Jörg Immendorff; painter (great Times UK obit)
Hyfler/Rosner
May 30, 2007
Jörg Immendorff
Powerful painter who deployed shock tactics and showmanship
to scrutinise the paradoxes in postwar German society
Jörg Immendorff was one of the most distinctive and
influential figures in postwar German art, and one of
comparatively few modern German artists to win international
renown.
Though he had his first gallery exhibition as a schoolboy,
it was in the early 1980s that he came to real prominence
both in his native land and beyond. He did so, at first, as
a member of a generation of German painters and sculptors
brought together - somewhat uncomfortably, it turned out -
under the label of neo-Expressionism.
There could be no doubt that the output of a lot of these
artists looked quite similar. What united them was an
undoubted relish not just for painting and sculpture, but
also for figurative painting and sculpture - a refreshing,
even shocking, development after several decades when first
abstraction and then conceptualism had seemed to hold sway
in modern art.
The deeper differences between them were, however, at least
as great as the superficial similarities. Some undoubtedly
loved throwing paint about. Some probably saw themselves
grappling with destiny. Immendorff's energetic and
thematically ambitious paintings, created, as one critic put
it, in a "style somewhere between painterly expressionism
and political cartoon", certainly happened to fit with the
coarsely gestural idiom of the time.
He would have no complaints about that. But he was an artist
whose thoughtful, critical, concrete engagement with
painting went right back to his student days, and in the
works that brought him fame he was addressing the same
fundamental questions that had concerned him throughout his
career: the political identity of Germany, with its
monstrous recent past and divided post-
war present; and the role and potential of the artist as a
political and social activist.
"I am for a form of art," Immendorff said in 1976, "that
sees itself as one of the many means through which human
society can be changed." It is a measured formulation.
Immendorff was a realist but never a cynic, an idealist but
nobody's fool. He had no grand illusions about what art
could do; but he had no doubt at all that it was still worth
making art.
Jörg Immendorff was born in 1945 at Bleckede, near
Lüne-burg. After his parents were divorced, he lived with
his mother, and was educated partly at boarding school. In
1963, two years after his first schoolboy exhibition in
Bonn, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie, Düssel-dorf,
studying theatre design initially before deciding to take
instead a class taught by a fairly recently appointed
professor, Joseph Beuys.
Beuys was already known as an important advocate and
exponent of the ideas of the experimental international
Fluxus movement, which proposed a radical new aesthetic
inspired by the chance-based composition methods of John
Cage. Beuys organised a pioneering Fluxus concert at the
Düsseldorf Academy in 1963, the first in an influential
series of "happenings" and performance events designed to
take art beyond the conventional confines of the gallery.
By the late 1960s, under these influences, Immendorff was
developing his own style of performance art as politicised
and absurdist agitation. This he christened "Lidl", nothing
to do with the discount supermarket chain, but a nonsense
word based on the sound of a baby's rattle. Convinced of the
need for new beginnings, he founded his own "Lidl academy",
a utopian vision of a professor-free art school.
There was real political engagement, too. In 1967 Beuys had
founded the German Students Party, the first of several
attempts he would make to create alternatives to what he
regarded as the moribund, bureaucratised institutions of
German democracy. A year later Immendorff, in a political
protest of his own, was arrested for parading outside the
parliament building in Bonn dragging behind him a small
wooden block, painted in the black, red and gold of the
German flag, with the word Lidl written across it. He, too,
was demonstrating his dissatisfaction with the "insipid and
uncreative" element in politics. In 1969 the Lidl academy
was cleared by the police. Immendorff was later banned from
art school after occupying the buildings to host a three-day
congress: "Work, Sleep, Love".
If there was an element of homage to Beuys in Immendorff's
work of this period, it is perhaps possible also to detect a
degree if not of satire then at least of ironic distance.
The mystical element at the heart of Beuys's thinking held
little appeal for Immendorff, whose political instincts
tended more to concrete involvement.
In the early 1970s Immendorff became a Maoist and a member
of a radical collective, creating caricature, comic-strip
style, didactic works reminiscent of political posters. From
1969 to 1980 he worked as an art teacher in a secondary
school, which allowed him to explore the question of the
artist's role in society with a directness few of his
contemporaries would have wished to emulate.
At the same time he continued to exhibit, and his work was
seen at Documenta in Kas-sel in 1972 and at the Venice
Biennale in 1976. At the latter he saw Renato Guttuso's
monumental Caffè Greco, an imaginary group
portrait-cum-histor-ical conversation piece, now in the
Ludwig Museum, Cologne. It inspired him to begin his Café
Deutschland series.
