Propellerfrau

Propellerfrau is an exhilarating example of Sigmar Polke’s Stoffbilder paintings. This series questioned the conventions of painting by replacing the standard canvas with mass-produced fabrics, effectively breathing new life into the medium after the so-called “end of painting” caused by the rise of minimalism and Conceptual art in the 1960s. In the present work, space is the main theme with thrilling spaceships, daring spacemen, mysterious planets, propeller planes, and rockets all shown across the surface of the work. Propellerfrau was so important to the artist that he refused to part with it for over 38 years, only loaning it once, to an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1992. Later in his life, Polke revisited the imagery in two further series of work that featured the propellerfrauen and their interstellar destinations. Thus, the painting has become a quintessential example of the artist’s oeuvre, visually striking yet intellectually probing, questioning of the morality of the Space Age, while imbued with a splash of Pop.

Polke created this large-scale canvas by stitching together three sheets of eclectically patterned, found fabric. The upper and lower thirds feature comic-like depictions of the United States’ exploration of space. Using material that looks as though it was originally designed to decorate a child’s bedroom, the artist uses this mass-produced fabric to ‘sandwich’ a passage of fabric of his own creation. This brightly striped central panel, dappled with hand painted white clouds and gold stars, serves as the interstellar space for the painting’s titular element—the propellerfrauen. From the upper-left corner, a phantasmic plane, defined by its ghostly silhouette, soars across the painting and passes a galactic wall of stripes on its way towards the green orb in the bottom corner.

Occupying the entire diagonal section of the painting are two biomorphic figures who seem to propel this aircraft across the canvas. Contrary to the swirling marks that Polke has made at their feet, these figures remain hauntingly motionless—celestial, female bodies reduced to blades on a simple propeller. Their static position, evident in their mummified positions, convinces the viewer that they are merely tools instructed by the goggled pilot who directs the vessel forward as its true navigator. The phantasmagoric appearance of something visible but immaterial lends an ethereal tone to the overall composition to the work. Polke uses the apparitions to emphasize what is there and not there—the key focus of his entire artistic sensibility. According to Gloria Moure, the artist uses this device because his creativity transforms ambiguity “in that he does not reject but utilizes the semantic multiplicity inherent in every image” (G. Moure, “Sigmar Polke. The Old Women or Time,” Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs and Films, 2005, p. 21). The vessel’s destination similarly utilizes several visual keys to obfuscate any definitive identification. The left side of the orb seems to suggest a visor of a space helmet, which is reinforced by the attached tube-like chord. However, the massive black footprints embedded on the orb’s surface echoes the traces left behind by Neil Armstrong’s footprints on the moon in 1969. Polke’s deliberate double-meanings re-engage imagery and force the viewers’ considered deliberation.

Conceived shortly after man set foot on the moon fifty years ago, Propellerfrau demonstrates the scathing critique of the relationship between the Cold War and the Space Age that Polke and his fellow “Capitalist Realist” painters, Gerhard Richter, Manfred Kuttner and Konrad Lueg proposed in their radical exhibits of the 1960s. During this period, the space race was a global obsession, captivating the minds of adults and children alike who were fascinated by the race to conquer the illusive resources of outer space. On a darker note, however, it was a fierce arms race between the United States and Soviet Union that spurred this rapid technological advancement with engineers from war-era Germany leading the charge. While artworks by American Pop artists such as James Rosenquist’s F-111, 1964 – 1965 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Robert Rauschenberg’s Signs, 1970 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) illustrated American technological optimism with their use of bright colors and mass-produced imagery, Polke’s artworks took a parodic tone. Despite illustrating a similar subject, he satirized this celestial obsession by imbuing it with humor and kitsch. In his 1968 artwork, Polke als Astronaut [Polke as Astronaut], the German artist sets a smirking floating head against a ready-made fabric with floating astronauts tethered to their spaceships that seems like it should belong in a child’s bedrooms. Polke als Astronaut and, indeed, the similarly illustrated fabric of Propellerfrau poke fun at the seriousness of nationally motivated space exploration. Curator of the recent Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963 – 2010, Kathy Halbriech writes that Polke found a “generative power in the destructive mechanisms of kitsch, in the ways in which its lowbrow sentimentality distorts and trivializes the original without regard to status... In characteristic contradictory fashion, he both appreciated and poked fun at kitsch, understanding how its vulgarity exposed concerns about what matters, what should be cared for, and what is memorable” (K. Halbriech, “Foreword,” Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963 – 2010, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 77).

Polke first introduced these ready-made materials into his practice in 1964 with The Palm Painting. Initially, he began searching for fabric with Blinky Palermo, but found they were interested in different types of material. “I did not like going fabric shopping with Palermo, because that was too stupid, I always had to look for some patterns [Muster], and for me it was more about the pattern [Rapport] than only monochromy…” (S. Polke, quoted in C. Mehring, “Polke’s Patterns,” in Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963 – 2010, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 234). More than Palermo, Polke’s fabrics of choice reflected the West German economic miracle. Esteemed art historian Benjamin Buchloh has written, “These fabrics vocally manifest their historical-social origin, they are Verhangungen [meaning both convoluted hangings and promulgations] and the fashionable dress ups of the subcultural proletariat of the 1950s in the Federal Republic of Germany” (B. Buchloh, quoted in C. Mehring, “Polke’s Patterns,” in Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963 – 2010, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 240). If the medium is the message, then Propellerfrau’s interstellar iconography reflects technological ambition. However, despite the canvas’s ostentatious patterns, the viewer’s focus frequently wavers to Polke’s hand-painted figures in the foreground.

Propellerfrau’s juxtaposition of mass-produced children’s fabric against the ghostly figures is a familiar dichotomy in Polke’s artistic practice. Irony seemed to be Polke’s most prolific device for illustrating his ideas, with each of his paintings presenting a multiplicity of contradictory ideas. The present work seems to largely communicate Polke’s distrust of the Space Age’s utopic enterprise for man and science. However, the withstanding oppositional forces within Propellerfrau are endemic to life at large. As Moure writes, “Polke—whether because of the advances of science, or because his formative period as an artist was shaped by the premise of landscape interaction rather than the principle of configuration, and given that he belongs within the critical-didactic tradition in German art—has felt this oneness with the cosmic whole from the first, because in his time this is no longer a matter of choice in a tragic context, but rather the complicity demanded by coherence” (G. Moure, “Sigmar Polke. The Old Women or Time,” Sigmar Polke: Paintings, Photographs and Films, 2005, 64).