Born in Germany in 1938, Georg Baselitz has been painting since the late 1950s. He was controversial from the start, his first solo exhibition a shocker with its paintings of priapic men. In 1969, Baselitz began painting his subjects upside-down, a strategy that subverted pictorial content and forced viewers to contemplate the painting as surface, shapes, colors. He once said, “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to reestablish an order.” Upside-down is the ultimate disorder. Baselitz is now 83. In the exhibition “Springtime,” he heralds the emergence from pandemic lockdown with the first collage paintings he’s ever made. Gluing nylon stockings onto the canvas, painting on and around them, he invokes the female leg, Degas’s ballerinas, Mrs. Robinson, and that German Expressionist trope: the silk stocking. —L.J.