Sigmar Polke

Galerie Ha. Jo. Müller, Cologne
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1993

Baden-Baden, Kunsthalle, Sammlung Frieder Burda, 1996, pp. 117 & 136, illustrated
Baden-Baden, Kunsthalle, Opening Exhibition: Sammlung Frieder Burda, 2004-05, p. 206, no. 127, illustrated
Göppingen, Kunsthalle, Vom Pferd erzählen. Das Pferd in der zeitgenössischen Kunst, 2006, p. 93, illustrated
Baden-Baden, Museum Frieder Burda; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Polke. Eine Retrospektive. Die Sammlungen Frieder Burda, Josef Froehlich, Reiner Speck, 2007, p. 37, no. 18, illustrated

Kentaro Ichihara, Ed., Sigmar Polke. Disguised Sublimity, Tokyo 1994, p. 71, illustrated
Anita Shah, Die Dinge sehen wie sie sind. Zu Sigmar Polkes malerischem Werk seit 1981, Weimar 2002, p. 206, no. 35, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the tonality of the white is slightly creamier and warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a small vertical scuff and very minor discolouration towards the upper right corner. There are three very faint media accretions: one towards the centre of the upper left quadrant; one to the left of the mule's head, and one towards the top of the mule's left leg. There is a very faint drip mark towards the lower left edge. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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"I like the way the dots in a magnified picture swim about and move about. The way that motifs change from recognisble to unrecognisable - the undecided, ambiguous nature of the situation, the way it remains open" 

The artist cited in: Dieter Hülsmanns, 'Kultur des Rasters. Austeliergesprdch mit dem maler Sigmar Polke', Rheinische Post, 10th May 1966

 

Approached from distance, Don Quixote stands tall and proud aboard his powerful mule, with Sancho Panza by his side. Like an effigy or misty memory of a much renowned image of one of the great literary characters, the register on the viewer's brain of this black and white amalgamation of dots, feels like an after-image but one which takes dramatic hold. However as one moves closer, the figurative energy begins to break down and the abstract construction of dots takes hold. This deconstruction of the image in front of one's eyes and the apparent proximity between glorious figuration and structured monochrome abstraction lies at the heart of Sigmar Polke's most critically successful series, the Rasterbilder which were executed during a short, intense burst in the mid 1960s. Here dots are magnified and painted in imitation of the lines and grids characteristic of the raster scanning and printing process. The reverberating matrix of dots in Don Quixote describes imagery through a codified visual language, which is both semi-abstract and immediately recognisable. This radical technique was a reaction to both Eastern Socialist Realism and Western Pop Art.

 

In the catalogue for the major retrospective organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, John Caldwell states that Polke's paintings of the mid 1960s "hit our consciousness directly, like a small bullet from a silenced gun. In this respect Polke's work - more than the American pop artists of these years - marks the most complete break with the Abstract Expressionism that had preceded it, and it reflects most clearly his direct relationship to life as we actually experience it" (John Caldwell in: Exhibition Catalogue, San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art and travelling, Sigmar Polke, 1990-92, p. 10).  This series were seen alongside Gerhard Richter's series of PhotoPaintings as the European response to the American Pop Art movement which dominated the progressive art of the 1960s. Like all of his best Rasterbilder works, Don Quixote interrogates the contemporaneous phenomenon of mass-media photo-mechanical reproduction and injects Pop with a European intellectualism. However, this painting signals the end of Pop's fascination with issues of perception, and introduces a new, cerebral, and Post Modern perspective in which both the subject and its treatment carry multiple layers of meaning that are complex and dynamic. 

 

The fundamental difference here is that Don Quixote depicts a well established classic literary icon from the 16th century rather than a subject of contemporary popular culture, and with this come various highly profound conceptual associations. The most famous creation of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century Spanish novelist Cervantes, Quixote is an errant, escapist hero who vainly chases lost ideals of chivalry. Alonso Quixano is so influenced by reading tales of chivalry that, modelling himself as 'Don Quixote de la Mancha' and accompanied by his squire Sancho Panza, he embarks on an adventure in the name of Dulcinea del Toboso, an invented maiden based on a local farm girl. The novel's full title is El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, 'ingenioso' in Spanish meaning 'to be quick with inventiveness'. Central to Quixote's character is his over-inflated self-opinion as being uniquely special, summed up by the belief that his life belongs to another era. His hallucinatory delusions result in those around him, including the faithful Panza, being forced to deceive him so as to protect his fragile dream, and the latter half of the novel philosophically investigates this theme of deception.

