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Lot Essay
Bavarian is one of Polke's first 'Rasterbilds' (dot paintings) made at the height of his so-called 'Capitalist Realist' years in 1965. A semi-abstract oil painting depicting a banal extract from a contemporary newspaper article in a style that mimics if not actually mocks the mechanical process of reproduction by which such mass media is made, it is a work of deliberate and provocative vagueness and ambiguity.
'Capitalist Realism'--the pseudo art movement that Polke founded with Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner and Konrad Lueg--began as an action/installation in a furniture store in Düsseldorf in 1963 and was an ironic response by these artists to the so-called 'Americanization' of West German culture and to the development of Pop art. "Pop art is not an American invention" they declared in an open letter at the time, "and we do not regard it as an import--though the concepts and terms were mostly coined in America and caught on more rapidly there than here in Germany. This art is pursuing its own organic and autonomous growth in this country; the analogy with American Pop art stems from those well-defined psychological, cultural and economic factors that are the same here as they are in America" (Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, 'Letter to a Newsreel Company', 29 April 1963).
For Polke and his "Capitalist Realist' colleagues, both their work and that of the American Pop artists--whose art they were clearly aware of --was a response to the mass-media saturation of contemporary culture. In the Federal Republic of Germany, in its political situation segregated from the Soviet regime in the East and culturally as well as militarily 'occupied' by the American West, the significance of such media overload bore undeniable political connotations. Indeed, the term "Capitalist Realism" was a deliberately ironic response to this situation being one that mocked both the state-approved "Socialist Realism" of the East and Pop Art's rootedness in a capitalist consumer society. Given West Germany's often deliberately conspicuous lauding of its consumerist culture at this time, it is easy to see how, for a generation of artists raised in the East, such as Polke and Richter were, much of the imagery of the West's mass-media had an aura that appeared alien, artificial and fundamentally divorced from reality.
Such awareness of the shallow artifice and inherent unreality of media imagery held important implications for the development of both Polke and Richter's painting as it grew to probe ever more difficult questions about the essential artificiality of all imagery. What appealed to these artists about Pop Art in the early 1960s they declared, was that it "recognizes the modern mass media as a genuine cultural phenomena and turns its attributes, formulations and content, through artifice, into art." In turning its own artifice in on itself Pop Art not only transformed the imagery of the mass media into art, but it also transformed art, "fundamentally changing the face of modern painting", they declared, and inaugurating " an aesthetic revolution." "Pop Art", the Capitalist Realists said, "has rendered conventional painting - with all its sterility, its isolation, its artificiality, its taboos and it rules - entirely obsolete, and has rapidly achieved international currency and recognition by creating a new view of the world." (Ibid.)
In Bavarian Polke demonstrates this transformation by creating a painting that openly displays its own artificiality at the same time as it exposes the banal unreality and artifice of the mass media. In the same way that Richter blurs his paintings of photographs to create an ambiguity and uncertainty at the heart of his imagery, Polke employs his trademark raster dots in this painting to assert the essentially abstract nature of all imagery as well as the multi-layered nature of reality. Magnifying the mechanically-reproductive technique of the benday dot used in the newspaper printing to the point where collectively they take on an abstract pictorial quality, Polke has painstakingly hand-copied an essentially abstract optical pattern of dots which, at a certain distance, convey a coherent and recognizable image of a English language newspaper with its own imagery of a Bavarian musical band. This is no straightforward copy à la Roy Lichtenstein however. Polke has carefully and deliberately magnified the raster dots to the precise point whereby they begin to disrupt and undermine both the cohesiveness and the integrity of the image they are supposed to convey without ever completely dominating or negating it. In this way, as he was to do in a variety of ways in so many of his later paintings, Polke establishes an ambiguous and multi-layered surface to the painting that asks important questions about the nature of perception, of imagery and image-making, and of reality. "I like the way that the dots in a magnified picture swim and move about", he said at this time," the way that motifs change from recognizable to unrecognisable, the undecided, ambiguous nature of the situation, the way it remains open ... Lots of dots vibrating, resonating, blurring, re-emerging, thoughts of radio signals, radio pictures and television come to mind." (Sigmar Polke cited in Dieter Hülsmanns, 'Kultur des Rasters. Ateliergesprdch mit dem Maler Sigmar Polke," Rheinische Post, 10 May 1966.)
Conveying a sense of a faint television image emerging from an artificial snowstorm of static, Bavarian is a work that seems to tap into the ambiguities of everyday life, asking not only whether you can believe everything you read in the newspapers but also whether you can believe what you see? It is a partial, fragmentary and seemingly incomplete image that seeks to obfuscate the meaning of something so ordinary, a brochure documenting the performance of a German musical troupe. Yet, it is precisely through this sense of fragmentation, banality and ordinariness, that the almost subject-less nature of the painting's imagery makes its point. For through it and with it Polke has managed to create a unique and surprising work of art that is as resolutely uninvolved with the traditional conventions of art as it is as engaged with those of seeing and the day-to-day nature of reality that exists outside the world of the art gallery. Marking a deliberate contrast to American Pop Art's often colorful lauding of celebrity and of cultural icons, Bavarian establishes itself as a classic work of "Capitalist Realist' irony, by throwing the dull, banal grey reality of the majority of the German people's daily existence into the art historical spotlight.
