Curator’s Edit — Georg Baselitz at Museo Novecento

The Man Who Turned Florence Upside Down

Museo Novecento, Piazza Santa Maria Novella. Mar 7 – Oct 4, 2026

In 1965, Georg Baselitz arrived in Florence after winning the Villa Romana Prize and stayed six months. What he found — the Mannerist distortions of Rosso Fiorentino, the elongations of Pontormo, a Renaissance that contained its own subversions — stayed with him. He spent the following six decades making work that inverted the figure, refused easy meaning, and kept unsettling the viewer’s sense of what a painting should do.

The Museo Novecento retrospective, running through October, follows that Florentine thread. It asks a straightforward question with no straightforward answer: what does a city do to an artist who pays genuine attention to it? Worth a long morning in the Oltrarno before the summer heat sets in.