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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface.

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

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

You dig in and you find something.

Asked what role he believes art plays in society, Baselitz replied, 'The same role as a good shoe, nothing more.

My Paintings are Battles.

You cannot deny your origins: I love Kirchner more than Matisse, although Matisse was a greater artist. That isn't to do with nationality. It's a stronger feeling.

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 love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.

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

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 don't see art as entertainment.

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

As an artist, I have been a risk-taker. And I've done a lot of different things. I don't make it easy for people. Identification is difficult. One doesn't recognize my art right away.

In a place like the Guggenheim, I would like to be a representative of arte povera. This would be my ideal.

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.

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

Nowhere in my collection do I, say, have a Auguste Renoir painting. Because everybody knows that this is a good painter without me having to demonstrate it.

I started collecting my artist friends, artists like myself who nobody had yet noticed. In everything, all I am collecting, so to speak, are my friends - artist friends.

Talent seduces us into interpretation. My sister could draw wonderfully, but she would never have hit upon the idea of becoming a painter. I never had that extreme talent.

A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

I would say for everyday I build buildings or houses like a bricklayer with canvas and paint.

Unlike the expressionists, I have never been interested in renewing the world through the vehicle of art.