Georg Baselitz died this week and every obituary says the same thing: he turned the world upside down. They mean his paintings. Figures inverted, heads at the bottom, sky where the ground should be. The critics call it making something strange or unfamiliar. A radical act. I read seven tributes in two days and not one asked the question that seems obvious from where I sit: radical for whom?
In July 2022, I was in a physiotherapy waiting room in Rotterdam. The magazine rack had an art supplement open to one of Baselitz’s inverted portraits. A woman next to me — she had a visual processing condition, I learned later — glanced at it and said, flatly, “that’s just how faces look to me sometimes.” She wasn’t making an art-critical point. She was stating a fact.
Baselitz spent six decades forcing sighted, neurotypical viewers — people without neurological differences or disabilities — to abandon their default orientation. He made them work. The paintings refuse narrative. You can’t read a story into a figure whose head is where its feet should be. You have to look at form, colour, surface. Critics called this revolutionary. Art critic Rosalind Krauss, writing about similar strategies in 1979, described it as stripping the image of its “natural” legibility. What nobody said: some people already live there.
A recent article about blindness deployed as metaphor in public sculpture — the bronze figure with a draped face read as wilful ignorance — made a sharp argument: stop using neurological difference as your symbol for moral failure. I agree. But here is where that argument and I part ways. Saying “I experience the city differently” is not the same as saying “the city is built to exclude me.” One is perception. The other is a drain grate that catches my front caster on Weesperstraat every single Thursday. Baselitz didn’t just perceive differently. He built paintings that forced a specific physical engagement — you had to tilt, crane, reorient. The gallery remained flat, level, hung at standing eye height. The challenge was perceptual. The architecture stayed the same.
I know something about orientation. When you sit at 110 centimetres — the height of a wheelchair or mobility device — the world is composed differently than it is at 170. Signage is above you. Faces arrive at an angle. Counters block the horizon line. I didn’t choose this as a formal strategy. Nobody is writing a tribute to it. But the mechanism is the same.
What Baselitz actually proved, without meaning to: the “correct” orientation was never neutral. It was a convention enforced by hanging height, by gallery architecture, by the spatial logic of how we place figures in rooms. He disrupted the convention. The convention stayed in the walls.
The paintings are upside down. The galleries are not.
This article was prompted by German artist Georg Baselitz dies aged 88 from Guardian Art & Design.