid the rubble and ideological re-education of the country's Soviet occupation zone.

He recalled the shock of first seeing works by Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists — evidence, in his telling, that the United States had a serious culture despite what he had been taught.

But rather than imitate an American style, Baselitz turned back to German sources, drawing on expressionism, folk traditions and imagery often dismissed by critics as ugly or even "degenerate". His early pictures, marked by raw bodies, stunted masculinity and abrasive humor, were widely seen as provocation.

This brand of artistic sensibility carried into his mid-1960s "Heroes" paintings, which presented hulking, battered figures that looked less like victors and more like survivors stumbling out of a defeated national myth.

But Baselitz's most recognisable works came in 1969, when he began painting motifs upside down.

The inversions made Baselitz an international figure in the 1970s and 1980s, as the market and institutions that once treated him as scandalous increasingly positioned him as a pillar of European postwar art.

His public reputation, however, did not settle into quiet respectability. He repeatedly sparked backlash with remarks about female painters, including a widely reported claim that women "don't paint very well". He also confronted the limits Germany's history places on gesture and imagery: a wooden sculpture shown at the 1980 Venice Biennale was widely read as evoking a Nazi salute, a reading he denied.

He was married to Johanna Elke Kretzschmar, with whom he had two sons. In later life, Baselitz painted huge canvases from his wheelchair and moved his brushes and paints in a rolling cart.

Production: Swantje Stein, Laura Urraca-Makuch/Reuters