Hello again Clarette
Thank-you - I've enjoyed this opportunity to learn more about Polke!
The answer is mostly excerpts and links which I hope will lead you to
plenty of useful material. When you've had a chance to read through
the sites I refer to, please do get back to me if you feel there is
something missing, and I'll try to fill the gap.
Before Polke went to art college, he was an apprentice learning to
paint on glass. When only 22, he teamed up with Gerhard Richter and
others for an exhibition called "Leben mit Pop" (Life with Pop),
staged in a large furniture store.
"[Richter] and Lueg organized a Demonstration in Support of Capitalist
Realism as a one-day event in a department store, Berges, in
Düsseldorf on 11 October 1963, displaying furniture on pedestals as
works of art and placing themselves in the room also as exhibits."
http://lacan.com/richter.htm
"The artists hung their pictures throughout the store and elevated
pieces of furniture on pedestals, transforming them into "sculptures."
The term "Capitalist Realism" wasn?t necessarily negative. Richter was
drawing parallels with American Pop art, which he saw as "an attempt
to overcome the sterility, isolation, and artificiality of
conventional painting.""
http://www.artnewsonline.com/pastarticle.cfm?art_id=1080
This "Leben mit Pop - Eine Demonstration für den Kapitalistischen
Realismus" in the Möbelhaus Berges, Düsseldorf was the first time
Polke had exhibited his work:
"1963 First public exhibition of [Polke's] works together with
Richter, Lueg and Manfred Kuttner in the Düsseldorf furniture store
Berges. Founded Capitalistic Realism together with Richter and Lueg"
The quote above is from this useful timeline/biography (with links to images):
http://www.sammlung-frieder-burda.de/autoindex_e.php3?ref=/content_e/deutschemalerei/polke/bio.html
* * * *
Richter was important in this phase of Polke's career. It was Richter
who thought of the phrase "capitalist realism":
"Richter was part of an exhibition in Düsseldorf, partly labeled
Capitalist Realism, a term which showed up again later. Richter never
intended it to be a political movement despite its allusion to
Socialist Realism and its aesthetic dogmas. Capitalist Realism can be
interpreted as a satirical term and a substitute for the label Pop."
http://www.cosmopolis.ch/english/cosmo26/gerhard_richter.htm
"Eschewing both the conventional Soviet Socialist painting tradition
and the contemporary Capitalist alternatives, Richter invented his own
vision of reality an ambiguous mix of avant-garde and tradition that
resists categorization."
http://www.postmedia.net/999/richter.htm
"Richter made friends. Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo were students
who had also fled East Germany. With Konrad Lueg, they formed a
clique. Polke, the wild man among them, for a while acted like Picasso
to Richter's Braque, the two egging each other on despite the fact
that temperamentally they couldn't have been less alike.
[...] Richter remembers. [...] 'With Polke [...] our relationship was
based on being outrageous.'
I ask Richter what he thinks of Polke now. He says: 'I have
difficulties with his work. He refuses all values and criteria, and
for that reason I could never talk to him seriously. He refuses to
accept any borders, any limits.' They rarely see each other anymore."
http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/CCT794/Sources/Richter/NYT-GerhardRichter-Kimmelman-1-2002.html
* * * *
" . . . the years 1963-1970 were formative for the artist. In these
years, he created a stylistic vocabulary in his paintings and drawings
from which he was to draw upon [sic] throughout his ongoing career.
The drawings, executed with ball-point pen, pencil, or gouache on
notebook paper, or regular office stock, have a curious immediacy to
them."
http://www.tractor.com/polkepr.html
"In the 1970s Polke explored the relationship between photography and
painting, and developed his interest in challenging the objectivity of
the photographic image. In 1974 he travelled in Pakistan and
Afghanistan, using his photographs from this trip as the basis for a
number of manipulated photographic and painted works. These explore
questions of authenticity, reproduction, imitation and authorship"
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/polke/polke.htm
The article with the quote above, from the Tate Modern website, gives
a good introduction to the development of Polke's work over the
decades. Also check out the links to further pages relating to the
current Polke exhibition there, a "History of Everything".
====================================================
Is he the greatest living artist?
The links below will lead to opinions by critics and others who are
better qualified to comment on this than I am. I notice Polke is often
called "elusive" and suspect this is part of his appeal for many
people, especially those who enjoy contemplating the range of
potential meanings contained in his work, but the elusiveness is
occasionally said to be "confusing". "Experimentation" and
"imagination" are other words which crop up regularly.
