Master Painter Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz is a bluff provocateur who is considered to be one of the most important contemporary painters whose works achieve record prices at auction. Georg Baselitz is always reinventing himself as an artist. From chunks of meat at the start of his career, through his heroic pictures to a complete reversal of his motifs and his so-called "remixes," everything remains in a state of flux.

Baselitz's aggression and expressive brushwork have long since secured him a place in the world's renowned museums. Yet his home life is surprisingly bourgeois: now in his eighties, he lives with his family in grandiose buildings such as Derneburg Castle in Lower Saxony and now on an estate built by Herzog & de Meuron on Lake Ammersee in Bavaria. So what is Georg Baselitz actually like? How is his work changing and what is his secret? We talk to many of his friends and colleagues, among them artist Markus Lüpertz, gallery owner Michael Werner and curator Norman Rosenthal. "Baselitz is a man full of mysteries," whispers Markus Lüpertz. Norman Rosenthal compares his artistic personality with that of Pablo Picasso. Michael Werner remembers Baselitz as a fragile young artist who wasn't good at dealing with scandal and imparts a long-kept secret about the confiscation of Baselitz's pictures in the 1960s. Baselitz himself confidently explains his artistic work and self-image in numerous documentary recordings. But Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, who worked for the Munich Pinakothek der Moderne for a long time, says that Baselitz is also plagued by doubt and new exhibitions are a matter of great concern for him. Yet, as collector Hans Grothe concludes, as the "Beethoven of Painters," Georg Baselitz has long since occupied his place in the history of art