This exhibition was grandly organized and made use of the entire space at Centre Pompidou’s Gallery 1, featuring 11 sections in total. Starting with “Discovering the avant-gardes,” the exhibition revealed a long journey along “Self-portraits of an experience,” “Fallen Heroes,” “Fractured images,” “Reversing the image,” “Between abstraction and figuration,” “Beyond abstraction,” "Zeitgeist," “The space of memories,” “From the ‘Russian Pictures’ to ‘Remix’,” and ends with “What remains.” To some, this may seem monotonous, as the exhibition is presented in chronological order, from Baselitz’s early days to the present day, yet it is worth doing for someone who has so many powerful works in each period of his artistic activities. On top of his paintings, the exhibition also displayed other major works—from sculptures of human figures to drawings—all of which were selected to allow the public unfettered access to the artist’s work process over the last 60 years. The course of the exhibition is a testament to the complexity of life as an artist in post-war Germany, and reveal his endless line of questions concerning the possibilities of representing his memories, variations in technique and traditional motifs of painting, aesthetic forms developed over the course of art history, and the formalisms dictated and conveyed by the various political and aesthetic regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries. The fact that one artist’s work can be viewed in such a variety of categories shows just how diverse and devoted Baselitz’s artistic journey has been. As it is impossible to cover this colossal exhibition in one article, I would like to take this opportunity to focus on the enticing philosophy the artist proposes through the “Reversing the image” section in which Baselitz’s most famous and oldest motif appears.

In order to understand the respect and praise poured onto Baselitz by countless people, we first need to know more about his life. To begin, Baselitz is not his real surname. His real family name was Kern (Hans-Georg was his given name). He attended a fine arts college in East Germany, but when Baselitz began to draw on the work of Picasso for the paintings he produced in school, he was expelled, according to his teachers, for a lack of “socio-cultural maturity.” Later, he crossed the border and renamed himself after Deutschbaselitz, a town in the eastern German state of Saxony where he was born and grew up. After entering West Germany, Baselitz pursued his studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin in West Berlin from 1957 to 1963.

In post-war Germany, the sociopolitical topography divided into East and West Germany also influenced art. In those days, East Germany and West Germany bluntly emphasized opposite political philosophies—social realism and lyrical abstraction, respectively. The art world of West Germany, which had suffered from self-denial with the fall of Nazism, was immersed in Art Informel for seven years after the war. Art Informel means “art with no form,” and refers to the trend in lyrical abstract painting that emerged after World War II, which left behind unimaginable loss and confusion. This art form was a complex result that was influenced by reflection on civilization, disillusionment with sociopolitical factors hindering art, and an art world moving towards an American-oriented center after the war. This was also the reality that Baselitz faced in West Germany after he was expelled from the art college in East Germany that was pursuing social realism.

The situation in which Baselitz had to choose and accept “either this or that” provoked a rebellious spirit within the young artist. It is no exaggeration to say that his work sprang from his rebelliousness against mainstream art. In his first exhibition at the Berlin gallery Werner & Katz in 1963, a couple of paintings were confiscated by West Berlin authorities for their “pornographic character.” Apparently, this was due to the exaggerated expression of a little boy’s genitalia. The art world and the public in West Germany, where lyrical abstract painting and pop art were the mainstream, were embarrassed and uncomfortable with Baselitz’s surprising painting. Given the time and place, perhaps it was close to something unacceptable in that atmosphere. For Baselitz, however, only art itself was important. This is because he believed that art was inevitably subjective and that he should keep his distance from any act of making painting a tool or disguising it as something else. Naturally, his paintings were not welcomed either in East Germany or West Germany.

For living artists, a retrospective is ambivalent. This is because the event is precious and glorious while at the same time being fear-inducing and burdensome. From an active artist’s perspective, a retrospective provides the pleasure of being recognized by contemporaries for the work they have done while alive, but it often feels like a kind of “grave.” The Centre Pompidou’s Baselitz – The retrospective focused on the process of constant renewal and bold initiatives by a great artist named Baselitz. Even after completing the journey of all 11 sections, visitors will most likely ask themselves: “What new work will Baselitz create in the future?”

Baselitz boldly pursued the essence of painting between conflicting arguments, and the resulting “upside-down image” remained the master’s great innovation of being simple and intense. Baselitz, who has spent much time on this great journey, constantly finding his own artistic path, still does not hesitate in the untiring exploration of painting. Indeed, the joy of discovering the dynamic shift of ideas and perspectives from this extraordinary artist’s attitude is still valid to this day. This is because Baselitz’s experiment has not yet been completed even after such a remarkable retrospective.