Georg Baselitz, the renowned painter who played with perspective and flipped canvases on their head, died recently at age 88

The Painter in His Bed etc. , Georg Baselitz, 2023 Jochen Littkemann, Berlin / Munch Museum

In East Berlin in 1956, an 18-year-old upstart named Hans-Georg Bruno Kern found an art school requirement utterly disagreeable. While his classmates put in time working at an industrial site—a mandatory duty under East Germany’s communist regime—he resisted.

The teenager’s subsequent expulsion for “socio-political immaturity” set the stage for a decades-long career in art that rarely paid heed to tradition or order. Kern moved to West Berlin, changed his name to Georg Baselitz (after his hometown , Deutschbaselitz), and made a name for himself with a prolific catalogue of paintings that earned international acclaim.

Baselitz died on April 30 at 88 years old.…