Sigmar Polke – genius against his will
A genius against his will—this is probably the most apt description of Sigmar Polke and his revolutionary artistic work. The unique energy and vitality that Polke's works still emanate today can be attributed to his nonconformist personality, which views traditions and conventions not as guides but as fleeting challenges to be overcome with ease. “We cannot rely on the fact that good paintings will be created one day; we must take things into our own hands!” is a famous quote by Sigmar Polke and his artist friend Gerhard Richter from the mid-1960s. And Polke and Richter did take things into their own hands. By the time he painted his programmatic work “Higher beings commanded: paint the top right corner black!!” (1969, Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart), Polke officially claimed the much-vaunted title of revolutionary anti-artist for himself. With wit and irony, Polke mocked the traditional art world and the notion of a divinely inspired artistic genius. But Polke’s art had already broken radically with art-historical tradition in previous years, especially through his legendary early grid paintings. At the latest, the Polke retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at Tate Modern in London in 2014/15, proved the international significance of a body of work characterized by an anarchic spirit and a great sense of humor.


Dot by dot – “BZ am Mittag”: Polke’s iconic grid paintings and the art of the “New Realists.”
At the forefront are the legendary grid paintings from the 1960s, such as the present composition “BZ am Mittag” or the painting “Freundinnen” (1965, Froehlich Collection, Stuttgart), in which Polke, very much in keeping with the spirit of Pop Art, used the grid printing techniques of magazines to develop his own artistic language. At the age of only 24, Polke already used stencils, as in our characteristic early painting “BZ am Mittag”, which was one of the first of these iconic creations and therefore featured in the legendary 1997 Polke retrospective “Sigmar Polke. Die Drei Lügen der Malerei.” He meticulously applied the stencil dot by dot using a perforated plate and then, with great patience, worked on each dot individually with a rubber stamp. For this purpose, Polke used the small, round erasers often found at the ends of pencils. Like Gerhard Richter’s early black-and-white photopaintings, these works are the visual epitome of the unconventional spirit of the 1960s and of the avant-garde movement that would soon take the art world by storm from Düsseldorf under the names “New Realism,” “Capitalist Realism,” or “German Pop”. Today, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter are regarded the leading figures behind an art movement that emerged alongside American Pop Art in the 1960s. They devoted themselves to a whole new universe of motifs drawn from magazines and periodicals, transforming these mass-produced images into art through the artistic process of selection, adaptation, and distortion. Polke, in particular, took this artistic process of transformation and reversal to the extreme in his early grid paintings, raising questions about the traditional boundaries between art and everyday life, fiction and reality. In the same way that the newspaper photo plays with the illusion of reality, Polke’s grid pictures play with the exact reversal of this illusion: they are handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces that, especially when viewed from a distance, evoke the illusion of a mass-produced print. Polke’s play with optical perception is both provocative and masterful. In “BZ an Mittag” (BZ Noon Edition), Polke even intensified this act of artistic alienation, since this grid picture is neither based on a print template that had already appeared in grid print nor on a genuine printed product. Instead, its compositional starting point is a humorous wedding newspaper printed as early as 1911 in the style of an issue of the daily Berliner Zeitung (BZ). Unlike Gerhard Richter, who collected all his print media sources in his “Atlas,” only a few of the magazine sources underlying Polke’s iconic creations of the 1960s are known. In the mid-1960s, Polke and Richter—who were both students at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Karl Otto Götz at the time—collaborated closely and thoroughly shook up the art world of the day with their representational, photo-based art.
These young artists radically broke with the established gestural painting of European Informalism on several levels; they painted not only figuratively but also with virtually no visible brushstrokes. Unlike Richter, however, Polke sought to provoke even with the techniques and materials he employed, resorting not only to oil paint but also to varnishes and emulsion paints, which had previously been considered trivial. Using red oil paint, Polke meticulously applied the lettering and motif of the title page, dot by dot, to the canvas primed with white emulsion paint; however, Polke did not just render the motif in a larger format. In a first step, he broke the motif down into individual screen dots, since the original template, produced by rotary press printing—a form of relief printing—contained no screen dots. Similar to the structure of a magnified offset print, Polke meticulously decomposed the motif into large and small, densely and sparsely spaced dots in bright red, thereby establishing his characteristic visual language. Nonconformist and progressive, Polke appropriates a motif that, although it had already been printed in 1911, could hardly be more apt to address the conservative, middle-class narrow-mindedness of the German economic miracle era following World War II—an era Polke humorously and obsessively grappled with throughout his life. Polke had already explored the thematic complex of lovers in “Liebespaar II” (Lovers II) in 1965. While the couple facing each other in this painting—which was not yet executed as a grid image—appears downright mundane, the motif's execution in “BZ am Mittag” is exceptionally fascinating due to the tense contrast between bourgeois, romanticized motifs and radical modern aesthetics. Once again, in “BZ am Mittag,” Polke confidently and boldly upended not only traditional viewing habits but also the prevailing conception of art and the artist.
