He talks about a narrow, closed view of the world in which a contempt for America – the home of “degenerate” jazz for the Nazis, the capitalist enemy for the GDR – was a constant. “Until I was about 20 years old I did not know there was something like culture in the United States. Based on the information I got from my father and the society around my parents, Americans were funny people. They had no culture and no art, only good weapons. Then I saw the New American Painting exhibition in 1958 from Pollock and his school, and it was like somebody beat me on the head with a big baseball bat. I suddenly learned that Americans did not only have the best weapons: they also had the best painters.”

(Jonathan Jones, “Like being beaten with a bat’: Georg Baselitz on eye-opening art — and his true feelings about female painters,” theguardian.com, 9-12-22)

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