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Lot Essay
Formerly part of the Crex Collection, the present work is the second in a series of three works by Markus Lüpertz. Collectively entitled Arrangement für eine Mütze (Arrangement for a Cap), the paintings offer a trio of subtle variations, each depicting a military cap. Rendered with rich, expressive brushwork on a monumental scale, the motif is pushed to the brink of abstraction, its meaning progressively swallowed by repetition and distortion. Lüpertz described this process as ‘dithyrambic’, inspired by the ancient Greek chants—known as ‘dithyrambs’—sung in honour of Dionysus. By introducing minor variations into seemingly identical compositions, the artist questioned the inherent symbolic value of his subject matter, asking at what point figurative meaning dissolved into painterly abstraction. The present work has been widely and prominently exhibited, featuring in solo shows at institutions including the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1973), the Kunsthalle Bern (1977), the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover (1983) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1991).
The present work was painted in 1973: the year that Lüpertz’s first retrospective at the Goethe-Institut in Amsterdam brought him international recognition. Born in former Czechoslovakia in 1941, the artist had moved to West Germany as a child. Following studies in Krefeld and Düsseldorf, he settled in Berlin, where he became associated with artists such as A. R. Penck, Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff. Like Baselitz, he felt that painters in both East and West Germany were reluctant to confront the country’s recent past, hiding behind Socialist Realist figuration and Western abstraction respectively. In his ‘dithyrambic’ paintings, he sought common ground between the two modes, subjecting simple graphic forms to distortive processes. Baselitz, who pursued a similar agenda by rendering his subjects upside down, had frequently adopted deliberately Germanic motifs, questioning the means by which images become invested with symbolic or political charge. Gerhard Richter, too, in his blurred photo-paintings had asked at what point figurative reality loses its claim to truth: all images, he proposed, were inherently abstract.
Here, Lüpertz’s military subject matter engages with many of the same issues. The viewer is forced to question at what point texture, colour and form coalesce into something loaded with history and meaning. Other forms lurk within the composition: a hint of a paint palette, or perhaps the strings of a lute. Is this a still-life, or something more? The artist’s bold colours and graphic forms also conjure associations with Pop Art: like Warhol’s silkscreens, each the same yet subtly different. ‘Painting provides the vocabulary to make the world visible’, he wrote (M. Lüpertz, quoted in Markus Lüpertz, exh. cat. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D. C. 2017, p. 6). Here, in the spirit of an ancient ‘dithyrambic’ incantation, Lüpertz lifts the veil upon the way in which we make sense of images.
The present work was painted in 1973: the year that Lüpertz’s first retrospective at the Goethe-Institut in Amsterdam brought him international recognition. Born in former Czechoslovakia in 1941, the artist had moved to West Germany as a child. Following studies in Krefeld and Düsseldorf, he settled in Berlin, where he became associated with artists such as A. R. Penck, Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff. Like Baselitz, he felt that painters in both East and West Germany were reluctant to confront the country’s recent past, hiding behind Socialist Realist figuration and Western abstraction respectively. In his ‘dithyrambic’ paintings, he sought common ground between the two modes, subjecting simple graphic forms to distortive processes. Baselitz, who pursued a similar agenda by rendering his subjects upside down, had frequently adopted deliberately Germanic motifs, questioning the means by which images become invested with symbolic or political charge. Gerhard Richter, too, in his blurred photo-paintings had asked at what point figurative reality loses its claim to truth: all images, he proposed, were inherently abstract.
Here, Lüpertz’s military subject matter engages with many of the same issues. The viewer is forced to question at what point texture, colour and form coalesce into something loaded with history and meaning. Other forms lurk within the composition: a hint of a paint palette, or perhaps the strings of a lute. Is this a still-life, or something more? The artist’s bold colours and graphic forms also conjure associations with Pop Art: like Warhol’s silkscreens, each the same yet subtly different. ‘Painting provides the vocabulary to make the world visible’, he wrote (M. Lüpertz, quoted in Markus Lüpertz, exh. cat. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D. C. 2017, p. 6). Here, in the spirit of an ancient ‘dithyrambic’ incantation, Lüpertz lifts the veil upon the way in which we make sense of images.