In the winter of 1964–65, just before the creation of “BZ am Mittag,” Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter participated in the legendary exhibition “Neue Realisten” at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. This term would henceforth be used alongside “German Pop” and the ironically intended self-designation “Capitalist Realism” to classify this young, nonconformist art movement. It is the revolutionary, youthful spirit that continues to characterize Polke’s rare grid paintings of the 1960s to this day, and the anarchic love of the dot that would henceforth become Polke’s artistic trademark: “I love all dots. [..] I am married to many dots. I want all dots to be happy; the dots are my brothers. I am also a dot.” (Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, 1966).


Polke, Richter, Schmela, Schniewind – “BZ am Mittag”: A gift from the progressive Rhineland collector couple Willy and Fänn Schniewind
“BZ am Mittag,” created in 1965, was a birthday gift from the progressive Rhineland collector couple Willy and Fänn Schniewind to Lotte von Böttinger (née Schniewind), the collector’s cousin. Fänn and Willy Schniewind, who also had their portraits painted by Polke's friend and associate, Gerhard Richter, on three occasions during 1964–65, began to build a significant private art collection in the early 1950s, starting with works of Modernism. In the 1960s, they expanded it with great discernment to include progressive and key works of European postwar avant-garde art. Above all, the close contact between the industrialist Willy Schniewind and the legendary Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Schmela—and the resulting ties to contemporary artistic circles—led to Schniewind’s extraordinarily progressive understanding of art. Schmela not only presented Gerhard Richter’s first solo exhibition in 1964, but also Polke and the “New Realists” in 1966; in addition to establishing the Rhineland avant-garde in the 1960s, he was also instrumental in the early positioning of the “ZERO” artists and the work of Lucio Fontana on the German market. All of these avant-garde positions represented by Schmela in the 1960s also found their way into Schniewind’s collection during this period. Presumably, Schmela introduced the Schniewinds to the young and promising art student Sigmar Polke, whom Schniewind then commissioned in 1965 to create a painting based on the cover of his cousin Lotte von Böttinger’s (née Schniewind) wedding newspaper, much like how Gerhard Richter’s three famous Schniewind portrait paintings came about in 1964/65 through Schmela’s mediation—one of which is part of the Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art today. In the mid-1960s, Polke and Richter were the two rising stars of the Düsseldorf art scene, as documented in the studio interview with Sigmar Polke published in the Rheinische Post in May 1966 under the title “Kultur des Rasters” (Culture of the Grid). In response to the critical question emphasizing the progressive spirit of Polke’s painting, “Mr. Polke, you use templates for your paintings; you cut them out of newspapers and magazines. Why do you prefer to copy rather than invent?”—Polke already had a complex and provocative answer ready at the time: “I have several, sometimes contradictory and mutually exclusive reasons for this, and I only know that they are all important and that there is always a little bit of each involved. It may be that this is my way to show how dependent we are on preconceived forms, how little freedom we have in our actions and thoughts. [...] It could also be irony, laziness, incompetence, or stupidity. But it could also be the epitome of creative freedom—namely, doing what one wants and what one considers right [...]” (quoted from the exhibition catalog Baselitz – Polke – Richter – Kiefer, Hamburg 2019, p. 198).
Sigmar Polke’s paintings appear “striking” only at first glance; upon closer inspection, however, his works reveal a complexity in both technique and content that has provided us with intriguing and often elusive puzzles since the 1960s. From the very beginning, it has been the skillful, anarchic, and provocative play with artistic traditions and conventional viewing habits that has characterized Polke’s entertaining and ironic work throughout his life. In 2021, Polke would have turned 80, and the art magazine Monopol celebrated him on the occasion of this anniversary with the following words: “Sigmar Polke’s laughter echoes on. It comes from a wonderfully silly iconoclast who was at the same time an artist liberated from all constraints—and one whose epic impact continues to unfold."[JS]