Georg Baselitz's provocative works from the 1960s mark the iconoclastic phase in which he rejected pleasant forms and wrestled with figurative subjects in order to distance himself from the figurative art of National Socialism and Socialist Realism.

In 1962 Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck (b. 1936) created Pandemonium I, based on the works of the Comte de Lautréamont (1847-1870) and Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), and a year later, Pandemonium II. These works presented the viewer with a fermenting substance from which new bodies or body parts were supposed to be created. With his innovations Baselitz consciously stretched the borders of contemporary social tolerance which lead to the confiscation of two of his works from an exhibition in Berlin in 1963.