4 Muses

Speaker: Hannah Klemm
Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Saint Louis Art Museum

In this large-scale painting Jörg Immendorff has created a fictitious artist’s studio in which he has depicted himself and three of his contemporary artist friends: Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck. He chose this group because he saw them as artists all deeply linked to the politics of postwar Germany.

Immendorff was part of a generation of artists born at the end of World War II. He studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under the famed conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys’s political activism was a key influence on the young Immendorff. Like Beuys, Immendorff believed that art was inextricable from politics. His paintings and performances called for social change and extended from his radical socialist viewpoints.

In the late 1970s Immendorff began painting imagery that directly confronted the division of Germany, combining autobiography with social and political commentary. In 4 Muses he examines both the politics of Germany at the time and what it means to be an artist, looking at the inherent contradictions between isolated studio art practice and activism.

Closest to the foreground, the artist Georg Baselitz is depicted seated at a table. He is looking at an image of himself in a mirror. In the reflection a crown has slipped down from his head and is situated around his neck, while an inverted figure hangs in the background, a play on Baselitz’s signature style. The most visible table leg depicts an eagle, referencing Nazi symbolism and standing as an emblem of Germany’s traumatic past. Here the eagle is bound and inverted, indicating a loss of its political power, yet it is still there as a reminder never to forget the past.

On the right side of the canvas is A. R. Penck, the only artist of this group who resided in East Germany at the time this work was painted. Penck is depicted in the shadows surrounded by images of State Socialism’s repressive tactics. His table is held up by figures resembling East German border guards. Military personnel and the Berlin Wall loom in darkness.

Immendorff was introduced to Penck in the mid-1970s through their mutual art dealer, and they became close friends and collaborators, often meeting up in East Berlin. Penck appears in several of Immendorff’s paintings on Germany’s division.

The other two figures depicted are Markus Lüpertz and Immendorff himself. Lüpertz examines himself in a mirror resting on a table supported by heads with their eyes covered by German flags. Lüpertz had become known for his artwork that pushed the German population to confront their Nazi past. While Immendorff stands looking at himself in a mirror, the table legs represent his own sculptures.

Through this complex symbolic painting, Immendorff celebrates German artistic achievement while challenging linear narratives and questioning clear understandings of the complex issues surrounding German national identity construction.