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

Cafe Deutschland

RS: Could you tell me how the Cafe Deutschland paintings began?

JI: Problems were increasing in my relationship with the political group I belonged to. The conflict was quite obvious: I no longer wanted an atmosphere where anybody would direct what I should paint, or say who my heroes should be--you know, all these questions. We had group critiques of the paintings. Today it's hard to understand that members of the group looked at my paintings and put their fingers on what they thought were the weak parts. I really got in big trouble the day I got a psychosomatic illness: I got pimples on my hands. It was, I must say, a kind of group terror. I felt very unhappy because I still wanted to belong, to have a political vision, but my artistic practice wasn't accepted, so the only way was for me to split. I couldn't run away from what I wanted to paint.

The birth of the Cafe Deutschland paintings was at the 1976 Venice Biennale. I had a couple of paintings in the neighborhood of paintings by Renato Guttuso, and I knew that he was a member of the Communist Party of Italy, and the party followed the Soviet Union. I was very interested in the paintings Guttuso showed, and in how he handled political things in paint. But from the political point of view, being Maoist, I was in opposition to him. So I took a canvas the same size as Guttuso's Caffe Greco and created Card Deutschland as an answer. I did hundreds of drawings to fill up the space of the Cafe, and I established an atmosphere to try to figure out what it was all about. But you and I are discussing this from a political point of view, and I don't want you to forget that I love to paint. When I'm doing the light, or when l show Brecht with a birthday cake, that is an opportunity to paint. It has two sides, of course. Even when the content and the task that I have set myself is not a joyful thing, I enjoy the work. So all these things set energy free in me. When I look at the Cafe Deutschlands today, I realize that even though in a way they are very stiff, they announced possibilities which took on much more importance later.

RS: When you made the jump from political paintings and drawings to the Cafe Deutschland series where things--the meanings--are more open, the color is more vibrant, the confusion of objects in spaces is intensified, and so on--were there other artists you were thinking about, or other precedents in your mind? Or were you just finding your way by trial and error?

JI: I found it by experiment. In a sense I was running away from that dogmatic style where you can see a clear hierarchy. As I worked, I became freer and freer. For example, playing with the mirror, translating symbols, making different settings, when for example the cafe became a discotheque or a public space. I could play with different characters, and use the space as a kind of theater director. So it was a start, if you want, for my fantasy game. I could breathe more freely. I was so happy when the famous German collector Peter Ludwig made my dream come true. I always wanted to have Caffe Greco next to Cafe Deutschland. He had the good sense to buy the Caffe Greco when he first saw it in 1979, when he also bought a Cafe Deutschland. Now you can see both paintings in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, confronting each other. You know, he finished my art piece [laughter].