hem|mungen

Germany's Greatest Artist!

Die Zeit profiles Markus Lüpertz, a painter and sculptor who's in the news right now because one of his sculptures, on display in a park in Bamberg, were vandalized recently. (The police are still clueless.)

I wrote my MA thesis on a series of paintings of German motifs he made in the 1970s; his older painting is still interesting to me, this new sculpture much less so. But it seems to me that what really keeps him in the news is his persona, his dandy-ness, expressed through expensively-tailored yet clashing suits and marvelous turns of phrase like, "Ich entschloss mich, ein schöner Mann zu sein" ("I decided to be a lovely man" - caption under the photo accompanying the interview).

But perhaps more interesting are statements like this, in which he voices a longing for the old Federal Republic, pre-Unification, ruined as if struck by a "DDR-Virus:"

Die Bundesrepublik hatte zum Beispiel keinen Rassismus, das kann ich mit Fug und Recht behaupten, ich habe jahrelang in Kreuzberg und Neukölln gelebt.

(Right. No racism. And also, Kreuzberg and NK were, like, representative of West Germany at the time.)

He's a real charmer in general. I was going to pull out more quotes, but I realize that this is interesting mostly to me, because I was so immersed in his method for a time. Let me just summarize by stating that the interview depicts a man who feels he was born into the wrong century and who loves to hear himself talk. When I read these sorts of interviews I remember why I fume every time some newspaper refers to him as "one of Germany's greatest artists" (as here in Die Zeit, where the interviewers pose some pretty fawning, "artisty" questions). Although I know personality is not a measure of quality of work, in this case it's pretty hard for me to separate them.