Georg Baselitz

Exhibition label: In 2018, inspired by the book Five Hundred Self-Portraits from Antique Times to the Present Day (1936), Baselitz embarked on an extensive series of paintings and drawings based on self-portraits of artists he admired, from the nineteenth-century Saxon painter Ferdinand von Rayski to younger colleagues, such as Cecily Brown and Nicole Eisenman. Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze, 1913-1951) was a German painter who created small, enigmatic abstractions in a gestural style, which fascinated Baselitz when he first saw them in the late 1950s. "I considered a small painting by Wols . . . more radical than a painting by [Jackson] Pollock," he later said.