By
Alastair Sooke
"Witty.
Sexy. Gimmicky. Glamorous. Big business.” That is how the British artist
Richard Hamilton defined Pop art in a letter written in 1957. Most
gallery-goers today would understand exactly what he meant: think of Warhol’s
sexy visions of Marilyn and his glamorous portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy, or
Lichtenstein’s gimmicky yet witty comic-book paintings, which parody warfare
and gender stereotypes. As for “big business”, one only has to look at the
prices achieved by canonical Pop artists in recent years: last November,
Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963) sold for a record-breaking $105 million (£65.5 million) at auction in
America.
But the
history of Pop art is not as familiar as you might think. Pop is often
understood as a US phenomenon. We perceive it as an art form intimately bound
up with the rampant consumer culture that emerged across the Atlantic in the
aftermath of the Second World War. Even the Britons, including Hamilton, who
supposedly anticipated by a decade the developments of Pop art in New York and
Los Angeles in the early Sixties were responding with the enthusiasm of
devotees to totems of American capitalism: Chrysler cars and Coke bottles,
Playboy pin-ups and Minnie Mouse.
More
recently, though, art historians have been investigating less-known aspects of
Pop, such as the roles played by forgotten but important female artists – the
likes of Rosalyn Drexler, Pauline Boty and Evelyne Axell. Next autumn, Tate
Modern will mount a revelatory exhibition called The World Goes Pop, focusing
on how the “spirit of Pop” flourished internationally, in Latin America, Asia
and the Middle East.
Before
that, though, another exhibition at the Tate, a full-scale retrospective for
the maverick German artist Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), offers a reminder that Pop
art was not an exclusively Anglo-American affair. Polke belonged to a
generation of German artists, including his more famous contemporary Gerhard
Richter, who launched their careers in Düsseldorf in the early Sixties with a
movement known as “Capitalist Realism” – essentially, a Teutonic version of
Pop.
Unlike
Richter, a meticulous painter whose work has long enjoyed success on the art
market, Polke is a tricky artist to characterise. Like Richter, he is known
primarily as a painter, but his work is irrepressibly experimental and draws
upon a bewildering jumble of inspirations, from philosophy and mineralogy to
alchemy and hallucinogenic drugs.
What
unifies his output is best described as a kind of anarchic and satirical
attitude or world view, a tongue-in-cheek, subversive spirit that has little
time for stuffy hierarchies or bourgeois conventions. Along with the slightly
younger Martin Kippenberger, Polke is arguably the most avant-garde figure in
post-war German art.
Born in
the Lower Silesia town of Oels, Polke grew up in the Soviet zone of occupation
before his family migrated to the West German city of Düsseldorf in 1953.
Following an apprenticeship to a glass-painter when he was 18, he enrolled in
1961 at Düsseldorf’s Kunstakademie, where he met Richter, a fellow student, as
well as an artist called Konrad Lueg, who later became the art dealer Konrad
Fischer.
Two
years later, inspired by examples of the new American Pop art that they had
encountered in shows and magazines, the trio collaborated together with a
fourth artist, Manfred Kuttner, on an exhibition in the window of an abandoned
shop in Düsseldorf. Richter described it at the time as the “first exhibition
of 'German Pop Art’ ”. Little documentation of the show has
survived, but supposedly Lueg took a branded tub of washing powder and turned
it upside down, while Polke strung together several magazines and hung them up
like a mobile sculpture.
Within a
few months, Richter and Lueg had also staged a celebrated “happening” called “A
Demonstration for Capitalist Realism” inside a furniture showroom in
Düsseldorf. As well as presenting their own works, the pair displayed furniture
on plinths, a papier mâché figure of John F Kennedy and offered themselves as
living artworks. German Pop was up and running.
On the
face of it, Capitalist Realism shares many affinities with American Pop. Just
as Lichtenstein made a series of paintings of solitary objects, including a
sponge, a tyre, a portable radio and a ball of twine, so Richter concentrated
on banal, everyday things such as a table and a roll of lavatory paper. Like
Warhol, he drew upon the mass-produced, commercial imagery of advertising, as
in his paintings Folding Dryer (1962) and Ferrari (1964).
So did
Polke. As well as early drawings in ballpoint pen of a bar of soap and folded
shirts, he made paintings of socks, more folded shirts, a broken-off bar of
partially unwrapped chocolate, and biscuits – all of them hijacking the visual
strategies of advertising.