 

Polke's work parallels Cervantes' masterpiece in three important ways. First, the iconographical coherency of the painting disseminates as the eye becomes lost in the mesmeric replication and multiplication. Polke hand paints the print-out of a scan of a photograph of an interpretation of a literary character. Layering interpretation and reference Polke creates an exemplar of artistic self-awareness. Deconstructing the image to its constituent abstract qualities, Polke pushes the boundaries of recognition and perception and thus mirrors Quixote's own problems with perceiving reality. Secondly, as implicated by the raster dots, this painting represents mass production and a reproductive process that treats all subjects as equal. In this way the painting parodies and undermines Quixote's self-aggrandising and esoteric elitism. Thirdly, the subtle deception inherent to the raster process echoes the deceptive bending of reality by the characters around Quixote.

 

The prodigious Polke painted Don Quixote at the age of twenty seven and it is important to site the work within a contextual framework for both Polke and Germany in 1968. Born in Oels, Silesia, then in East Germany and now in Poland, Polke escaped to West Germany in 1953, where he was to win the Young German Art Prize and have his first solo shows in Berlin and Düsseldorf in 1966. However, his student career, spanning 1961 to 1967 at the Düsseldorf Künstakademie, was paramount in shaping his immensely dynamic approach to art. He studied under Karl Otto Goetz and Gerhard Hoehme, and the pedagogical presence of Joseph Beuys on the faculty was hugely significant. Beuys considered art as the potential facilitator of social and political change, and his actions and performances must have greatly expanded Polke's understanding of what art could achieve.

 

In 1963 with his friends Gerhard Richter, Manfred Küttner and Konrad Lueg, Polke initiated the quasi movement Kapitalische Realismus ('Capitalist Realism') that, in its title alone, was a pithy riposte to the state-sponsored 'Socialist Realism' of the GDR. Their first exhibition was entitled Life with Pop - A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism: clearly these young men saw art as a means to effect political and social ends. Indeed, their open letter of 1963 stated that: "Pop art recognises the modern mass media as a genuine cultural phenomenon and turns their attributes, formulations and content, through artifice, into art. It thus fundamentally changes the face of modern painting and inaugurates an aesthetic revolution. Pop art has rendered conventional painting - with all its sterility, its isolation, its artificiality, its taboos and its rules - entirely obsolete, and has rapidly achieved international currency and recognition by creating a new view of the world" (Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, and Sigmar Polke, 'Letter to a newsreel company', 29th April 1963, in: Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1995, p. 16).

 

Initiated during this formative period, the rasterbilder works not only critique issues of perception and reality in a media-obsessed world but also challenge global methods of communication as agents of social change. Having been born in the abysmally dark shadow of Nazism, Polke had lived on both sides of a divided Germany that was the crucible of the Cold War. Hence he knew extremely well the manipulative power of the media and the potential of propaganda. The predominant method of mass reproduction in the 1960s, the raster process transforms every facet of an image into a pixel value within a prefabricated hierarchy. Through the multiple layering of grids of spots, contours are reduced to stark silhouettes while subtle variances in tone and hue are reduced to a matrix of black-and-white dots. The authority endemic to newspaper and published images was broadcast via these schematic grids and by breaking down the grids Polke subversively broke down the authority of the images.

 

In Don Quixote the black-on-white dots are of uniform size, but the white-on-black dots vary to produce gradations in modelling. The spectrum ranges from the near-total blackness in Quixote's jacket to the lighter tone of Sancho Panza's trousers. These are not immaculate spots of perfect definition: smudges and smears give the authenticity of a cheap reproduction where the thin layer of ink has not completely dried or been absorbed. They are different from both the pristine raster and benday dots of Lichtenstein and the photo-mechanical imitation of Warhol. Lichtenstein idealised the stereotype of the printing process, while Warhol's paintings were themselves mechanical and subject to their own unpredictable inconsistencies. By contrast, Polke replicates the subtle errors by hand in a knowing and Post Modern acknowledgement of Pop precedent, which was to open the door to a whole new generation of innovation in painterly technique and application from Chuck Close to Peter Doig.