He grew up amongst the suffering and demolition of World War II, and the concept of destruction plays a significant role in his life and work.

"[3] By disrupting any given orders and breaking the common conventions of perception, Baselitz has formed his personal circumstances into his guiding artistic principles.

In its assembly hall hung a reproduction of the painting Wermsdorfer Wald (1859) by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski, an artist whose grasp of Realism was a formative influence on Baselitz.

There he studied under professors Walter Womacka[6] and Herbert Behrens-Hangler and befriended Peter Graf and Ralf Winkler (later known as A. R. Penck).

[citation needed] In 1957, he resumed his studies at the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin, where he settled down and met his future wife, Johanna Elke Kretzschmar.

Trier's classes were described as a creative environment largely dominated by the gestural abstraction of Tachism and Art Informel.

[5] At the Hochschule der Künste, Baselitz immersed himself in the theories of Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Wassily Kandinsky, and Kasimir Malevich.

Art historian Andreas Franzke describes Baselitz's primary artistic influences at this time as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston.

At the turn of 1959 to 1960, Baselitz began to produce his first original works in a distinct style of his own, among them the Rayski-Head (Rayski-Kopf) series and the painting G. Head (G. Kopf).

Two of the pictures, The Big Night Down The Drain (Die große Nacht im Eimer) (1962/63) and The Naked Man (Der Nackte Mann) (1962), were seized two days after the opening of the show by the public prosecutor on the ground of their lewd and obscene content, after likely a friend of the Galerist Michael Werner had already reported their being seized via German News Agency in the local newspaper B.Z.

After returning from Florence to West Berlin, Baselitz created the series of Heroes (Helden, also known as Neue Typen), between 1965 and 1966, which, among others, includes the large-format composition The Great Friends (Die großen Freunde, Museum Ludwig, Cologne).

[10] These figures represent a metaphorical image of a man who, having neither nationality nor an affiliation to a place, throws the illusory and megalomaniacal ideals of the Third Reich and East Germany overboard with his desolate, broken, ragged appearance (for example, Rebel, held by the Tate Modern).

Baselitz' Helden typically appear alone in a barren landscape with naked arms and legs, and hands opened in a summoning gestures.

On the basis of his Fractures, Baselitz used a painting by Louis-Ferdinand von Rayski, Wermsdorf Woods (Wermsdorfer Wald), ca 1959, from his childhood at his elementary-school as a model, in order to paint his first picture with an inverted motif: The Wood on Its Head (Der Wald auf dem Kopf) (1969).

[12] By inverting his paintings, the artist is able to emphasize the organisation of colours and form and confront the viewer with the picture's surface rather than the personal content of the image.

In 1990, at the Nationalgalerie im Alten Museum in Berlin, the first major exhibition of Baselitz's works in East Germany was staged.

From 21 November 2009, to 14 March 2010, the Museum Frieder Burda and Baden-Baden's Staatliche Kunsthalle exhibited a comprehensive survey of the artist, featuring approximately 140 works.

[18] Over the past years, Baselitz has been working on a series of quiet portraits of both him and his wife, Elke, painted with dark washes of blue and black, somber tones that point to a mediation on mortality and aging.

[19] Due to his 80th birthday on 23 January 2018, several retrospectives were held in his honor; for instance at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Fondation Beyeler and Kunstmuseum in Basel, as well as in the U.S. at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.[20] With over 100 works highlighting six decades, the Hirshhorn's exhibition was the first major U.S. retrospective of Baselitz in more than twenty years.

[25] In October 2021 a major retrospective opened at the Centre Pompidou including paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, as well display cases with archival and documentary material.

[27] His drawings and paintings of the past ten years show the artist revisiting, correcting, and varying his earlier work.

[28] Baselitz's disparaging remarks about women artists[29] have earned him a reputation as a sexist,[30] and he has been accused of reinforcing gender bias[31] in the art world.

[32][33] Baselitz highest selling painting was Mit Roter Fahne (With Red Flag) (1965), who sold by £7,471,250 ($9,099,982), at Sotheby's London, on 8 March 2017.

[34] The highest selling sculpture by the artist was Dresdner Frauen – Besuch aus Prag (Women of Dresden – Visit from Prague) (1990), a work of tempera on ash wood, who sold by $11,240,000, at Sotheby's New York, on 19 May 2022.