Overview
- Baselitz, whose longtime gallery confirmed Thursday he died peacefully at 88, had no cause of death announced and is survived by his wife, Elke, and sons Daniel Blau and Anton Kern.
- The artist’s final series opens May 6 at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, presenting late gilded works that many expect to anchor early reassessments of his legacy.
- He pioneered inverted compositions in 1969, flipping figures and trees to break the link between image and subject so viewers focused on paint, rhythm, and form.
- Born Hans‑Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, he was expelled from an East Berlin academy, moved to West Berlin in 1957, and drew early notoriety in 1963 when prosecutors seized two paintings as obscene.
- He gained wide institutional recognition, from representing West Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale to a Centre Pompidou retrospective in 2021 and election to the Académie des Beaux‑Arts in 2019, even as debates over a Biennale sculpture and blunt public remarks kept his work in fierce public view.