By turning the motifs of his paintings upside-down since 1969, Georg Baselitz discovered an innovative way of interweaving formal and thematic contents and demonstrated that pictorial space is always an artificial space with its own laws. Trauriger Gelber (Sad Yellow Man) comes from the time when Baselitz, in addition to his painting, once again turned intensively to sculptural work on figures and heads. 

In 1986, Baselitz used various motifs—bridge, tree, horse, eagle, house, jug, heap, head—primarily as the occasion for a painting in which figure and ground become intertwined. In this second work, which also entered the collection thanks to the Friends, isolated, seemingly encapsulated elements are embedded in the white ground in a loose sequence. They appear to circle around the head in the center of the composition, with some overlapping the edge of the canvas.

Both paintings were donated to the museum—mediated by the Friends—by a private patron.