Georg Baselitz and the Art Market’s Selective Amnesia

‘Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.’

When the late Georg Baselitz made this claim in 2013, the artworld responded with outrage. His remarks in Der Spiegel were condemned as sexist, and his argument – that female painters don’t pass ‘the market test’ – was scrutinised and dismantled. 

Yet the underlying question remained: was one of Germany’s leading artists mistaking market value for artistic merit? And how come today, thirteen years later and mere months after his death, does Baselitz’s market value appear more enduring than the sexist rhetoric that once defined him?

As Back Again opens at White Cube Bermondsey (9 June–30 August), and as concurrent exhibitions run at Hall Art Foundation, Museo Novecento and Fondazione Giorgio Cini, these questions are becoming increasingly relevant. The proliferation of exhibitions, along with rising prices and the gradual forgetting of Baselitz’s misogyny, suggests that his legacy is entering a posthumous phase. 

Baselitz might have scoffed at that. Throughout his career he maintained the market was the ultimate measure of artistic success, thereby equating an artwork’s price to its artistic value. ‘The market doesn’t lie,’ he assured Kate Connolly in 2015, doubling down on his remarks in an interview with The Guardian by claiming that women lack the ambition and the ‘brutality’ to succeed, sans a few exceptions, such as Agnes Martin, Cecily Brown and Helen Frankenthaler. No mention of discrimination or institutional barriers.

This position is both historically illiterate and self-serving. As Baselitz’s own career reveals, the art market is a poor arbiter of anything but taste, whim and demand. Commercial success is not rooted in talent alone. It is a function of access, provocation, institutional endorsement and popularity – all of which Baselitz mastered. Equally, it is not dependent on character, despite the artist’s insistence to the contrary, when he attributed female artists’ relative lack of commercial success to personal shortcomings rather than structural inequalities. If market outcomes genuinely reflected personal qualities, the same logic would apply to him, rendering his misogyny pertinent to price formation. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the market continued to reward his work while separating the artist from his character – a courtesy he himself failed to extend to women.

Georg Baselitz, Back Again, 2026 (installation view, White Cube) © Georg Baselitz. Photo: White Cube (Eva Herzog). Courtesy the artist and White Cube

Such controversy was not foreign to Baselitz’s life. Born in Saxony in 1938, he was expelled from the Weißensee Academy in East Berlin for ‘socio-political immaturity’. In 1963, his first solo exhibition (at Galerie Werner & Katz, Berlin) was dubbed pornographic by the press, and two paintings were confiscated by the police for obscenity. Seventeen years later, at the 39th Venice Biennale, his Model for a Sculpture (1980) was contested for its apparent Nazi salute. In a sign of protest, Baselitz proceeded to invert his figures and paint upside down, simultaneously evoking Saxon reverse-glass paintings and emptying his forms of their content. All of these appear as ploys to irk, provoke and perplex the viewer; to disrupt the artworld through technique, subject matter and rhetoric alike.

They paid off. By the time of his most sexist provocations, Baselitz was one of the most influential living artists. With exhibition histories spanning the Royal Academy of Arts, Centre Pompidou and The Guggenheim Museum, to name just a few, his artworks were fetching millions at auction. In 2014, Der Brückechor (1983) sold for $7.4 million at Christie’s New York, exceeding its high estimate by nearly half a million dollars, setting a record for the artist. Three years later, Ein Grosser Hund (1967-1968) realised $9.1 million, shattering the previous record and proving misogyny could not dent Baselitz’s market; it could only bolster it. Over the next five years, Mit Roter Fahne (1965-1966) went for $9.4 million, Dresdner Frauen – Besuch aus Prag (1990) $11.2 million, and Spekulatius (1965) $7.8 million. Whether that trajectory will continue now that Baselitz is gone, and his oeuvre complete and finite, remains to be seen.

Judging by previous examples such as Balthus, Pablo Picasso and Paul Gauguin, the death effect does indeed encourage demand and bolster prices, thereby deeming an artist’s character and misogyny largely irrelevant to commercial value, but the same cannot be said about public art institutions. 

Georg Baselitz, Back Again, 2026 (installation view, White Cube) © Georg Baselitz. Photo: White Cube (Eva Herzog). Courtesy the artist and White Cube

Urged by scholars, activists and collectives such as the Guerrilla Girls, museums across the globe are becoming increasingly mindful of how they curate, present, and display male artists tainted by their personal remarks and actions. London’s National Gallery, for example, now supplements Gauguin’s paintings with information about his sexual misdemeanour, predation and exploitation of underage Tahitian girls. The oeuvres of Picasso, Balthus and Chuck Close have become subject to the same concerns, prompting museums to contextualise their depictions of women. Reflecting on this trend in a 2020 interview with The New York Times, Max Hollein, CEO and director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, admitted art could no longer be seen merely for its beauty and craftsmanship, and had to be instead evaluated ‘in light of its political messages’.

Whether White Cube and Baselitz’s estate share this view remains unclear. Both were approached for comment but refused to contribute on this occasion. What is certain, however, is that Baselitz never paid the price for his misogyny, nor did it prove a liability to his market. If anything, controversy helped his rise to the upper echelons of the artworld, maintaining his notoriety and his demand. Death is unlikely to change that. As exhibitions proliferate and his legacy is canonised, Baselitz’s sexism has been reduced to an asterisk in a narrative that prizes artistic and commercial success over personal conduct. His career, then, proves that the death effect does not merely consolidate value; it absolves those tasked with preserving an artist’s legacy from accountability.