The Brooklyn Rail

“This is why I concern myself with other artists at all, because they offer me a vocabulary that can lead me to new formations.”

Markus Lüpertz’s work is strewn with fragments and quotations of works by Nicolas Poussin; but not just Poussin, of course, but also Gustave Courbet, Hans von Marées, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Aristide Maillol, Eugène Delacroix, and many others, exhibiting an omnivorous enthusiasm for the great art that precedes him, from classical antiquity, modern masters, and cool classicism, to the fury of Expressionism. He slides between art historical moments and artistic styles with disconcerting ease and disregard of hierarchies. There is simultaneously a sense of profound meaning and indiscriminate interchangeability in the artist’s approach to Poussin.

Lüpertz proudly asserts his pedigree, claiming that he is “descended from all painters,” but at the same time absorbing multitudinous artistic citations into his vast internal intellectual library, his indiscriminate source book of ordinary objects that includes as well, advertising clips, urns, birds, skulls, goats; Tower of Babylon, men in suits, centaurs, palettes, helmets, ears of grain, ship sails. In this sense, the citations from his artist predecessors are absorbed into his aesthetic campaign to invent “something abstract that is also figurative, a dithyramb.” In this way, Lüpertz freed himself from traditional realism and also from the strictures of abstract orthodoxies. Lüpertz explains: “The dithyramb was my totally individual contribution to abstraction, abstraction not in the sense of rational analysis and reduction, but as in the invention of a non-sense object.”

Fragments of Poussin compositions are both imposing/weighty and meaningless/ inscrutable. Lüpertz claims: “Art survives only in riddles, only in mystery can art’s eternal truth be retained, therefore the artist must be, as Nietzsche demands, a seeker of riddles.” The artist engages us in his earnest game, challenges us to keep up, to piece together these abstracted and deconstructed elements, to make sense of these mere remnants of ideas and memories stripped of context. Lüpertz’s wild juxtapositions and visual somersaults are his core artistic strategy.

Lüpertz imports the figure of Saint John on Patmos from Poussin’s 1640 landscape into several paintings, including Poussin - Philosoph (1990), in which the figure and adjacent architectural fragments are depicted against a dark, explosive background. In other works, the manipulations are more severe, resulting in mere fragments of limbs, such as in Landscape (After Poussin) (1989), which captures the poignant gestures of the sole figures in Spring (The Earthly Paradise) (1660–64), hand urgently grasping the recumbent figure’s upper arm. The fragments of hands, feet, knees, and disembodied gestures are synecdoche of Poussin’s works from which they are borrowed. Through this thorough process of deconstruction the fragments are barely recognizable and fully incorporated into Lüpertz’s own generative strategy of artistic invention.

Lüpertz’s Poussin – Tangier (1989), offers a clue to his process of thinking and painting. The upper portion of Poussin’s Annunciation (1657), appears in this composition as though a reproduction torn from the pages of a book or a fragment of a poster, reduced to monotones and framed with white borders. Lüpertz’s visual repertoire is dense with images gleaned from a lifetime of looking at paintings, in museums surely, but most assuredly at innumerable reproductions so readily available for repeated perusal in books and catalogues. Shadows of Poussin’s paintings reappear as object fragments. We recall Lüpertz’s stated intent to reveal the “artfulness of the object,” yet “the object is not important.” He manipulates figuration as a mode of abstraction. “I didn’t want to paint figuratively anymore, so I invented something abstract that is also figurative, a dithyramb.” It is the clarity of Poussin’s choreography of gesture, so powerfully imprinted on Lüpertz’s imagination, that (ironically?) fuels his bold and generative manipulation of disembodied parts, his turn away from the figurative towards abstraction.

Let us add two additional observations/musings about Poussin and Lüpertz: Recent scholarship has elegantly demonstrated Poussin’s process of working with small wax figures, placed in a kind of diorama space, in order to study, change, and perfect the gestures of the figures eventually included in his finished paintings. In an interesting parallel, Lüpertz sometimes creates dithyrambs in sculpture, thereafter, importing them back into painting, a working method that attenuates the connection between object and representation, while at the same time endowing even the most ‘nonsense’ object with a three-dimensional authority. One can follow this process in Lüpertz’s sculptures of disembodied contrapposto legs (yet another dithyramb, and invoking Polykleitos, Donatello, Auguste Rodin, and Matisse), their depiction in many drawings, and their incorporation in paintings. The intra-media process is key to the deconstruction into idea or memory independent of all precedents.

Poussin’s newly translated letters offer rich information about patrons, commissions and compositions, but also reveal a litany of illness, debt, worries, delays, misunderstandings, annoyances, accountings, mailings, politics, wars, payments, and flattery. This dismal catalogue of daily worries prompts one to better appreciate Lüpertz’s carefully crafted personal presentation as fastidious, stylish dandy as a theatrical public pose that creates a psychological buffer against the unending mundane demands of the working artist.