When artists get better with age. In memory of Georg Baselitz's late art.

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Okay, so I'm going to be honest here.

[00:00:01]When I heard about the passing of Georg Baselitz, the German Neo-Expressionist painter a while back, I thought maybe I should make a film about him, but then I hesitated. This channel is really about my artistic heroes, um the artists that stand out for me, the ones that somehow changed me. And I'm sorry, but I was never really that much of a Baselitz fan. Without really paying too much attention, I must admit I dismissed, perhaps unfairly, his art as overly aggressive, but not in a good way. And the inverted paintings to me always felt more like a gimmick than a stroke of genius. So, honestly, I never thought he was for me. But then something really strange happened.

[00:00:44]As I started to go through his life's work after his death, and actually paying attention this time, I suddenly found some paintings that stopped me in my tracks. The weird part is this, I discovered that I actually really did like some of his paintings. And here's the even weirder bit, only the work made at the very end of [music] his life.

[00:01:06]Baselitz was 88 years old when he passed away, which means that the work I'm responding to the [music] most deeply was made when he was between 76 and 88 years old. Which in turn means I only like the work from roughly the last 12 years of his life. And to me, that raised a fascinating question. Why is it that some artists become truly great only at the very end? Let's find out.

[00:01:44]Hello and welcome to How to Create an Icon and Make a Deeper Creative Dent.

[00:01:48]This show where we get inspired by artists, designs, and creative works that had deeper impact and become timeless of the visual icons. I'm Matt, and I'll be your host. Now, this is going to be controversial because I know there are two groups already getting ready to bash me in the comments. The first lot will be the hardcore Baselitz fans who think I'm being disrespectful for not loving the earlier work. And then the people who hate all modern art anyway and think Baselitz was just a fraud from beginning to end. But all of you I say, hear me out because I don't think this is just about Baselitz. I think there's a bigger pattern here. And once I started to notice it, I see it everywhere. Because in my opinion, a surprising number of artists actually get better with age. And no, I don't mean just technically better or more experienced. Better is a subjective word anyway. I I'm not even sure I mean emotionally deeper. It's something different, I think. It's like some artists' work get more distilled somehow. Almost like the art finally becomes exactly what it was always trying to become. So instead of the word better, I'm going to use the word clearer or more single-minded. Take Matisse for example. Now obviously his early paintings were revolutionary. I know I wouldn't dare to say that Matisse wasn't great when he was young because he was great. I really think that. And yes, the early work changed modern art forever.

[00:03:16]But stay with me.

[00:03:18]Look at his late cut-outs. Look at the Chapel in Vence.

[00:03:22]Look at the simplicity, the confidence, the total lack of unnecessary information.

[00:03:30]To me it feels like an old man arriving.

[00:03:33]Arriving at absolute clarity.

[00:03:37]It's like this work, in my humble opinion, is free. Free from trying to impress anyone.

[00:03:43]It's not trying to prove anything.

[00:03:47]To me this is art saying, "This is what matters. This and nothing else."

[00:03:53]Or you take the buffet, the later work becomes freer, and once again, in my opinion, much, much, much more distilled.

[00:04:01]Perhaps less concerned with what's going on on the fringes and much more concerned with the essence.

[00:04:07]Clarity.

[00:04:09]I know this is just my opinion and you might disagree and that's fine. This is a very subjective topic.

[00:04:15]But the list goes on in my view. Monet got better with age. Yes, there I said it.

[00:04:21]Cy Twombly, who we've covered earlier on this channel. Uh he certainly got better with age in my opinion.

[00:04:27]Joan Mitchell, as we covered just 2 weeks ago, certainly to me got more single-minded with age. We could go on and on. But instead, let's look at someone like Anne Ryan, a name that was recommended to this channel. Someone I didn't really know about, but when reading about her, it turns out that she was an artist who barely became known until late in life.

[00:04:46]And looking at her work, it seems to me that her best work started roughly when she was in her mid-50s, which turned out to be towards the end of her life since she passed away at a very young 65.

[00:04:57]Looking at her collages from the last 10 years or so of her life, they're kind of delicate, yet they look to me like they have confidence in that fragility. Like someone finally speaking in their true voice after decades of silence.

[00:05:12]Honestly, for me, the list just keeps growing. So I ask myself, why does this occur? And no, it can't just be experience because then every artist would improve with age, but they don't.

[00:05:25]Some artists stagnate, some repeat themselves. Warhol certainly ran out of ideas and got worse with time.

[00:05:32]There are more, but let's not be unkind.

[00:05:35]So to me, clearly something else is happening. I wonder if it's this. When you're young, you have infinite options.

[00:05:42]You can still become anything. Your art can go on in know, thousand directions and your inspirations come from all sorts of different and sometimes opposing directions.

[00:05:54]Baselitz, like so many of us, had a very varied list of inspirations. The buffet and art brut, certainly, but also early expressionism like Munch and Dubuffet.

[00:06:05]But also the writings of Otto and existentialist philosophy.

