Sigmar Polke, one of postwar Germany`s most important artists, had

Michael Werner
4 East 77
New York
New York 10075
Ted Loos
Shape Shifter
April 2014
Sigmar Polke, one of postwar Germany’s most important artists,
had a penchant for mystery.
Sigmar Polke, Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan), 1974/1978,
gelatin silver print with applied color
When the august and ever-expanding Museum of Modern Art offers one of its biggest
exhibitions of all time, attention must be paid—who could merit that kind of attention, given
the fact that such titans as Willem de Kooning have recently had major events at MoMA? This
month, the super-sized show “Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010” arrives with some 300 works
across many media. Like the German artist’s work, it’s protean, sprawling, riveting.
Daphne, 2004, artist’s book (p. 16)
Raster Dawing (Portait of Lee Harvey Oswald),
1963, Poster, paint and pencil on paper
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Michael Werner
4 East 77
New York
New York 10075
“Bigness isn’t necessarily good, but in this case,
it’s the first sizable retrospective to include all his
media; it required that spaciousness,” says Kathy
Halbreich, MoMA’s deputy director and the
primary force behind the show. As the
exhibition’s subtitle indicates, Polke (1941-2010)
was a master of multiple identities. His works are
frequently layered, covered and revealed,
brimming with ambiguity. “He seems to have no
boundaries, no style, no limits,” says Halbreich.
That, of course, makes him a difficult artist to pin
down: “Writing my essay nearly put me over the
edge,” she adds with a laugh.
Negative Value II (Mizar), 1982, dispersion paint, resin,
and pigment on canvas
Over the years, the alibi-prone Polke represented
himself in artworks variously as a palm tree, a
doppelganger, and an astronaut. Halbreich
remembers him wearing snakeskin pants, an
appropriate metaphor: “Snakes move fast and
shed their skin. He was constantly reinventing
himself.”
But his shape-shifting can’t obscure the fact that
he was perhaps Germany’s most important postwar artist, save only his onetime teacher Joseph
Beuys. Included in the massive show, which goes
to London’s Tate Modern after MoMA, are
abstractions like the ghostly, white-streaked
Untitled (2007), as well as the classic 1980s piece
Watchtower with Geese (1988), with its
totalitarian subject matter and its use of
interlocking color and patterns on fabric—one of
Polke’s many experiments with materials other
than plain old oil on canvas. “I think people will
be surprised by the enormous variety, but also
the strange unifying spirit across all the work,”
says Gordon VeneKlasen, his dealer for 20 years
at the Michael Werner Gallery and a close friend.
Polke’s early work dovetailed with the Pop era,
but he was in some ways the anti-Pop artist. He,
too, looked at the everyday world for inspiration
and imagery, but his take was more sinister.
“Compare Roy Lichtenstein’s Hot Dog with
Polke’s The Sausage Eater, which is in the show,”
says Halbreich, referring to works that were done
a year apart, in the early 1960s. “Same subject
matter, but Lichtenstein’s has a triumphant
cleanliness, and Polke’s is dirty, dusty and
contaminated.”
The Hunt for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, 2002, digital
print on tarpaulin
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Michael Werner
4 East 77
New York
New York 10075
The Sausage Eater was done with Polke’s
“raster dot” technique, his own version of
Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dots or the Pointillist
daub. (They are quite literally Polke dots.)
The very first work in the show is Raster
Drawing (Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald)
(1963), a chilling subject that Polke returned
to. “Our exhibition is a loop,” says Halbreich.
“We start with that raster and end with a
four-part projection of Lee Harvey Oswald
imagery.”
Watchtower, 1984, synthetic polymer paints and dry
pigment on fabric
Small gouaches show another side of his
work, like Sketchbook No. 21 (1969), with a
loosely drawn figure appearing to give an
almost Munchian scream. There are also 13
films in the exhibition that will be a
revelation, since eight of them have not been
seen before by most audiences. Late in
Polke’s life, before he died of cancer at 69,
editing films was something he could
comfortably do while sitting in a chair.
Over the decades, there was almost nothing he wouldn’t attempt to create art. “He was a volcanic
experimenter,” says Halbreich. For Watchtower (1984), he employed silver bromide, the
photographic substance that changes over time with light. The sculpture Potato House (1967) is
painted latticework and actual potatoes— one of Polke’s many references to the earthy basics of life
that kept post-World War II Germans alive.
