Georg Baselitz

Baselitz was born on 23 January 1938, in Deutschbaselitz (now a part of Kamenz, Saxony), in what was later East Germany. His father was an elementary-school teacher and the family lived in the local school building.Baselitz attended the local school in Kamenz. In its assembly hall hung a reproduction of the painting Wermsdorfer Wald (1859) by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski, an artist whose grasp of Realism was a formative influence on Baselitz. Moreover, Baselitz was interested the writings of Jakob Böhme. At the ages of 14 and 15, he already 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 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 however, he was expelled for "sociopolitical immaturity" because he did not comply with the socialist ideas of the DDR. Baselitz' distinic and controversial nature already becomes apparent this early on in his career.

In 1957, he resumed his studies at Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin, where he settled down and met his future wife Johanna Elke Kretzschmar. In 1961, he attended Hann Trier's master class and completed his studies the following year. Hann Trier's classes were described as a creative environment largely dominated by the gestural abstraction of Tachism and Art Informel. At the Hochschule der Künste Baselitz immersed himself in the theories of Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich. During this time he became friends with Eugen Schönebeck and Benjamin Katz. Art historian Andreas Franzke describes Baselitz primary artistic influences at this time as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston.

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

Since 2013, Baselitz and his wife live in Salzburg in Austria and both obtained Austrian citizenship in 2015. He married Kretzschmar in 1962 and is the father of two sons, Daniel Blau and Anton Kern, both galerists.

(Source: wikipedia)