[00:06:10]He was inspired by mysticism. He was inspired by and collected African sculptures and wood carvings, but he was also inspired by American abstract expressionist artists like de Kooning as well as the contrasting European abstract movement of art informel. Now, I'm not saying that Baselitz is unusual in this uh or that it's somehow wrong to have different sorts of inspirations. We all do and that's a good thing. What I am saying is that with age, the endless possibilities and endless inspirations perhaps naturally become more limited and strangely, the limitations might actually turn out to be a superpower.

[00:06:50]Let's start by looking at young Baselitz, born in 1938 in Deutsch Baselitz, a German town that after the end of the war found itself on the East German side of the border and is to some degree might be the first clues to Baselitz and his sense of not really belonging to any camp in his life.

[00:07:09]And with a sense of rootlessness that I think perhaps we can see reflected in his attitudes as well as in his art.

[00:07:15]Anyway, in 1956, he studies art at the Deutsche Akademie der Künste in East Berlin, which is obviously on the GDR side at this time. Here, he makes friends with a number of artists, among them Ralf Winkler, as we know better later on as A.R. Penck.

[00:07:34]But after just a year, Baselitz is expelled for socio-political immaturity, which basically means he's not falling in line with the authoritarian socialist ideas of East Germany. And this also gives us a clue as to Baselitz's non-conformative personality, uh which, as we'll see, will remain with him for life. Instead, he moves across the border to West Berlin in '58. Now, don't forget that the wall wasn't built until '61, so he could travel across uh via a checkpoint. So, now in West Berlin, he studies at Hochschule für Kunst, and this is where he meets uh his future wife and lifelong muse and often reoccurring model Elke. In the West, his contrarian personality can fully come out now. And at this time, he's highly critical of the politics and the art of socialistic hyperreality. But no sooner he finds himself in the West, he becomes a critic of the German abstract uh dogmas and the lack of representation of the human condition. And it's this protest personality of his that seems to make its its way into most of his art during most of his career.

[00:08:45]Any form of establishment orthodoxy will be met by Baselitz's critique. Also, during this time of study, he's exposed to art informel, which is sort of a post-war European answer to American abstract expressionism. But where that side of the Atlantic is experiencing an almost euphoric time full of almost heroic optimism.

[00:09:08]As can be seen in the art of the AbEx movement, the European version on of informalism is deeply melancholic and reflecting the horrors of having had World War II playing out in your backyard. The overlap with art brut can be seen in things like mixing grit and dirt into the paint, making these paintings feel static and fixed, like cementing contrast to the free-flowing physical dynamism of American abstraction.

[00:09:40]And it's this background many to understand when we look at Big Night Down the Drain from 1963 featured in Baselitz's first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner and Katz.

[00:09:52]You can see all the influences we mentioned here, can't you? The heavy art informel paint style, the expressionistic mood, and the provocative subject matter. And it's that provocation that makes it a scandal. And it's the fact that the seemingly deformed young boy is masturbating. This is so shocking to the public that the gallery was shut down, at least for a while, and Baselitz himself was charged with public indecency, I think. It's shock, horror, and provocation, something we'll see again and again in his career.

[00:10:27]What do you think of it? For me, it just doesn't do it for me.

[00:10:31]Aesthetically, it is not particularly interesting to me, and the provocation feels just a little immature. Like an angry young man who wants to give two fingers to the establishment, but it just ends up being a little bit obvious. Sorry.

[00:10:48]But for those hating on me right now, please bear with me. We'll get to the Baselitz I think is brilliant shortly.

[00:10:54]Meanwhile, let's move to his series Heroes from the mid-60s. Here Baselitz teaches solitary figures in desolate landscapes.

[00:11:05]They seem to be homeless, hopeless, resigned figures somehow, and and they look a bit like soldiers that lost their homes. It's very post-war expressionistic.

[00:11:17]And apparently, from what I read, is that the Baselitz himself saw himself as these figures. And as mentioned before, it's that ruthlessness, one foot on one side of the border between East and West, and kind of being highly critical both.

[00:11:33]Apparently, these paintings are meant as a critique of the socialist communist regime of the East, but also a critique of the capitalism of the West. Like the figures in the paintings, Baselitz doesn't belong on either side. So, let's move forward to '69.

[00:11:50]This is where he starts to invert his images. First out is the wood on its head, which was based on a painting by Louis Ferdinand von Rayski. Uh a print of this painting had been hanging in Baselitz's school as he he grew up and he had remained with him. Now, the idea of the inversion seems to have been, in Baselitz's own words, to empty the form of its content. Now, this then was an attempt to free his imagery from political and narrative content. The painting was then exhibited in Cologne by an art dealer called Franz Dahlem.

[00:12:24]Really surprisingly, this idea of hanging his art upside down really really shocked people. So much so that again, legal action was threatened and all sorts of shenanigans. Do you see the idea of inverted pictures as controversial? I mean, to me, maybe it had been back in, let's say, the Impressionist time, but don't forget this is 1969.

