Markus Lüpertz: In the Trenches

Ahead of an exhibition in Cologne in 1969, Lüpertz visited a section of the Siegfried Line located in a rural area on the western border of the FDR. Referred to in German as the "West Wall," the fortified boundary comprised of bunkers, trapezoidal tank barriers, and abandoned tanks is still partially existent today. In the drawing Ohne titel - dithyrambisch, (1970 ca.), a herd of sheep graze in front of a farmhouse with a black, triangular thatched roof.  The shape of the barns recalls the visual obstruction of the Siegfried Line which when viewed from above resembled a railroad track cutting through the terrain. By juxtaposing pastoral landscape with manmade interventions, Lüpertz's drawings suggest various overlapping histories related to agricultural initiatives, military intervention, and national propaganda.

This major presentation of drawings is supplemented by critical paintings, including Arrangement für eine Mütze (1973), in which Lüpertz overlaps various elements in a still-life arrangement within a natural but surreal landscape. The discernible forms include a Wehrmacht military cap, a painter's palette, a guitar, and a snail shell embedded in the receding hills. The symbols have various connotations, for example the guitar relates in art history to both Picasso's cubist collages as well as the female form. Furthering this provocation, by incorporating a Wehrmacht hat into a cubist composition, Lüpertz directly referenced a style condemned by the Nazi party as "degenerate." At the time, this subject exploration was often received as neo-Fascist, a criticism lobbied at Lüpertz and his contemporaries, including Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, who were considering similar questions. In retrospect, it was each of these artists' dedication to performative and/or illustrative taboos that forced a reconciliation with postwar identity by a new generation of artists.