Sideways Glance at Genius, Financial Times, The Business

German artist Georg Baselitz frequently paints his subjects skewed or upside down, forcing the viewer to explore the territory between madness and liberation.

The taxi driver who took me to Hanover airport to Schloss Derneburg, home of German painter Georg Baselitz, knew about the famous artist. I did not need to give him directions to the castle where Baselitz has lived 25 gears. I arrived at night, opened the wrought-iron gates, and walked up to a vast wooden door. Suddenly it opened a crack and there he was, shaking my hand and that of the taxi driver, too, who seemed star-struck.

Small wonder. Georg Baselitz is that rare being, a painter whose influence has grown steadily, painfully, through talent, sheer obsession and hard work, but without the now familiar marketing hype. He has become a bit of a legend in his lifetime, an artist of whom Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries, says: "You cannot make an international exhibition from the 60s onwards without including Baselitz."

His work is uncompromising and tough, with an intense painting style and bold use of colour. The most striking characteristic is the inversion of figurative images, painting them sideways and upside down. He does not paint the “right” way up and then turn over the canvas—he paints the image upside down as he sees it. His subjects range from heads to large-scale figures, landscapes with trees, floating eagles, studies of his wife Elke and of his beloved dogs.

His paintings and sculptures are displayed in all the great museums, from Tate Modern to the Guggenheim, New York. His most recent London show was at the Gagosian Gallery, attracting collector Charles Saatchi, the actor Steve Martin and the rock star Mick Jagger. The writer and art critic David Sylvester, who died in June, wrote the preface to the catalogue, declaring: "I can think of no other living European painter whose creativeness has been sustained decade after decade as has."

Energy and inquiry are the two words that come to mind on meeting the artist, together with the feeling that he is somewhat larger than life. This may have something to do with the fact that everything around him has outsize dimensions: his pictures, his wooden sculptures, his carved frames, his house, his mastiff dog Paul, his studio, his library and the man himself. His looks are commanding, tall and trim. He has a rakish scar over his left eye, which he received as a seven-year-old, playing with guns left behind by soldiers in 1945 when the second world war ended. "My friends and I loved adventure and fooling around," he says. "l wasn’t going to kill myself."

“In business or finance, background is irrelevant. But as a German artist you are discriminated against forever”

At 63. he is both anarchist and artist in the great European painting tradition, two seemingly conflicting characteristics that are nonetheless not mutually exclusive. They provide a clue to his German heritage, crucially important in understanding the sometimes savage, Teutonic, nature of his work. "In business or finance, background is irrelevant. If you are a financier or car-maker, no one asks whether you are French, British or German. But if you are an artist people want to know, they expect something biographical," Baselitz says. "As a German artist you are obviously discriminated against; not just initially, but forever. The German past is such that your conversation partner is always at an advantage."

While he feels it might be better not to engage, but to stay mysterious, it is simply not his way. "It’s important to acknowledge your background, to make it visible, to insist on its tradition, to avoid a watering-down, a plunge into a global multimedia existence. Germany is well-known as a country of the arts, the land of poets and thinkers (das land der Dichter und Denker). We supply good pictures, good music and good literature; and I think it should remain that way. It is not about being nationalistic, but one should not disown one’s background."

Baselitz was born in 1938 as Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz - the town from which he took his name - in Saxony. He was the son of school teachers Lieselotte and Johannes Kern, and had an older sister and two younger brothers; the family lived in the school house. Baselitz rebelled early on: "l started painting, acted crazy, looked different, stopped washing myself, grew my hair long. "

He knew when he was very young that he wanted to be an artist, or a musician, although the latter seemed like too much hard work at the time. "My sister played the piano, but I never managed it; I wanted to be successful more quickly, I wanted applause. So, I took up drawing and began to have my first success with girls. I drew their likeness. That was the first test. You have to do something, which everyone recognises immediately... that is me, that is you."

His generation grew to adolescence surrounded by ruins. To the east of Dresden, he saw the poverty of a destroyed country and the turmoil of a society annihilated by the Nazis. His first experience of communism under the new Germany was no better: "My teachers had to be good communists before being good teachers. We had a Russian teacher who did not know any Russian. We had a French teacher who couldn’t speak any French. We had an art teacher who didn't have the faintest clue about art. It was mad, but normal in such political systems. It is a bit like nowadays. when a trainer suddenly becomes the new minister of culture."

The artistic authorities of the former DDR pronounced Baselitz "politically and socially immature", and threw him out of the High School for Creative and Applied Art in East Berlin. He then entered the High School for Creative Arts in West Berlin in 1957, bringing with him figurative painting and a strong interest in craft tradition, then deeply unfashionable in the west. Instead, abstract artists such as the US painters Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston were admired, and Baselitz saw their work for the first time. Ile managed to synthesise both the figurative and the abstract,

"He is the painter I most admire in the world," says his friend Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts. "The balance between figuration and abstraction is extraordinary. He has an idea of traditional painting, and yet he is very modern. He is completely of his time," In the early 60s, Baselitz painted enormous heads and figures. He then created "fracture paintings", cutting up surfaces to produce both a figurative and abstract effect. In 1969, his subjects are turned on their heads for the first time, a strikingly radical invention, challenging the viewer to see the image differently

When I ask whether he will ever change this, he counters: "Your view is too narrow. There are many paintings. and many different ways of painting. Once you break a convention, you have to see it through. Turning the image upside down is a taboo, it should be liberating, but actually doesn't seem that way, it seems more like madness... all well and good. The reality is, there is no top or bottom in art, it does not exist."

