Georg Baselitz, one of Germany's most celebrated and provocative postwar artists, died peacefully on 30 April 2026 at the age of 88. His studio confirmed the death to Der Spiegel, and the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery — which had a longstanding professional relationship with the artist — paid tribute, saying Baselitz had "defined German visual art for a generation" and was "one of the most important artists of our time." His paintings hang in major museums across the world, from Paris to Venice.

Born Hans-Georg Kern on 23 January 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a small town near Dresden in what would become socialist East Germany, he adopted his artist's name in 1961 both as an homage to his birthplace and to protect his family from the controversies his work inevitably provoked. He began his art studies in East Berlin but was expelled after two semesters for what authorities described as "socio-political immaturity" — partly because he had been working in the style of Picasso, whose art was considered decadently Western in the German Democratic Republic. He relocated to West Berlin in 1957 and quickly established himself as an uncompromising avant-gardist. His first solo exhibition, in 1963, ended with police confiscating two paintings laden with sexual symbolism, triggering a high-profile legal battle.

Baselitz's most distinctive and enduring contribution to art history came in 1969, when he began painting his canvases upside down and inverting his motifs. The technique, he explained, was intended to liberate traditional images from their familiar context and to find a path between pure abstraction and conventional figurative art. He applied this method to a celebrated series of eagles — the emblem shared by both the Nazi Third Reich and the postwar Federal Republic — depicting the birds finger-painted and tumbling earthward. One of these works caught the eye of Gerhard Schröder, who as German chancellor from 1998 to 2005 hung the inverted eagle prominently behind his desk. Alongside contemporaries Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, Baselitz used his art to grapple with the trauma of German history and questions of collective guilt, describing his paintings as "battles" against the weight of that past.

Baselitz was also a prolific sculptor and printmaker. A chainsaw-and-axe-hewn linden wood figure he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1980 caused controversy for what some saw as a Nazi salute; Baselitz maintained it depicted a gesture of deference inspired by artefacts of the Lobi people of Burkina Faso. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, one of the art world's most prestigious international prizes, and in his later decades ranked among the highest-priced living German artists, surpassed only by Richter. His most recent major exhibition, showing work from his final years, was held at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg. A trenchant and at times divisive voice, Baselitz made controversial remarks about women artists that he later partially retracted, expressing admiration for figures including Tracey Emin and the baroque master Artemisia Gentileschi. His death closes a career of more than six decades that fundamentally shaped how Germany — and the world — understood postwar expressionism.