Kunstmuseum Basel opens survey of Georg Baselitz's drawings and graphic art

On occasion of his eightieth birthday, the Kunstmuseum Basel honors Georg Baselitz (b. Jan 23, 1938), one of the most distinguished figures in German postwar art. Concurrent with a focused retrospective of his oeuvre at the Fondation Beyeler, this exhibition showcases a representative survey of his drawings and colored graphic art from the museum’s Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings). Baselitz was trained as a painter at the Academies of Arts in East and West Berlin. In the context of German postwar art’s stern emphasis on abstraction, his insistence on a highly expressive and realistic figuration could not but be perceived as a provocation. Baselitz’s meteoric career took off in the mid-1960s, when he painted pictures that scandalized critics and audiences and published hallucinatory “Pandemonic Manifestos.” He cultivated his public image and featured “new heroes” in h