Baselitz is one of a group of post-war German painters known as New Expressionists, who were all from the east and came to dominate the frenzied international art market of the 80s. They include Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and A. R. Penck. But although Baselitz is named in the context of this group, he is content to remain an outsider, living and working according to his rules. He abhors hierarchies and ideologies, whether religious or political, not surprising given his background in turbulent circumstances. He even studied "outsider" art. he calls it, paintings by the insane, “who were free of any ideology, as they were deemed crazy. It was a very fruitful endeavour, which has lasted until this day”.

Baselitz believes his outsider status is essential to the artist’s process, an entirely different one to any other occupation. "It is different from being a car-maker, for instance, as you can't achieve anything following on from something else. You can't build on what is already there or might make it faster or better. You always to start at the beginning. "

A visit to his vast sky-lit studio, built scratch right next to the castle, demonstrates this creative restlessness. The space is exhilarating, larger than an ice rink. Canvas upon canvas of finished paintings propped up against the walls, with that unmistakable brush stroke of which Lars Nittve, former director of Tate Modern, says: "his handwriting just sings”. His sculpture does not sing so much as shout; monumental, roughly hewn and very Teutonic. Baselitz chooses to sculpt in wood, as wood carving is part of the German tradition, but also because in his view it is the most difficult medium. He uses a saw and an axe as his tools, indeed some of his work looks as if he has attacked, or wounded it. "There is the question whether my sculptures are ‘avant-garde' or merely 'folk art’,” he comments, "but I leave it open. They work. they are potent."

His first sculpture, "Model for a Sculpture", was shown in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980. The reclining wooden figure, with arm raised, caused controversy, which prompted Serota, then director of the Whitechapel Alt Gallery, to exhibit it later in London: "Nobody had seen anything quite like it," he says. Serota and Rosenthal went on to stage the exhibition New Spirit in Painting in 1981 at the Royal Academy in London. "That was the best international exhibition which I have ever been part of, " Baselitz says. "It was my finest hour. It was the exhibition to celebrate our generation. I had a very good room: my pictures were displayed with those of half-dead or dead artists, de Kooning, Bacon and Balthus."

Potency is a word Baselitz uses often. It is the powerful effect of both process and result he wants to achieve. To this end, he sets himself hurdles all the time, whether it requires laying the canvas on the floor, painting with his fingers, or using an extra-long brush. "l always had this problem of not being able to finish a picture quickly. Once you do more and more brushwork, or paint over it, you are not in control any longer, which is disastrous. It's only late in my life that I managed to do a picture within the hour. Painting quickly is not the goal, but being able to stick to the first sketch is."

Baselitz's wife Elke Kretzschmar calls us for dinner in the kitchen, and we eat mutton raised on their own farm. They met in Dresden in 1958, and again in Berlin, where she went to study art. His friends told him: "Elke is arriving, take care of her, and buy her some bananas," he says. He did more than that— they married, in 1962, and have two grown-up sons, Daniel and Anton. Their life at Schloss Derneburg, a restored 12th-century building, seems a domestic idyll, built as if to protect him to concentrate on his work. They also have a house and studio in Italy, where he paints half the year. Baselitz admits to being incredibly ambitious, his work more important than life itself.

Among his friends is the German dealer Michael Werner, who sold his works since the 60s, starting with A4 watercolours that he bought for DM300 each — a large sum in those days. Werner had offered him DM300 for the lot, but Baselitz negotiated the higher price. “There are few great living artists, and he is one of them," Werner says. "He is charming, communicative and very cultured; but an artist is not a normal person. Women, children, making money, it's all a distraction. He is also a madman; in that area between genius and madness is where the art is created."

Sitting in his library after dinner, Baselitz mentions twice how much he loves pictures, to the extent that he is also a collector. Three gigantic Warhols hanging in the entrance hall are testimony to his skill; he was able to buy and swap his own work for that of others. He also acquired a significant collection of 16th century Italian prints. "My collecting started as a sort of 'Besserwisserei' (know-it-all). I wanted to own these things to give my approval. You discover something that others don 't value, you often overestimate its worth, but sometimes you are lucky."

His work has brought him riches and a comfortable life, but the idea that an artist could earn serious money was not something he grew up with. The current marketing of artists, such as the young British artists of the 90s — whose work he admires — is in stark contrast to his own journey. "His time will come even more," says Rosenthal. "He has renewed himself consistently, and surprises me constantly with his inventions. He preserves the world from cynicism through his art."

By Bettina von Hase