Thaddaeus Ropac, London
The artist captures horror, disgust and guilt over Germany’s Nazi past. The colossal results are so scathingly ironic it’s like being spat at

When the German painter Georg Baselitz died this year a chunk of Europe’s rapidly diminishing historical memory went with him. Baselitz was born in 1938, experienced Hitler’s Germany and the second world war as a young child, then found himself growing up in communist East Germany before escaping to the west and becoming an artist. His acidic, honest perceptions of the history he’d lived through will no longer be those of the living person I was lucky enough to encounter. But he has left us a gift: an exhibition in London he helped plan of his most astonishing history paintings, The Heroes.

It’s a savage, merciless vision of modern history with feelings of horror, disgust and irreparable guilt hanging heavy in the poisoned air. But there’s a terrible joy too, the thrill of speaking the truth. You sense the liberation Baselitz must have felt when he set brush to canvas to start these paintings in 1965. Comparing the explosive rage and nihilism of his art to punk may be inadequate but the title of this series of colossal imaginary portraits is so scathingly ironic it’s like being spat at.

His egalitarian homeland used to harbour reservation against the architecture star. But with 13 new Unesco listings and a new exhibition in Helsinki, Aalto’s work is finally getting the recognition it deserves

In the early 1950s, Alvar Aalto built a boat to get to his remote summer residence on an island in Lake Päijänne, about 200km north of Helsinki. But the celebrated Finnish architect was not a happy skipper. He named the boat – a title as cumbersome as his buildings were elegant – Nemo propheta in patria: “No man is a prophet in his own land”.

The name was a dig at Finland, which the architectural maestro believed had taken him for granted. Other nations, he moaned, recognised his talent more than his own. Today, arriving in Helsinki, I find that Finland doesn’t just love Aalto, he’s a national treasure.