"Sigmar Polke explores modern reality through an extraordinary range
of imagery. The novelist AS Byatt sings his praises:
Sigmar Polke is a brilliantly witty artist. I use the word ?wit? in
the way it was used of English 17th-century poetry, to describe a
ranging and probing intelligence that investigates everything,
connecting disparate images and ideas. He can be flatly comic and
slapstick. He can equally make layered and ambiguous images of great
subtlety. He does not preach or hector; I have the sense that he
expects his audience to participate in the rueful irony ? and in the
delight ? with which he presents his phantasmagoria. He has
constructed, arguably, the most complete language I know for
describing modern reality."
Reprinted from 'The Times':
http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue7/polke.htm
"Polke is arguably the greatest and most influential of the East and
West German painters who came of age in the late 1960s and early '70s,
but whose work was not seen in New York until the early '80s. His main
competition is Gerhard Richter, whose intellectual rigidity is the
inverse of Polke's heady, almost (sometimes actually) intoxicated
sense of license.
[...]
It doesn't take too long to realize that the flaming imagination and
restless experimentation that courses so raucously through "The Ride
on the Eight of Infinity" swirls more quietly through everything else,
a rich, ceaseless underground current."
http://www.earlham.edu/~vanbma/fall/polke-art-review.htm
"Artistic quality cannot be measured, but you can measure the demand
for an artist. At least according to the international magazine
Capital, which once a year publishes its art compass ? a list of the
100 artists most in demand ? based on participation in group and solo
exhibitions at selected, prestigious museums all over the world. In
2000, the German painter Sigmar Polke came in as number one, well
ahead of such colleagues as Gerhard Richter and Bruce Nauman.
[...]
Those who talk about the death of painting always forget Sigmar Polke.
In his work, the art of painting has survived, full of vigour,
ambiguous, rich in perspective, humorous, mythological and fantasising
- in short: apparently inexhaustible. Polke continues to surprise us.
He can make even the needle of the compass dizzy."
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2001/03/30/28317.html
"Polke thinks big. In paintings of stupendous ambition and authority,
he aims in his art to embrace the whole of human experience, ranging
from politics and sex to history, childhood, biology, mythology, and
current events.
[...]
The meaning of Polke's art is often maddeningly elusive, but, as you
look, you find yourself seduced by his work, delve into yourself in
your attempt to understand it. Initially forbidding, his pictures grow
on you, hold your interest, and ask you to use your mind and
imagination in a way that no other artist of his generation quite
does."
Originally in 'The Telegraph':
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/artcritic/level1/reviewarchive/2003/03_10_01_polke.html
"Polke has mixed media, symbolic systems, and poetic messages with
such marvelous alacrity that the defining characteristic of his
persona has become its sheer elusiveness."
http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1997/dannheisser/commentary.html
" . . one of the leading German artists on the international art
scene. In the course of the past 30 years he has managed both to build
up an extraordinarily diverse oeuvre and to make clear his importance
to the younger generation of artists."
http://www2.kah-bonn.de/1/12/0e.htm
"Sigmar Polke is one of the world's most revered and influential
contemporary artists.
[...]
the artist's famed explorations of how images are made, used, and
thought about in our media-dominated culture. The works also pose
intriguing questions about how the eye and mind become crucial players
in the perceptual game we undertake daily."
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0300099096/103-3406958-0055841?v=glance
"For 40 years, Polke´s art has been a very serious joke.
[...]
Compared to Polke´s, most painting looks feeble, slow-witted,
uninventive. Even though his is an art frequently based on secondary
material - the newspaper clipping, the found photograph, old
engravings, old art, old pornography - his work startles, confuses,
fascinates and bedevils anyone who cares, or tries, to pin it down."
http://www.artdaily.com/links.asp?idl=28&id=172
"Polke?s interest in the history of ideas, but also [...]his
remarkable painterly inventiveness, his pleasure in experimentation
and open use of existing visual material."
