He wanted, he told The Guardian in 2014, “to examine what it was to be a German now.”
In 1962, the year he graduated from art school, he married Johanna Elke Kretzschmar, who survives him. His survivors also include their two sons, Daniel Blau, who owns an art gallery in Munich, and Anton Kern, the owner of the Anton Kern Gallery in Manhattan.
Mr. Baselitz’s first solo show, at the Werner & Katz Gallery in 1963, created a scandal. The police seized two paintings featuring men with enormous penises, “The Naked Man” and “The Big Night Down the Drain,” and the government prosecuted him, unsuccessfully, for offending public morality.
The “Heroes” and “Fracture” series, though, brought him acclaim in Europe. The Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland, mounted an exhibition of his prints and drawings in 1970, and he was included in the influential Documenta show in Kassel, Germany, in 1972.
Mr. Baselitz caused an uproar at the 1980 Venice Biennale, at which he shared the German pavilion with Mr. Kiefer and contributed his first major work of sculpture: a recumbent man, carved roughly from several pieces of wood, with one arm raised upward in what some critics took to be a Nazi salute. (In the late 1960s, Mr. Kiefer had also made art that referenced the salute.)
Mr. Baselitz, stunned by the blowback, said that the gesture derived from African art, in which an upraised palm signaled surrender in battle. Blending African and German Gothic elements, he used chain saw, chisel and ax to carve dozens of wooden sculptures in the years to come, among them “Tragic Head” (1988) and the fabric-covered “Armalamor” (1994).
Mr. Baselitz and his fellow Germans attracted worldwide attention in 1981 when the Royal Academy of Arts in London turned the spotlight their way in the groundbreaking exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting.” A solo show of Mr. Baselitz’s work at the Xavier Fourcade Gallery in New York quickly followed.
