Polke Dots: Remembering Sigmar Polke

When Sigmar Polke’s family crossed over to the freedom of West Berlin from the oppression of East Berlin on the subway in 1953, 12-year-old Sigmar feigned sleep to add to the picture of normalcy for his fugitive family. Polke (pronounced “polka,” like the dance), who passed away last Thursday, feigned many things during his life in his art, but usually to question the idea of normalcy, especially the rushed, forced normalcy of his native Germany after World War II. With a smile on his lips, Polke never slept through an opportunity to poke fun at the establishment—artistic, social, or political—and help people connect the dots, usually closely spaced, between apparent normality and absurd abnormality. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Polke Dots."

[Image: Sigmar Polke's "The Goatwagon" (1992).]

The Alchemist

Just a few months old when his homeland of Germany finally surrendered and ended the European theater of World War II, Anselm Kiefer grew up consumed by the memories of the pain that had originated and ended in his native land. Born March 8, 1945, Kiefer continually reminds his country of the past that they wish would fade into the mists of time with works such as his Nuremberg (above, from 1980), which alludes to the Nuremberg trials that brought so many Nazi war criminals to justice. Kiefer followed his teacher Joseph Beuys (himself a German veteran of World War II) in incorporating unconventional materials, such as clay, straw, ash, and even lead, into his paintings, bringing a harsh reality to them that paint alone couldn’t achieve. From those ashes, Kiefer hoped to raise a phoenix of accountability and allow Germany finally to embrace its past and move on.

Kiefer’s works lack the raw confrontation aspect of his post-war contemporary Georg Baselitz, but exceed Baselitz’s critique of post-war Germany in their ability to cast up wartime memories in unforgettable ways. Kiefer’s The Milky Way (above, from 1985-1987) darkly reproduces the desolate, scorched earth policy practiced by the Nazis as they lost ground to the Allies and retreated deeper and deeper into Germany as World War II reached its end. In the foreground, Kiefer fills a gashed area with white paint—the “milky way” of the title. Above that horizontal white slash rests an actual lead funnel connected to lead wires that extend to the top of the painting. Kiefer found the ideas of alchemy fascinating, especially the possibility of turning lead into gold. Kiefer’s works aim at a similar transformation, dreaming of the day when the leaden weight of the Holocaust could become a golden opportunity for Germany to examine its past sins.

When I look at Kiefer’s sculpture Book With Wings (above, from 1992-1994), I can’t help but think of Wim Wenders' beautiful film, Wings of Desire. While so much of Kiefer’s art resembles the earth itself, this one creation of the air seems to provide pure hope. There’s an aching kind of lyricism to Book With Wings that Wings of Desire achieves in a different medium. The two works seem to pass in virtual space, with Wenders’ angel longing to be human and Kiefer’s humans longing to be angels. Like the novelist Gunter Grass, Kiefer has made many enemies in his homeland in those who would rather forget. In the face of such opposition, it would be easy to give up. Fortunately, Kiefer still dreams of being the alchemist of the German soul, turning base metal into something precious and pure.

The World Turned Upside Down

Born Hans-Georg Kern on January 23, 1938, the artist later known as Georg Baselitz, caused a scene from the very beginning of his career. At his first solo exhibition in 1963, German police responded to public outrage and confiscated two paintings deemed indecent—Naked Man and The Big Night Down the Drain—the latter of which depicted a boy masturbating. Baselitz, who adopted the name of his home town as his own, strove for shock in everything he did, always looking to shake up the comfortable art world and wake up the viewing public to a new way of seeing. Baselitz’s Rebel (above, from 1965) could be considered a type of self-portrait of the artist as a young anarchist, the anti-hero with ideals and unconventional methods.

In 1969, Baselitz literally turned his art upside down, deciding to depict all his figures inverted to thwart attempts to see the person in the image and instead present the image alone. (One of the tricks drawing teachers often use is to have students turn a picture upside down when copying, so that they see only the shapes and not when they represent.) Nude Elke 2 (above, from 1976) shows the artist’s wife in Baselitz’s typical Neo-Expressionist style, which harks back to the style and the goals of the German Expressionists of the early twentieth century. As a young man, Baselitz read writings of the mystic Jakob Böhme and later immersed himself in the spiritually-oriented art theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich. Beneath Baselitz’s sexually-charged and brutally depicted images lurked an inquiring soul longing to see beyond the physical and into mystical realms, much like the first generation of German Expressionists such as Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Over time, Baselitz the outlaw rebel became Baselitz the representative German artist in several international exhibitions in the 1980s. By the 1980s, Baselitz spread out his vision into other media, such as the untilted wood sculpture above (from 1982-1983). Never one for subtlety, Baselitz literally carved this figure with a chainsaw. The primal aspect of using power tools for art renders a figure that itself seems to be from a primitive. Thanks to Baselitz and the other neo-Expressionists, the first generation of German Expressionists received a critical reappraisal in the 1980s that continues today. Still going strong at 80 years of age, Baselitz, like his predecessors, saw the ills of his time and pointed them out in a raw and loud voice that cut through all the comfortable illusions.