‘Like being beaten with a bat’: Georg Baselitz on eye-opening art – and his true feelings about female painters

Now in his 80s but as fiery as ever, the German provocateur talks about his pride at being a ‘degenerate’ artist, painting his wife nude – and revisits his assertion that: ‘Women don’t paint very well’

Georg Baselitz is talking about Tracey Emin. “She ate too much spaghetti at De Kooning’s restaurant,” says the German painter. I understand this as meaning her paintings are overly indebted to the abstract expressionist master.

“But he says it with admiration, yes?” explains the translator. “She has touched De Kooning. It’s joking, teasing her.”

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