Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (born 23 January 1938) is a German painter.

Baselitz was born 23 January 1938, as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz (now a part of Kamenz, Saxony), in Germany. His father was an elementary-school teacher and the family lived in the local schoolhouse.

In 1958, as a student in West Berlin Baselitz met his future wife, Elke Kretzschmar. He married Kretzschmar in 1962 and they had a son named Daniel. In 1966, his second son, Anton, was born, and the family moved to Osthofen, near Worms, and later on elsewhere in Germany and Italy.

In 1961, he adopted the name Georg Baselitz in a tribute to his home town.

Since 2013, Baselitz and his wife live in Salzburg in Austria and obtained Austrian citizenship in 2015.

Baselitz attended the local school in Kamenz; in its in the assembly hall hung a reproduction of the 1859 painting Wermsdorfer Wald by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski, an artist whose grasp of realism was a formative influence on Baselitz. Baselitz read the writings of Jakob Böhme. At the ages of 14 and 15, he painted portraits, religious subjects, still lifes and landscapes, some in a futuristic style.

In 1955, he applied to study at the Kunstakademie in Dresden but was rejected. In 1956, he successfully enrolled at the Hochschule für bildende und angewandte Kunst in East Berlin. There he studied under professors Walter Womacka and Herbert Behrens-Hangler, and befriended Peter Graf and Ralf Winkler (later known as A. R. Penck). After two semesters, he was expelled for "sociopolitical immaturity."

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