THERESA THOMPSON reviews the retrospective at the Royal Academy of the challenging and controversial painter and sculptor obsessed with German history

The crudely fashioned sculpture of a man who seems to be doing a sit-up, emerging from a block of wood on the floor of the rotunda, is the first thing you see in the Georg Baselitz retrospective running at the Royal Academy, London.

But stop a minute. Slicked over black hair, a hint of moustache, right arm raised if not in salute then at least imperiously, and painted red and black, Model for a Sculpture as it's called, just has to be Hitler. Doesn't it? Baselitz says not, however, maintaining he had African sculpture in mind, Lobi specifically, when making it.

That raised right arm certainly caused a scandal when the sculpture was shown alone in the centre of the West German pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale. But the benefit of the doubt rests with its creator, the palm-upwards position of the hand apparently more extravagant gesture than salute.

But one wonders. Baselitz already no stranger to controversy, his work having been confiscated from his first ever solo exhibition in 1963 in Berlin on the grounds of immorality, is ever enigmatic. He is also obsessed with history, according to Sir Norman Rosenthal, the exhibition's curator and the artist's close friend, who describes Baselitz as one of the most important contemporary artists of our time. With work firmly rooted in the German tradition of art, Baselitz confronts in his own subjective way issues of cultural history, the terrifying history of Europe and the Nazi occupation: real, uncomfortable, shocking realities. What you see here, Rosenthal stresses, is an artist with memories of the Second World War.

Hans-Georg Kern, as Baselitz was then known, was born in 1938 in the village of Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, in what would later become East Germany. The son of primary-school teachers, he was only seven years old when the city of Dresden just 30km away and the surrounding areas were bombed by the Allies. Tens of thousands of civilians were incinerated, and though particular events are never pinpointed in Baselitz's work, they powerfully inform it.

"What I could never escape," Baselitz has said, "was Germany, and being German." Now nearly 70, he admits he still has daily conversations with his wife about the war and its aftermath. Like other German artists he struggled to come to grips with his country's wartime past, finding expression in neo-Cubist fractured pictures, distorted human bodies, in violent, hostile destructive imagery - and in ugliness. Unashamedly, he says he is a painter of "bad pictures", insisting his pictures must be ugly.

Even if so, they are uncompromisingly powerful. An almost unbearable sense of futility comes across from the figures in his Hero' paintings. In the grip of forces outside their control these anti-heroes flounder through the woods returning from battle, military uniforms in tatters, flies undone; every gesture, every symbol is redolent of trauma.

Being visceral and disturbing has never troubled Baselitz. Case in point, among his earliest work, are dislocated, discoloured feet like those in medical textbooks, a poet in a vortex, sex with dumplings, and other strange, aggressive images. Also, The Big Night Down the Drain, the painting of the small man with pock-marked face and over-sized penis that caused such a scandal when first exhibited in 1963 and brought the just out of college Baselitz instant notoriety.

Further fame came and stuck with Baselitz's radical decision in 1969 to paint upside down pictures. What could easily be seen as a gimmick had a serious purpose for Baselitz: to play down the importance of the subject matter without moving into the realm of abstraction. Inversion forces us to see the pictorial qualities of an artwork in a new light, freed from existing expectations.

But he does not, as Norman Rosenthal somewhat wearily points out, paint an image then turn it over. He paints it on the studio floor and can approach it from all sides. Examples include Finger Painting - Eagle (1972) an inverted, possibly falling, eagle against a brilliant blue sky, and the series of 20 painted wooden panels called '45 (Forty-Five). Made in 1989 a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, they along with the giant cadmium-yellow heavily-scored sculpture heads in the same room honour the resilience of the women of Dresden.

During the 1980s, his paintings became more sculptural and his figures more primitive. One example is the bold, inverted Supper in Dresden (1983), a painting that to some extent is autobiographical. It resembles an altarpiece in its size and subject matter, referencing Baselitz's interest in the religious art of Emil Nolde, and pays homage to its German Expressionist heritage with artists such as Ernst Kirchner and the Norwegian Edvard Munch sitting at the upside down table.

These days Baselitz makes what he calls Re-mixes', consciously revisiting and reworking themes from work completed over 40 years ago. The final room is full of them, but having got used to the raw physicality of his earlier work, these lighter, sketchier, almost carefree paintings, drawings and prints seem almost deficient by comparison. Intriguingly though, swastikas still appear here and there, and the pen and ink remix of The Big Night Down the Drain now has a Hitler moustache.

This survey of Baselitz's work is on at the Royal Academy until December 9.

For more details visit www.royalacademy.org.uk