Georg Baselitz Quotes

The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.

I begin with an idea, but as I work, the picture takes over. Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived... and the picture that fights for its own life.

Art is visceral and vulgar - it's an eruption.

A painter doesn't need any talent. In fact, it's better not to have it.

An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object.

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface.

In the beginning, the energy involved to create came from my reaction to the work of other artists. The force behind this was aggression. The art that I saw was great, but I had to reject it, because I could not continue in the same direction. So I had to do something entirely different. It had to be so different, so extreme, that those who loved pop art, for instance, hated me. And this was my strength.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

As a human being, I am a citizen, but as an artist, I am asocial.

What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.

I dont want to create a monster; I want to make something which is new, exceptional, something that only I do...something that references tradition, but is still new.

Women don't paint very well. It's a fact. There are, of course, exceptions. Agnes Martin or, from the past, Paula Modersohn-Becker.

You dig in and you find something.

I have always had the feeling that other people are too stupid to discover interesting things. That's why I do it myself. I think of collecting as a way to show that I understand what's important better than others do.

I don't like things that can be reproduced. Wood isn't important in itself but rather in the fact that objects made in it are unique, simple, unpretentious.

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.

I always work out of uncertainty but when a painting's finished it becomes a fixed idea, apparently a final statement. In time though, uncertainty returns.. your thought process goes on.

The idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous. Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse.

I don't paint over my paintings with black paint. I paint black paintings. It isn't because I'm sad, just as I didn't paint red paintings yesterday because I was happy. Nor will I paint yellow paintings tomorrow because I'm jealous.

I did not always trust my teachers, because I found them too weak. I was looking for something that could take me in a new direction, for things that I could admire. And because it was so hard to find this, I became a sort of outsider. That's why I began to identify with the insane, "outsider" artists.

All German painters have a neurosis with Germany's past: war, the postwar period most of all, East Germany. I addressed all of this in a deep depression and under great pressure. My paintings are battles, if you will.

I remember that Michael Werner told me about a famous collector, and Michael set up an appointment for us to meet. This man looked around the room and at my pictures. Then he said, "Young man, why are you doing these horrible things? Look out the window. There are nice girls out there. It's springtime. Look at how beautiful the world can be. You'll ruin your health by smoking so much and doing such tortured things."

I don't see art as entertainment.

What I could never escape was Germany, and being German.

I always feel attacked when I'm asked about my painting.