'Capitalist Realism'--the pseudo art movement that Polke founded with Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner and Konrad Lueg--began as an action/installation in a furniture store in Düsseldorf in 1963 and was an ironic response by these artists to the so-called 'Americanization' of West German culture and to the development of Pop art. "Pop art is not an American invention" they declared in an open letter at the time, "and we do not regard it as an import--though the concepts and terms were mostly coined in America and caught on more rapidly there than here in Germany. This art is pursuing its own organic and autonomous growth in this country; the analogy with American Pop art stems from those well-defined psychological, cultural and economic factors that are the same here as they are in America" (Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, 'Letter to a Newsreel Company', 29 April 1963).
For Polke and his "Capitalist Realist' colleagues, both their work and that of the American Pop artists--whose art they were clearly aware of --was a response to the mass-media saturation of contemporary culture. In the Federal Republic of Germany, in its political situation segregated from the Soviet regime in the East and culturally as well as militarily 'occupied' by the American West, the significance of such media overload bore undeniable political connotations. Indeed, the term "Capitalist Realism" was a deliberately ironic response to this situation being one that mocked both the state-approved "Socialist Realism" of the East and Pop Art's rootedness in a capitalist consumer society. Given West Germany's often deliberately conspicuous lauding of its consumerist culture at this time, it is easy to see how, for a generation of artists raised in the East, such as Polke and Richter were, much of the imagery of the West's mass-media had an aura that appeared alien, artificial and fundamentally divorced from reality.
Such awareness of the shallow artifice and inherent unreality of media imagery held important implications for the development of both Polke and Richter's painting as it grew to probe ever more difficult questions about the essential artificiality of all imagery. What appealed to these artists about Pop Art in the early 1960s they declared, was that it "recognizes the modern mass media as a genuine cultural phenomena and turns its attributes, formulations and content, through artifice, into art." In turning its own artifice in on itself Pop Art not only transformed the imagery of the mass media into art, but it also transformed art, "fundamentally changing the face of modern painting", they declared, and inaugurating " an aesthetic revolution." "Pop Art", the Capitalist Realists said, "has rendered conventional painting - with all its sterility, its isolation, its artificiality, its taboos and it rules - entirely obsolete, and has rapidly achieved international currency and recognition by creating a new view of the world." (Ibid.)
In Bavarian Polke demonstrates this transformation by creating a painting that openly displays its own artificiality at the same time as it exposes the banal unreality and artifice of the mass media. In the same way that Richter blurs his paintings of photographs to create an ambiguity and uncertainty at the heart of his imagery, Polke employs his trademark raster dots in this painting to assert the essentially abstract nature of all imagery as well as the multi-layered nature of reality. Magnifying the mechanically-reproductive technique of the benday dot used in the newspaper printing to the point where collectively they take on an abstract pictorial quality, Polke has painstakingly hand-copied an essentially abstract optical pattern of dots which, at a certain distance, convey a coherent and recognizable image of a English language newspaper with its own imagery of a Bavarian musical band. This is no straightforward copy à la Roy Lichtenstein however. Polke has carefully and deliberately magnified the raster dots to the precise point whereby they begin to disrupt and undermine both the cohesiveness and the integrity of the image they are supposed to convey without ever completely dominating or negating it. In this way, as he was to do in a variety of ways in so many of his later paintings, Polke establishes an ambiguous and multi-layered surface to the painting that asks important questions about the nature of perception, of imagery and image-making, and of reality. "I like the way that the dots in a magnified picture swim and move about", he said at this time," the way that motifs change from recognizable to unrecognisable, the undecided, ambiguous nature of the situation, the way it remains open ... Lots of dots vibrating, resonating, blurring, re-emerging, thoughts of radio signals, radio pictures and television come to mind." (Sigmar Polke cited in Dieter Hülsmanns, 'Kultur des Rasters. Ateliergesprdch mit dem Maler Sigmar Polke," Rheinische Post, 10 May 1966.)
Conveying a sense of a faint television image emerging from an artificial snowstorm of static, Bavarian is a work that seems to tap into the ambiguities of everyday life, asking not only whether you can believe everything you read in the newspapers but also whether you can believe what you see? It is a partial, fragmentary and seemingly incomplete image that seeks to obfuscate the meaning of something so ordinary, a brochure documenting the performance of a German musical troupe. Yet, it is precisely through this sense of fragmentation, banality and ordinariness, that the almost subject-less nature of the painting's imagery makes its point. For through it and with it Polke has managed to create a unique and surprising work of art that is as resolutely uninvolved with the traditional conventions of art as it is as engaged with those of seeing and the day-to-day nature of reality that exists outside the world of the art gallery. Marking a deliberate contrast to American Pop Art's often colorful lauding of celebrity and of cultural icons, Bavarian establishes itself as a classic work of "Capitalist Realist' irony, by throwing the dull, banal grey reality of the majority of the German people's daily existence into the art historical spotlight.