Polke sometimes drew cartoon-like figures,
and he loved to steal images from
newspapers, like many Pop artists and like
his German peer Gerhard Richter. In 1970, he
took a beautiful black-and- white photograph
of his artist friend Michael Buthe— and then
painted the face over with primary red, blue
and yellow hues, a typically nose-thumbing
gesture. Polke’s relationship to color was
typically off-center and effective. Frequently
appearing in the exhibition’s works are an
unsettling orange— the color of menace and
alert— and a mysterious mauve. Halbreich
says, “He was fascinated by the antique rarity
of purple,” one of Polke’s many explorations
of arcane history.
Still from Quetta’s Hazy Blue Sky/Afghanistan-Pakistan,
c. 1974-76, 16mm film transferred to video
(color, sound), 34:33 min
“Witty, yet brutal” is the museum’s official line on Polke’s work of the late 1960s, but that phrase
could really apply to anything he did. Dark humor infuses all his work. Born in 1941, in the height of
the Nazi regime, he spent his formative years in the ashes of Germany’s shame and its shaky
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Michael Werner
4 East 77
New York
New York 10075
rehabilitation. His family fled East Germany for the West. “He grew up in utter and total chaos,” says
VeneKlasen. “He was fleeing the whole early part of his life.”
Untitled (Rorschach), c. 1999, colored ink in bound
notebook, 192 pages
Although he was a restless and curious soul
who traveled the world, he lived most of his life
in the country of his birth, largely in Cologne.
(Polke was married and divorced twice and had
two children with his first wife.) “He was an
obviously an international artist, but his roots
are buried very deep in the German soil,” says
Halbreich, who feels that the messiness of
Polke’s work is rooted in a deep mistrust of
authority and a cynicism about the Modernist
quest for purity in all things: “He was polluted
by the Third Reich’s ideas about a much more
poisonous kind of purity. I think he was a
political agnostic but a deeply sensitive person
who was chased by the past.”
Polke’s intellectual range was unusually broad. “He worked on so many levels,” says VeneKlasen. “I
would go book shopping with him, and he could do that for weeks. He looked for underlying
theories of the universe.” It made him a difficult artist to understand and appreciate, which is
perhaps why there isn’t a signature Polke work— and that may be just how he liked it. “That’s why
he’s a great artist,” says Halbreich. “The difficulty of pinning him down is a suggestion of the
freedom he wrestled out of a difficult history and the very problems of trying to say something and
be original.”
Working with him was no picnic, either. “The first
time I went to see him, I was deeply honored he
only made me wait half a day,” says Halbreich.
“He was extremely private. He kept his telephone
in a suitcase.” VeneKlasen remembers, “He had no
secretary or assistant. For years, people would
call me trying to get through to him.” Not only
was there no one to help him contact the outside
world, he had no studio assistants whatsoever,
making him an outlier in an age when artists
routinely have armies of helpers.
When the curator Robert Storr featured Polke in
the Venice Biennale, the exhibition was a
Untitled, c. 1975, gelatin silver print
surprise— even to Storr. “Rob had no idea what
was in the exhibition,” says VeneKlasen, because Polke wouldn’t tell him until the works actually
showed up. “He knew he had a room. For me, that was kind of exciting.”
Not surprisingly, the artist was touchy about how his work was shown, especially when it came to
career-capping tributes. “He didn't want a greatest-hits show,” says VeneKlasen. The last
retrospective of his work to make it to New York was in 1991, and Halbreich had many hurdles to
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Michael Werner
4 East 77
New York
New York 10075
making the current one happen. “He left no files,” she said. “It’s been a massive research project. It’s
one of the reasons we don’t know the work as well. We only know bits and pieces.”
Polke did few interviews, often joking around or spreading misinformation when he did submit to
one. His stubbornness, his single-mindedness and his devotion to his art— rather than to blabbing
on about it— are some of the reasons he’s always been “the artist’s artist,” in the words of
contemporary painter Amy Sillman. “Artists admire it,” says Halbreich. “They are so pushed to be
public figures and to produce for galleries, art fairs and museums— there’s very little privacy left in
the process.”
But now, the MoMA show is displaying the totality of Polke’s achievement, and anyone with a few
hours to spare can decide if they agree with VeneKlasen, who’s still taken aback that Polke is no
longer around to challenge and surprise us. “He was a king among artists,” he says. “Sigmar was
something special.”
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