Quote

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.

Georg Baselitz

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Georg Baselitz
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: January 23
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Painter
Printmaker
Sculptor
University Teacher
Hans-Georg Kern
Georg Dern
G. Baselitz
Hans-Georg Baselitz
Georg Kern
Hans Georg Kern
Like
Noticed
Artists
Nobody
Started
Friends
Speak
Artist
Everything
Collecting

More quotes by Georg Baselitz

Image
Asked what role he believes art plays in society, Baselitz replied, 'The same role as a good shoe, nothing more.
Georg Baselitz
Image
I was always on the outside. It was the worst when I still wanted to be a professor, having to deal with colleagues and students, and having to listen to all that academic nonsense. It's really just a haze that keeps them busy. But all of that is fortunately over now, once and for all.
Georg Baselitz
Image
An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object.
Georg Baselitz
Image
There's a market for art, and things are indeed going swimmingly, especially for German artists. But everything takes place in America and in London, where there are quite a few wealthy, engaged people. What motivates them to buy art is a different question, but they do.
Georg Baselitz
Image
In a place like the Guggenheim, I would like to be a representative of arte povera. This would be my ideal.
Georg Baselitz
Image
Most of arts what comes from the States to Europe has something to do with entertainment. I can't imagine artists in the United States having the same kind of isolated position that we have here in Europe. I have a feeling one lives more publically in the States.
Georg Baselitz
Image
I don't see art as entertainment.
Georg Baselitz
Image
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.
Georg Baselitz
Image
I think the defect actually lies with male artists. Male artists often border on idiocy, while it's important for a woman not to be that way, if possible. Women are outstanding in science, just as good as men.
Georg Baselitz
Image
Art is visceral and vulgar - it's an eruption.
Georg Baselitz
Image
Women don't paint very well. It's a fact. There are, of course, exceptions. Agnes Martin or, from the past, Paula Modersohn-Becker.
Georg Baselitz
Image
I became an artist because of the possibility it gave me to develop in another way, because I didn't want to follow the same lines the others around me did. I was educated in the former German Democratic Republic, which meant that an individual figure had to be... like a soldier in the army.
Georg Baselitz
Image
When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.
Georg Baselitz
Image
You dig in and you find something.
Georg Baselitz
Image
I don't know who made up this sort of greatest-hits list for artists. If one artist isn't moving forward anymore, then it's assumed another one is going to take their place. With Francis Bacon's death, a whole genre of art died.
Georg Baselitz
Image
A painter doesn't need any talent. In fact, it's better not to have it.
Georg Baselitz
Image
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.
Georg Baselitz
Image
That was in 1957. And there I found out that Germany is a kind of province. I didn't know anything about expressionism, about the Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism. I was uneducated, so to speak - and everybody else was more or less uneducated, too.
Georg Baselitz
Image
There is no communication with any public whatsoever. The artist can ask no question, and he makes no statement he offers no information, and his work cannot be used. It is the end product which counts.
Georg Baselitz
Image
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.
Georg Baselitz