Sigmar Polke

Private Collection, Germany (acquired directly from the artist)
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, Part 1, 19 November 1997, Lot 30
Private Collection, Germany
Sale: Christie's New York, Contemporary Art Sale, Morning Session, 11 November 2004, Lot 183
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is brighter and more vibrant and fails to convey the iridescent quality of the paint in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Painted by Sigmar Polke one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall,Menschen wie Du + Ich (People like you + I) delivers a satirical and somewhat retroactive portrayal of an idealised family unit. Adopting the guise of kitsch 1950s advertisements and their proliferation of stereotypical domestic bliss with glamorous loyal housewives, leisurely couples and hardworking businessmen, Polke’s invocation of cliché harks back to the social milieu of an economically optimistic postwar era. Executed in 1988 however, Polke’s work, for all its delicate graphic linearity, opalescent variegation and diaphanous layering in capitalism’s patriotic colours of red, white and blue, delivers a scathing political comment on false idealism and imprudent self-confidence in the wake of Germany’s reunification.

Like a palimpsest, Polke’s layering of one stereotypical icon upon another foregrounds social roles and ideals of femininity that had long since withered into cultural obsolescence. With pithy cynicism, Polke parodies the outrageously outmoded political reinvigoration of these metaphors invoked to forge a fresh identity for an economically optimistic New Germany. Stamped and reiterated over the top of one another, these emphatically outlined individual motifs expose the vacuous substance and utter two-dimensionality propelling such a dated propagandist strategy. As a country divided by the iron curtain since the end of the Second World War, the historical trauma of over forty years of separation vastly outweighs any paper-thin impetus to adopt an economical ideal in the same way that previous governments had done in the 1950s and 1960s.

Born in 1941 in the lower Silesian town of Oels, now Olesnica in Poland, when Polke was four, his family was driven out of Silesia to Thuringia, in Soviet-occupied Germany, from where they fled to the West in 1953. It was through an apprenticeship at a stained glass factory in Düsseldorf where Polke began his career in art, eventually studying at the Düsseldorf State Art Academy, where Joseph Beuys was teaching at the time. In 1963, while a student in Düsseldorf, Polke together with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer-Lueg founded ‘Capitalist Realism’, a style that at once parodied East Germany’s state-imposed ‘Socialist Realism’ while transmuting the influence of American Pop from a distinctly European perspective: “They [Polke, Richter and Fischer-Lueg] thereby declared their intention to embrace, pell-mell, the American preoccupation with media-derived imagery, but with a chilly irony about the political uses of representation” (‘The Daemon and Sigmar Polke’ by Peter Schjeldahl  (cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sigmar Polke, 1992, p.17).

Attuned to the earlier philosophical underpinnings of Capitalist Realism, Menschen wie Du + Ich clearly evokes and conflates the paradigms of popular icons, gender stereotypes and consumer imagery privileged in the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, with an aesthetic extrapolated from the state-sponsored prescription of Socialist Realism. As the only viable avenue for artistic expression in the East, Socialist Realism represented a cultural promotion of the communist system through vivid imagery rooted in the harmonic connection of labour and heroism. The artist’s ability to link both a response to the Americanization of Western Germany, with the prescriptive modalities of Socialist Realism illustrate a critique of Germany’s split society. Though both systems envisaged congruent models for human idealism, Polke’s alignment with an ideal driven by either the State or capitalist economic miracle, Wirtschaftswunder, is ambivalent. In 1988, the figures add up to an idea of a new Germany, where hard work is rewarded with family and leisure time. However the irony of the title betrays Polke’s derisive opinion on the matter; real life is far from the way it is played out in the painting. It is clear that neither system is capable of achieving that which it proposes, a perfect nation of happy, proud and self-confident people. Though reunified and ‘new’ Germany will remain as flawed a society as any other. As Menschen wie Du + Ich expertly elucidates with sardonic cynicism, Polke’s ability to visually illuminate and critique the particularities of German society at this decisive moment in cultural history utterly epitomizes his genius as an artist.