In April 1966, wearing nothing but pink swimming trunks and an oversized baby cardboard nose, 20-year-old Jörg Immendorff climbed a ladder into the rafters of the Aachen Gallery and began throwing 200 yellow-red flowers one at a time into the audience. Immendorff, who studied in Joseph Beuys' class, calls this Dadaist performance the “flower power action”. It's about the Vietnam War, in which bombs fall instead of flowers, and also about giant babies.
A few of them can be seen in the large exhibition in Düsseldorf's Museum Kunstpalast: chubby and very buxom infants from different ethnic groups, which Immendorff also washed and fed in public on occasion. The child of divorce, born in 1945, had other strange ideas. In 1968, Immendorff rang the doorbells of Düsseldorf apartment buildings, inserted a polar bear figure on a long stick, briefly contacted the residents and left (“Keep the polar bear in”).
On May 1, 1968, when he tied a wooden block painted in the German national colors to his left leg and walked back and forth in front of the Federal Palace in Bonn, he was arrested. This performance marked the beginning of the “LIDL” campaigns. Soon afterwards, Immendorff joined a Maoist K group and became an art teacher at a secondary school. How does someone who obviously had so much nonsense in his head become a great artist? This show is the first Immendorff retrospective in a long time. You can find out here.
The painter and sculptor, who died in 2007, is still quite famous due to various scandals, but was hardly exhibited for many years. Too bad. You quickly become enthusiastic about the wealth of images he produced, the anarchy and the joy of telling stories, debating, agitating and dreaming. Three years before his death at the age of 61, Immendorff was sentenced to probation for cocaine possession. By then he was already severely affected by an incurable nervous disease.
The scandal at the time and Immendorff's lifelong self-dramatization made his work famous and overshadowed at the same time. Immendorff painted the portrait of Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, with whom he was friends. Since the Federal Chancellery didn't want to borrow it, a study can be seen in the show. No other portrait of the Chancellor is so courageous and at the same time so strange: Immendorff gilded the face of the Brioni Chancellor.
Someone like him is missing. Many artists today would like to be political figures, and yet it often feels as if politics is attached to works of art in a non-binding manner, like an order slip. Completely different with Immendorff. After his Dadaist early LIDL phase he becomes a Maoist.
In the service of the peasant revolution, Immendorff paints seemingly naive pictures, such as one in which a man leaves a KPD demonstration and throws open the door to a painter's studio. “Where are you with your art, colleague?” is the title of this work from 1973. But it does not formulate a question. Immendorff is saying: It is unimportant what an artist does in the studio if it does not change society. The young artist paints agitprop, propaganda in acrylic. Picturesquely banal.
But then something remarkable happens: painting takes on a life of its own. The spark will be a painting by the older Italian artist Renato Guttuso. His monumental picture “Caffè Greco”, created in 1976, brings together living and dead greats of cultural life in the traditional Roman café of the same name, from Giorgio de Chirico to André Gide, Apollinaire and Buffalo Bill. A Japanese tourist and a lesbian couple can also be seen. The present and the past merge into one another. The chocolate manufacturer Peter Ludwig buys “Caffè Greco” from the communist Guttuso and exhibits it in Cologne. Immendorff is thrilled.
So you can paint figuratively and interestingly and think politically, you can negotiate, argue and debate about the things in life, but not only in the bars in Düsseldorf's old town, but also in an imaginary, painted “Café Germany”. Immendorff varied this in large format nineteen times between 1978 and 1982. The Café der Nation actually looks more like a nightclub - the cycle becomes one of the most important contributions to painting in the second half of the 20th century. On large canvases, the artist creates rooms populated by many figures in a central perspective, half pub, half discotheque, half alternative parliament. There's something going on everywhere.
In the first version of the motif, Immendorff sits at a round table and stretches his hand through a small wall, which is of course the Berlin Wall. Next to him, the Brandenburg Gate is reflected in a mirrored pillar. In it he sees his friend and colleague A.R. Penck, who is trying to do the same thing over in the GDR: to create a completely new art that helps everyone communicate with everyone. Totem poles with fixed faces symbolize East and West. Bert Brecht crouches above the bar's illuminated ceiling and writes everything down by candlelight. It is the German drama. Immendorff paints the picture of reunification, but most people no longer believe in it.
Three images can be seen here from this complex. One would have wished for even more, because the “Café Germany series” never gets boring. You are literally sucked into these social caves, always discovering new details and allusions. And one wishes that such art existed today, when Germany is once again threatening to fly apart, politically teetering between radical fringes and an exhausted center. In front of these canvases, it becomes clear why Immendorff is such an important political artist and still fun: everyone here talks to everyone else, everything comes together, and everyone is allowed to represent their respective interests without being denounced. There is no clear message, the image itself is the message.
In the 80s, Immendorff finally became what he had always admired about Beuys: a recognizable figure, inseparable from his own work. Immendorff becomes a brand. There are two large portraits on the wall in the exhibition. One was created in 1987 and shows Immendorff as a leather jacket macho with thick rings, an earring and a small fluffy dog, a kind of Mickey Rourke of German art. Immendorff creates his wooden sculptures with a chainsaw, his trademark monkeys adorn celebrity restaurants and the Fortuna Düsseldorf football jersey. Art and life fall into one. In this respect, he always remains true to his early Dadaist work. It was the confrontation with reality that drove Immendorff into art.
But his political impetus left him before German reunification. In the hidden object pictures of the “Café de Flore” series, the paranoia of the Cold War no longer prevails, but rather a cultivated parlando of intellectual greats and companions. The public space is now removed from time, it is always night, dominated by black with neon colors.
The show shows the monumental canvas “Gyntiana” from this phase, measuring seven by three and a half meters wide. Immendorff is now more concerned with himself than with politics. In “Café” from 1990, he lit a fire with brushes at the table on the far right. At the table next door with a mustache is the artist A.R. Penck and Markus Lüpertz, on the far left their shared gallery owner Michael Werner. The pub is called “Zum Immendorff” and looks a little dim.
Immendorff begins to paint himself and his colleagues into art history, but perhaps he already knows that things are not going well for him. He gradually loses the ability to paint, but with assistants he still creates a very impressive, increasingly ghostly late work. He died in Düsseldorf in 2007. Why the city is only now exhibiting him extensively again after his first solo show in 1982 is a mystery. But maybe the break was good for the work. In any case, autumn 2026 is a good time to sit down in Café Deutschland again and talk to everyone who is there. No matter what they have to say.
“Immendorff”, until January 10, 2027, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.