The 16 Café Deutschland paintings (1978-84) are set in an
imaginary nightclub where confrontations between East and
West Germany, as well as between Germany's past, present and
her reunified future, are played out in crowded, urgent,
sometimes funny, sometimes almost apocalyptic scenes. In
these pictures Immendorff develops a complex, densely packed
political iconography, which runs through much of his best
work.
Alongside the exuberantly deployed repertoire of images and
symbols, the large canvas-es teem with a vast cast of
figures, ranging from historical personalities such as
Hitler, Sta-lin and Mao, through cultural icons such as
Marcel Duchamp and Max Beckmann, to contemporary political
leaders, such as Erich Honecker and Helmut Schmidt. Also
present are friends and associates from the contemporary art
world.
Immendorff can be seen there too, of course, half-seriously
mythologising himself, as in Café Deutschland I (1978),
where he appears in the middle of the foreground stretching
his hand out through the Berlin Wall. Elsewhere, he more
than once depicted the artist as ape or - perhaps (but not
necessarily) - wise monkey.
The Café Deutschland works brought Immendorff international
attention and were featured in his first large museum show,
at the Kunsthalle Düssel-dorf in 1982. At that year's
Documenta his work was widely acclaimed for the first time.
He was given a one-man show in New York, a second followed
in 1983 and his work was included in exhibitions such as
Expressions: New Art from Germany (1983-84), which toured
North America and Europe as international interest began to
develop in the work being produced by German artists. In
Britain he had an impressive show at the Museum of Modern
Art, Oxford, in 1984 and was a prominent presence in the
Royal Academy's polemical survey of German Art in the
Twentieth Century in 1985.
Outside the gallery, Immendorff continued to teach, taking
up guest appointments throughout Europe before becoming a
professor in Düsseldorf. In the early 1980s he opened a bar,
La Paloma, in the Reeperbahn red-light district of Hamburg.
It became a popular and inspirational meeting place for a
coming generation of German artists. He also designed the
costumes for Strauss's Elektra in Bremen in 1986, and the
set and costumes for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress at the
Salz-burg Festival in 1994. He became fascinated by Hogarth's
Rake's Progress and painted himself as the rake in his own
outlandish version of the story.
Immendorff was awarded the Marco, at $250,000 the
best-endowed art prize in the world, by the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico, in 1997.
He had attained a degree of official respectability. The
following year he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz
(order of merit) by the Federal Republic of Germany. He
would later be commissioned to paint the portrait of Gerhard
Schröder, the Chancellor. Immendorff admired and respected
Schröder, whom he described as the first Chancellor to
bother about artists and to acknowledge the place of art in
society. He painted him, not altogether ironically, in gold.
As the theatrical quality of the Café Deutschland
paintings - and the stint as a Hamburg bar owner - may
suggest, Immendorff enjoyed the notion of the artist as
showman and glamorous social star. He liked to cut a dash.
There was an ironic knowingness about his love of the
limelight, though this was perhaps less evident as time went
on.
In August 2003, however, he found himself making headlines
in a way that even he might have preferred to avoid, when he
was arrested in possession of a large quantity of cocaine,
and in the company of no fewer than nine prostitutes, in a
suite of the Steigenberger hotel in Düsseldorf. He admitted
organising almost 30 such parties in the previous two and a
half years, involving drink, drugs and pornographic films.
He had been taking cocaine for more than ten years, he said,
using it to alleviate sporadic panic attacks. He was
sentenced to 11 months probation and fined ?150,000.
The sentence reflected his cooperation with the authorities
but also his medical condition. He was found in 1997 to be
suffering from the incurable paralysing disease amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis. The resulting loss of muscle function
confined him to a wheelchair and forced him to abandon
painting, instead directing assistants to complete works
following his instructions. He became, he said, like a
composer, writing the notes but not playing the melody
himself.
His later work, often based on motifs from art history, took
a darker, more introspective, rather surrealist turn. His
60th birthday was marked with an important retrospective at
the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
In his last years he worked tirelessly to build public
awareness of his disease and to raise funds to benefit
researchers and other sufferers.
In 2000, with much fanfare, Immendorf married Oda Jaune, a
former student more than 30 years his junior. They had a
daughter, born in 2001.
Jörg Immendorff, artist, was born on June 14, 1945. He died
of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on May 28, 2007, aged 61