The "Markus Lupertz: Threads of History" Exhibit (Washington D.C., U.S.A.)

"Markus Lupertz: Threads of History" Exhibit

The Markus Lupertz: Threads of History Exhibit, opened last May 24 2017 at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, celebrates the pioneering early works of Markus Lüpertz, one of the most influential contemporary German artists who initiated a return to figurative painting during the late 1970s and 1980s, with an in-depth exploration of his groundbreaking paintings from the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibit runs until September 10, 2017.

Check out "Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden"

 

Exhibit Area

Markus Lüpertz, born in 1941 in Liberec, Czech Republic, is celebrated as a painter, sculptor, designer of opera sets and an influential teacher.  An acclaimed figure in Europe, in the U.S. he may be the least familiar of postwar German painters, less recognized than such colleagues as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. However, his paintings are known for their virtuoso paint handling, saturated hues, generous scale, and firm, confrontational compositions.

 

Idyll IV (1969)

Belonging to a generation who came of age in the shadow of World War II, Lüpertz is said to have wanted to be “an artist without responsibilities” (one who concentrated on the abstract essentials of picture-making and avoided political or sociological content) during the Cold War, when Germany began to deal publicly with its brutal recent history.

 

Motif - Dithyrambic II

Still, he also always responded to the crucial events of his working life - the construction of the Berlin Wall, the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann, Germany’s collective admission of culpability for the Holocaust, growing postwar prosperity, the actions of the Red Army Faction terrorist gang in the 1970s, the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of East and West Germany, and the rebuilding of shattered Berlin, among many other things.

 

Idyll IV (1969)

This exhibition brings more than 30 paintings to the National Mall including the 40-ft. long Westwall (Siegfried Line), a large-scale work on view for the first time in the US. It coincides with The Phillips Collection’s exhibition Markus Lupertz (May 27 to September 3, 2017), which spans the artist’s entire career.

 

Cyclops I - Dithyrambic (1973)

Together, the two presentations, forming Lupertz’s first major US museum retrospective, offer an overview of five decades of the artist’s paintings, the first American museum survey of his work (There are also recent paintings at Michael Werner Gallery, New York City).

 

Kitchen - Dithyrambic (1964)

Lüpertz’s most recent works, his most explicit, include an ample nude inspired by Peter Paul Rubens, references to Classical sculpture, and tantalizingly repeated landscape forms.

 

Triptych (1964, distemper on canvas)

The titles of Lüpertz’s abstract paintings refer to everything from Donald Duck to brightly colorful tents for camping, in perhaps a dessert, to Nicolas Poussin and Parsifal.  Many titles also include the word “dithyramb,” originally referring to the ecstatic verses created by ancient Greek followers of Dionysus. 

 

Our Daily Bread (1972)

The term, for him, stands for what the wall texts call “the primacy of the artist’s expressive power over the subject.” That is, since any painting is both abstract and a fiction, the nominal subject that triggered the improvisatory process of picture-making loses its original meaning by being translated into this new state of being. The painted frames on many of the included works emphasize the artifice of the process.

 

Westwall - Siegfried Line (1968, distemper on canvas)

The even earlier 1968 painting Westwall (Siegfried Line), dominating a gallery wall as if it were a Renaissance perspective project, is an enormous, 40 foot long mural-size, meticulously shaded riff of the geometrically arranged battlements of the Siegfried Line, repetitive tank-trap fortifications used by the Germans during World War II. In works from the 1970s, I easily recognize the stahlhelm, the characteristic German army helmet, and military caps.

 

Tent – Dithyrambic (1965)

Tent 9 - Dithyrambic (1965)

The brilliant wide, large paintings of tents, not on canvas or with oil or noticeable artist paint, are on industrial Kraft paper painted with what is known as  distemper, a chalky commercial poster paint which he wisely “borrowed” (Lupertz was working for a poster company at the time). They are as much a design as an actual representation of colorful tents.

 

Tunnel Flowers - Dithyrambic (1969)

Lüpertz complicates things by frequently working in series, repeating a single image with eye-testing variations, the equivalent (according to him) of the individual frames of a film that, similarly, evoke the passage of time.

Tent 46 - Dithyrambic (1965, distemper on nettle)

 

Markus Lüpertz - Threads of History: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 700 Independence Ave SW & 7th St SW, National Mall, Washington, D.C. 20560, United States.  Website: www.hirshhorn.si.edu. Admission is free.  Open daily, 10 AM – 5:30 PM.