Quotes from Georg Baselitz

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

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.

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

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 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.

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 paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface.

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.

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

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

I don't see art as entertainment.

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.

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

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.