Comparisons
between the Americans and their German contemporaries are often irresistible.
In 1963, for instance, Lichtenstein created Hot Dog with Mustard. That same
year, Polke produced The Sausage Eater, in which an eyeless, disembodied head
in profile consumes a serpentine string of brown frankfurters.
Around
the time that Lichtenstein became interested in replicating coloured patterns
of so-called “Ben-Day dots”, which allowed publishers to reproduce pictures
mechanically, Polke also began investigating commercial printing techniques.
His Rasterbilder (“Screened Paintings”), which he began in 1963, borrowed the
“raster” dots of halftone newspaper illustrations. These would become some of
his best-known images, inevitably leading to talk about his distinctive “Polke
dots”.
Yet for
all the superficial similarities between what was happening in New York and
Düsseldorf in the early Sixties, there are also some significant differences.
According to Mark Godfrey, who has curated Tate’s forthcoming retrospective,
the way that Lichtenstein and Polke each used dots is one of them.
“Polke
first paints dots with the rubber on the back of a pencil, dipping it in ink,
dotting it down,” he explains. “Later, he uses a screen. But when you look
closely at them, they are very messy. When you look at Lichtenstein’s dots,
they are pristine, sharp-edged. Lichtenstein’s work in those years is
technically very proficient, whereas Polke’s looks casual: the perspective is
wrong, the paint thickness varies, or the background drips into the foreground.
There’s an amusing, clunky quality to it.”
Why did
Polke want to make deliberate mistakes? To answer that, it is important to
understand the context of the historical moment in which he grew up. As Godfrey
explains, living in West Germany did not offer the same experience as
capitalist America during that era.
“To be a
consumer in America in the Sixties,” he says, “you just go and buy your Coke
cans. But as a young artist in his 20s who was still pretty poor, Polke
experienced consumer culture as objects of desire he couldn’t have. Warhol and
Lichtenstein were surrounded by a glut of things, but in West Germany they were
still living in austere times.”
“When I
came to the West, I saw many, many things for the first time,” Polke once
recalled. “But I also saw the prosperity of the West critically. It wasn’t
really heaven.”
The
style of his early work was also linked to the spectre of the Second World War
and the toxic legacy of Nazism. “Polke was growing up after a moment when
Germany had been obsessed with purity, with clarity, with the Nazi idea of a
single truth – the truth of the Führer and Nazi policy,” explains Godfrey. “His
critique of that was always to think about images in terms of their dissolution
or corruption.” It has been suggested that his interest in swirls, squiggles
and organic, kidney-shaped forms was a reaction against the angularity of the
swastika and Nazi design.
German
Pop is, says Godfrey, “often more political, to do with a society rebuilding
itself. There was a more difficult set of circumstances that the Germans had to
deal with when they were making these images of everyday things. Young German
artists at the beginning of the Sixties were aware that their parents and
people in authority had been part of a generation impacted upon by Nazism. The
world around them was trying to forget the past – but their inquiring minds
preferred to trouble that repression.”
One way
that Polke interrogated the state of German society was through his use of
humour and satire. His painting of socks, for instance, is deliberately humdrum
and ironic. In The Sausage Eater, the endless frankfurters suggest both
gluttony and coercion, as though the eyeless figure is being force-fed.
“Sparkling Wine for Everyone”, a crude, watercolour-and-ballpoint doodle that
punctures the hollow promises of prosperity uttered by West Germany’s leaders,
looks like it could have come from the contemporary artist David Shrigley.
Why
Can’t I Stop Smoking? (1964) adopts a similar tone. “You’ve got this man who
looks a bit like [Mad Men’s] Donald Draper at the beginning of the Sixties,”
says Godfrey, “but his eyes aren’t filled in. The sketchiness of the way he’s
drawn: you’d never find that in American Pop.”
He pauses. “I’d be hard-pressed to think of any
point where Polke was merely a follower of American Pop art,” he says, “because
his paintings of everyday things have a humour and a charm to them that you
don’t often see in American Pop at that point. Some of the work may seem
puerile, but it was puerile in a context where that was thoughtful and
important, because one had to ask serious questions about the older generation.
Polke’s clowning was always motivated by something deeply serious.”