[00:12:48]40 years after Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery. So, why is an upside down painting so radical 40 years later? But, it was The show was apparently a commercial flop. Only one painting sold, but it was a defining moment for Baselitz. Clearly, I'm wrong because the art public was so shocked at the idea of inverted images literally made Baselitz famous. Now, let's move on to 1972. At the documenta show, here Baselitz have started painting with his fingers while still holding on to the idea of inversion.

[00:13:23]And again, people were shocked. And I'm kind of shocked that they were so shocked. And it's not actually until 1980 at the Venice Biennale I concede Baselitz actually did something truly controversial. This is a wooden sculpture of Hitler called Model for a Sculpture. Now this one more understandably in my opinion got a lot of criticism. The Nazi salute for one thing. Baselitz himself claimed it wasn't that and it was just inspired by his collection of African carved art as we mentioned earlier. Either way by now Baselitz seems to have made a career of being highly controversial, opinionated, and outspoken person. And this is on his canvases as it is in his real life. He is famous for example for having said really really stupid things about female artists.

[00:14:11]And he seems to thrive on controversy.

[00:14:14]But for me his art of the '80s, '90s, and eventually early naughties just doesn't have the same oomph as his controversial attitude as a human being does. Now don't get me wrong. Shock art is not my thing. But for me if your main goal is for your art to be controversial it needs to be more controversial than this I think. The Hitler sculpture being the exception. But and here comes the big change because in his late paintings something changes. We're now in 2016 and Baselitz is 76 years old. To me it's like he's taken [music] a deep breath.

[00:14:52]And look how suddenly his art changes.

[00:14:56]For the first time the inverted figures stop feeling like a gimmick to [music] me. They now start feeling philosophical. And the inversions suddenly make sense to me.

[00:15:06]And there's more empty space that lets the paintings breathe. Less noise.

[00:15:13]Less need to be controversial.

[00:15:16]Suddenly less anger. And dare I say less ego.

[00:15:21]It's as all the performance finally falls away and underneath it you suddenly find vulnerability and even tenderness [music] and mortality.

[00:15:32]The late paintings don't shout anymore.

[00:15:34]They whisper [music] and somehow that makes them to me at least much more powerful.

[00:15:39]A lot of these paintings are portraits of Georg and his wife Elke. And perhaps that's why he treats the subject more tenderly.

[00:15:48]And to me [music] these paintings from the so-called time collection I just think are so great. Is it just me or is this like walking into an old [music] Egyptian tomb or something of that kind?

[00:15:59]Like monuments to to humankind somehow full of god-like statues while at the same time being very fragile and full of human mortality.

[00:16:09]All this makes sense for an aging artist stripped away of the bravado of youth and coming face to face with his own mortality.

[00:16:18]I think there's even more going on for the aging artist.

[00:16:22]Purely aesthetically there [music] seems to be less appetite for distraction.

[00:16:27]Less energy for pretending, less desire to impress the art world or kick the real world.

[00:16:33]Maybe it's a time for every artist that eventually comes where he or she [music] have to ask "What actually matters now?

[00:16:40]If I only have 10 paintings left, what are they?

[00:16:44]I mean what exactly are those 10 paintings? Not 50 directions, not experiments for the sake of experiments, not endless cleverness and detours, just the thing. The one thing that was always there underneath everything else."

[00:17:00]And maybe this is true outside art, too.

[00:17:02]Maybe nearing the end of life creates clarity because time stops feeling abstract, the deadline becomes visible.

[00:17:11]And when that happens unnecessary things begin to fall away.

[00:17:16]There's a famous line from Steve Jobs that remembering death is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you've got something to lose.

[00:17:25]And maybe artists feels this intensely because old age removes the illusion of infinite time. So the work becomes concentrated and it becomes urgent.

[00:17:36]And with that, it becomes direct and clear. And honestly, I think there's something deeply hopeful about this because we do live in a culture obsessed with youth, young geniuses, the hot new thing lists, and general young relevance.

[00:17:53]But art history keeps whispering another truth. Sometimes the masterpiece comes late.

[00:18:00]Sometimes your real voice arrives after decades of wrong turns. And clearly, it would seem that sometimes clarity takes a lifetime. So George, you'll have to forgive me because for the most of your career, I just didn't get it.

[00:18:15]But maybe that's because you hadn't fully arrived yet either. Well, at least not for me.

[00:18:20]It took you a long time to become the artist that I love, but once you did, you were pretty awesome.

[00:18:26]So rest peacefully and thank you for the late paintings. Now, if you're a younger artist watching this, try imagining that you only have 10 works left to make.

[00:18:36]What would they be?

[00:18:38]Not what they should be and not what might succeed. What's the one thing that's been calling for your attention for years? The thing you keep circling around but never fully commit to. Maybe that's the work. And maybe then the older artists teach us that greatness isn't about endless possibilities, but instead about ruthless focus. And if you're older, then maybe this is your reminder, too.

[00:19:04]You don't need permission anymore. You don't need to impress anyone. You can finally may the thing your whole life's been pointing toward and maybe your best creative work and your creative dividend is still ahead of you. If you found this video inspiring, please share, like, and subscribe. [music] If you do, I'll make more videos like this that hopefully will make you become a more inspired artist and creative.

[00:19:29]Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you in the next one.