Of politics and painting: in the first installment of a two-part conversation, the artist looks back on his eventful early career—student days, learning from Beuys, Maoist and Green Party activism, clandestine visits to East Germany, the genesis of the Cafe Deutschland series

Art in America, June-July, 2005 by Robert Storr

Born in 1945 in Bleckede, near Luneburg, Jorg Immendorff belongs to the generation of postwar German artists for whom the past was at once heavy and opaque, and the future hemmed in by the sharp political and cultural antagonisms of East versus West, communism versus capitalism. Immendorff, who grew up in West Germany, began his artistic training in 1963 at the Art Academy in Dusseldorf under the tutelage of the innovative theater designer Teo Otto, who had been one of Bertolt Brecht's principal collaborators in the 1920s and early 1930s. A year later, Immendorff joined the class of the recently appointed professor of monumental sculpture, Joseph Beuys, who was to remain his mentor for many years thereafter and who still figures prominently as a character in his dense pictorial allegories. While still a student, Immendorff developed his own style of political performance art under the rubric LIDL--nonsense syllables referring to childhood, like the word "Dada"--and for these events made masks, cutouts of Buddha or Mao-like babies, and other props.

As the end of the 1960s approached and ideological lines separating student rebels and officialdom hardened, Immendorff took a step that few committed artists of the time were actually prepared to follow: he joined a left-wing collective and voluntarily subordinated his work to "revolutionary" discipline. While such involvements have often preceded the creative death of engaged artists, in Immendorff's case it served as a catalyst, transforming his work from the playful ephemera associated with his LIDL concept--a parody not only of high art, but of Beuys's many utopian projects of the period--to a substantial form of initially socialist then broadly social caricature. This transition culminated in the series of Cafe Deutschland paintings of 1977-82, in which Immendorff staged confrontations between emblematic figures and symbols that represented the complexities of German reality: Stalin and Hitler, swastikas and hammers and sickles, punk rockers and old-style bohemian painters. Widely viewed as "Neo-Expressionist" in the 1980s, the Cafe Deutschland canvases are, in keeping with the artist's apprenticeship with Otto, in fact more like Brechtian scenarios.

By the 1990s, Immendorff changed the venue from German bars to French cafes--specifically, the Cafe Flore in Paris--organizing imaginary encounters between himself and his peers (A.R. Penck, Georg Baselitz and others) and masters of modernism such as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Giorgio de Chirico, Kurt Schwitters, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Max Ernst. The latter group represented the historical avant-garde from which German culture had been entirely cut off during the 12 years of the Third Reich--and from which the East German art scene was still cut off by the Cold War. While major exhibitions such as the first two Documentas (1955 and 1959) and the 1958 retrospective of Schwitters reintroduced these seminal figures to the general public, Immendorff's fantasies constitute a symbolic attempt on the part of young painters and sculptors to get acquainted with them "personally," thereby initiating an imaginary dialogue between artistic fathers and sons that would fill the prevailing silence between prewar and postwar generations. Indeed, these pictures remind one strongly of Ernst's group portrait of the Surrealists with Dostoyevsky in their midst, The Rendezvous of Friends.

From plans for the LIDL academy, the artist's notion of the perfect art school, to Marxist-Leninist propaganda for the perfect revolution, to fanciful renditions of the perfect colloquia of modernist talents through to his current and increasingly baroque allegories, Immendorff s work has been an ongoing argument with his times and himself. The following conversation, which took place (in English) in January 2001, picks up the narrative in the early stages of his life and carries it forward to the 1980s. The second half of the story will be told in an interview of April 2005, which will appear in a forthcoming issue.

School Days

Robert Storr: What did you study at the Academy in Dusseldorf?

Jorg Immendorff: When I was quite young, about 17, I belonged to the theater class of the stage designer Teo Otto, who had worked in Berlin with Bert Brecht and Max Reinhardt. In the 1960s and '70s he became very famous. I was a fan of Chagall, dealing with flying figures. Every material inspired me--paint on canvas, or paint on old windows that a school near the art academy threw away. I had no money to buy canvas or expensive colors, so I took any material that I could get. The conflict was that I didn't want to do stage sets. Still, I was impressed by the atmosphere of theater. Before going to the academy, I had had a short experience as a ballet dancer in Bonn, and I had seen [the actor] Klaus Kinski. He was a kind of rebellion on the stage. When he performed Hamlet with a skull, he was so impulsive and emotional that the audience started to laugh, and then he threw the skull into the audience and finished his performance. As a young kid, this was impressive to me because I was looking for a way not to be deflated by rules.