Georg Baselitz

“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 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 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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”