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Lot Essay
Parlament: sicher wieder so ein Irrer in der DDR is an important painting by Jörg Immendorff, which comments directly on the division of Germany.
Since Immendorff began painting in the middle of the 1960's he has attempted to communicate with the viewer. In this way his paintings often take the form of a scene that is opened up in front of the viewer. We are not confronted with the world or with a fragment of it - but we see an arrangement structured as a dramatic situation; the picture as a social space, where Immendorff combines his role as homo politicus with his artistic aims.
Painted in 1978, this work shows a bizarre scene of the German Parliament which powerfully expresses the political climate of the divided Germany at this time and that formulates questions concerning the political situation. It is the painted question as to how the future of Germany should be.
In this work various parallel actions can be observed as well as the painter's metaphorical and symbolical vocabulary is depicted homogenously.
In the front one can see former Chancellor Willy Brandt, who represented a figure of change, and followed a course of social, legal, and political reforms. By the mid-seventies the euphoria of the post-68-Brandt-era has evaporated in Germany. In 1974 Brandt resigned from his position as the Chancellor because of the so-called Guillaume-affair: Brandt's personal assistant Guenter Guillaume had been an espionage agent for East Germany.
The three figures in front of Brandt remind the viewer of the wise monkeys as a symbol of the proverbial principle "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" - in the Western world this image is used to refer to a lack of moral responsibility.
The background of the picture is a colourful panorama into which a former current event is inserted: On 17 September 1978 the evangelic priest Rolf Günther immolated himself in protest of the discriminatory of Stasi in Falkenstein (former GDR). Near to this scene again the eagle populates this painting, once a royal bird and a symbol of pride and victory, has now been brought down to earth.
A change of conditions was not foreseeable on either side of the border.
'It has always been true that a picture leads its own life, has its own story. The motives for its being painted are really of no importance whatsoever. The result is what matters, the motives for producing a painting are just Zeitgeist' (Jörg Immendorff in: Kunst heute, No. 11, Cologne 1993, p.58).
Since Immendorff began painting in the middle of the 1960's he has attempted to communicate with the viewer. In this way his paintings often take the form of a scene that is opened up in front of the viewer. We are not confronted with the world or with a fragment of it - but we see an arrangement structured as a dramatic situation; the picture as a social space, where Immendorff combines his role as homo politicus with his artistic aims.
Painted in 1978, this work shows a bizarre scene of the German Parliament which powerfully expresses the political climate of the divided Germany at this time and that formulates questions concerning the political situation. It is the painted question as to how the future of Germany should be.
In this work various parallel actions can be observed as well as the painter's metaphorical and symbolical vocabulary is depicted homogenously.
In the front one can see former Chancellor Willy Brandt, who represented a figure of change, and followed a course of social, legal, and political reforms. By the mid-seventies the euphoria of the post-68-Brandt-era has evaporated in Germany. In 1974 Brandt resigned from his position as the Chancellor because of the so-called Guillaume-affair: Brandt's personal assistant Guenter Guillaume had been an espionage agent for East Germany.
The three figures in front of Brandt remind the viewer of the wise monkeys as a symbol of the proverbial principle "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" - in the Western world this image is used to refer to a lack of moral responsibility.
The background of the picture is a colourful panorama into which a former current event is inserted: On 17 September 1978 the evangelic priest Rolf Günther immolated himself in protest of the discriminatory of Stasi in Falkenstein (former GDR). Near to this scene again the eagle populates this painting, once a royal bird and a symbol of pride and victory, has now been brought down to earth.
A change of conditions was not foreseeable on either side of the border.
'It has always been true that a picture leads its own life, has its own story. The motives for its being painted are really of no importance whatsoever. The result is what matters, the motives for producing a painting are just Zeitgeist' (Jörg Immendorff in: Kunst heute, No. 11, Cologne 1993, p.58).