Baselitz Self Quotes & Sayings

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

Shades of gray. Even if our colors are bright, as long as we stay silent, we are like a gray mouse. In praise of our speaking out. — Lara Biyuts

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

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

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. — Georg Baselitz

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

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

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. — Georg Baselitz

My Paintings are Battles. — Georg Baselitz

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

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. — Georg Baselitz

Do you believe in rock 'n roll? Can music save your mortal soul? — Don McLean

He took me under his wing when I first came to the Rams and taught me everything - his technique in the pass rush, how to play off blockers, and how to make the big play. — Jack Youngblood

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. — Georg Baselitz

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. — Georg Baselitz

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. — Georg Baselitz

Museums collect what's important in their respective countries. In Berlin's National Gallery, however, this isn't the case. They're interested neither in me nor the other usual suspects. It's simply a German reality. — Georg Baselitz

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

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

I could have been a dental hygienist with nothing bad ever appearing in print about me, but that's not how I've chosen to lead my life. I knew that you put yourself under a microscope the more famous you become. — Julia Roberts

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. — Georg Baselitz

In Germany, we often hear the absurd complaint that museums don't have the money to buy paintings. Of course, I'm not talking about me and my paintings. There are, after all, more popular painters in this country. — Georg Baselitz

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

Are you staring at me because you've seen my doppelganger roaming the halls, playing kind of the cafeteria? Or because you need to borrow a pencil and you're too shy to ask? — Alyson Noel

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. — Georg Baselitz

Standing, with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet, Womanhood and childhood fleet! — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface. — Georg Baselitz

I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films. — Eli Roth

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. — Georg Baselitz

As writers, the world is not about individual expression entirely because we are producing works of literature and getting them out into the world. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

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

Fairy godmothers didn't exist, and even if they did, they wouldn't wave a magic wand and make everything better.(Not without a contract, anyway.) — Julie Kagawa

You dig in and you find something. — Georg Baselitz

It made the kids at camp much more enthusiastic and cooperative when they had ego goals to fulfill, I'm sure, but ultimately that kind of motivation is destructive. Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. Now we're paying the price. When you try to climb a mountain to prove how big you are, you almost never make it. And even if you do it's a hollow victory. In order to sustain victory you have to prove yourself again and again in some other way, and again and again and again, driven forever to fill a false image, haunted by the fear that the image is not true and someone will find out. That's never the way. — Robert M. Pirsig

It certainly must have been a relief for women of the country to realize that one could be a woman and a lady and yet be thoroughly political. — Pearl S. Buck

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