://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:QU70mxVrzKIJ:www.depont.nl/en/collectie/3-morinf/sp.htm+sigmar+polke+great+OR+greatest&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
"Polke's work is full of experimental joy, irony, multi-levels,
delight in quotation and great variation presaging Post-Modernism at
an early stage."
http://www.af-moma.no/english/kunstnere/polke.html
"Polke lets his work speak for itself, rarely commenting or revealing
anything about himself. When he arrived to discuss the hang at the
Anthony D'Offay Gallery, instead of putting himself on display in a
shop window as he did in 1963, he brought along a video camera and
filmed the bemused gallery staff. "
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/news_comment/artistsinprofile/polke.shtml
"Sigmar Polke is the first living artist to have a show at Tate
Modern. I don't suppose the honour will daunt him. At 62, Polke has
enough work behind him to fill the museum several times over and must
surely be aware - even if he has the humility to demur - that there
are those who think him the world's greatest living artist.
Tate Modern itself is making no such claims. In fact, the whole
presentation is a model of restraint: none of the usual blether about
Polke subverting the elitist mythologies of artistic creation,
overthrowing the dominant visual ideologies or singlehandedly
regenerating the language of art."
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4767426-102280,00.html
"The Sigmar Polke exhibition is thought provoking and diverse, and at
times entertaining, but at others confusing. "
http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/exh_gfx_en/ART18554.html
====================================================
You can find auction records at a pay-for-information site called
ArtPrice.com. Some useful facts are accessible without payment,
including the names and dates of works sold at auction. They have sale
records from 1990 onwards for:
185 drawings, 168 paintings, 197 prints, 5 constructions/installations
and 43 photographs.
Here's an extract from their records of prints sold in spring this year:
Title Dated Size cm (in) Medium
Hallo Shiva 1974 20.2x43 Offset
Ohne Titel 1992 69.7x99.7 Print in colors
New Yorker Bettler 1974 43x61 Print
«Dr Pabscgt het z'schpiez s'sschpäkbschteck z'schpät bschteut» 1981-1991
50x40 Digital print
Freundinnen I 1967 46.4x58.7 Offset lithograph
To explore the site just type 'Polke' in the search box at:
http://web.artprice.com/
You can take out a day membership for $15 if you want to investigate
the prices paid for these works.
====================================================
Further Reading
===============
I hope you have access to a library with the comprehensive "catalogue
raisonné" detailing Polke's work between 1967 and 2000:
Sigmar Polke: Editions 1967-2000
by Sigmar Polke, Jurgen Becker, Claus Van Der Osten
Hatje Cantz Publishers (November 15, 2000)
Some of your best sources of critical opinion on Polke will be
exhibition catalogues, above all the "Three Lies":
Sigmar Polke: The Three Lies of Painting
by Sigmar Polke, Hans Belting, Rudi Fuchs, Charles W. Haxthausen, Martin Hentschel
Distributed Art Publishers (June 1997)
"This catalog to the largest Polke retrospective ever undertaken
[...]
chronologically arranged blocks of illustrations are interspersed with
essays that examine the artist's work, life, iconography, and
influences. One of the five leading German and American scholars and
curators who contributed pieces, Charles W. Haxthausen, offers an
especially insightful analysis of Polke's engagement with questions of
reproducibility ever since his discovery of Pop Art in the
1960s.[...]the most exhaustive work we are likely to see for at least
another decade on one of Europe's leading contemporary figures"
http://www.amazon.com/
(Other books by the above writers on Polke will give you some idea of
their interests.
Rudi Fuchs:
http://www.designstore01.com/search/books/AuthorSearch/Rudi+Fuchs/14/
Hans Belting :
http://www.designstore01.com/search/books/AuthorSearch/Hans+Belting/14/
Haxthausen:
http://www.designstore01.com/search/books/AuthorSearch/Charles+W.+Haxthausen/14/
Henschel has written a book on Tracey Moffat.)
ArtCyclopedia links to articles and images which may be of interest:
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/polke_sigmar.html
You could take out a free trial membership of ELibrary and see if
their articles on Polke would interest you. Check what they have at:
http://ask.elibrary.com/
Some of the books on Polke at Amazon have a "look inside" option which
may be helpful.
http://www.amazon.com/
I hope this will get you off to a good start, Clarette, but please
feel free to ask if you have a query.
Good luck with your thesis. Polke's oeuvre is so huge and
wide-ranging, I imagine this could be a very absorbing research
project.
Best Wishes - Leli
Search strategy:
'Polke' combined with
review
great
greatest
leading
exhibition
essay
critic
curator
"first * exhibition" |
,
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