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Lot Essay
'You have to look at the world, at the pollution, at the nuclear weapons we have pointed at all of us. There is a history now of Europe being the world's battlefield and Germany sitting there right on the frontier. What Hitler did was nothing compared to the evil we are ready to unleash upon ourselves. What Hitler did is nothing compared to this...' (Jörg Immendorff interview with Peter Hill in: Artscribe no. 43, October 1983).
Immendorff's paintings of the early 1980s articulate an extraordinary world of fantasy and nightmare in which, although the end of the world appears nigh, the potential for world-changing revolution also seems prescient and real. Expressed through a Brechtian cabaret of diverse characters, mythic animals and epic heroes, the multitude of figures who crowd Immendorff's dark and powerful paintings inhabit a condensed world of myth and symbolism in which all choice appears to be political and all action historic.
The Saints/Leda und die Schwäne (The Saints Leda and the Swan) is one of two works painted in 1984 in which the Greek myth of the seduction/rape of Leda - an event which presaged the birth of Helen and the catastrophe of the Trojan war - is rendered by Immendorff in the form of an orgy. In this work, as opposed to its companion painting, The Demons/Leda und die Schwäne, a central, seemingly scorched and burned figure is held on the shoulders of one of Immendorff's most popular motifs, a gang of eagles. These eagles, a German symbol tainted by the Nazis, are here presumably the 'Saints' of the picture's title. 'In my paintings,' Immendorff said recently, 'symbols associated with National Socialist Germany function as kinds of clichés in so far as they stand for universal evils. The factors that led to (Hitler's) rise to power and the destruction he subsequently wrought remain permanent dangers. Such images must be painted. To make them taboo would be regressive. The smoking swastika indicates that the matter is far from closed, be it in Germany or - from the perspective of 2003 - the malicious terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Evil takes root and flourishes when art and freedom of expression are censored...It is almost impossible to recapture the utopian spirit of the 80's today, not only because there are no cultural dialogues, but because there is less possibility today of reconciling religious, racial, and moral differences. In my eyes, everyone in the world should put the questions on the table again just as they did in the 80's' (Jörg Immendorff in conversation with Pamela Kort in: Artforum, March 2003).
Immendorff's paintings of the early 1980s articulate an extraordinary world of fantasy and nightmare in which, although the end of the world appears nigh, the potential for world-changing revolution also seems prescient and real. Expressed through a Brechtian cabaret of diverse characters, mythic animals and epic heroes, the multitude of figures who crowd Immendorff's dark and powerful paintings inhabit a condensed world of myth and symbolism in which all choice appears to be political and all action historic.
The Saints/Leda und die Schwäne (The Saints Leda and the Swan) is one of two works painted in 1984 in which the Greek myth of the seduction/rape of Leda - an event which presaged the birth of Helen and the catastrophe of the Trojan war - is rendered by Immendorff in the form of an orgy. In this work, as opposed to its companion painting, The Demons/Leda und die Schwäne, a central, seemingly scorched and burned figure is held on the shoulders of one of Immendorff's most popular motifs, a gang of eagles. These eagles, a German symbol tainted by the Nazis, are here presumably the 'Saints' of the picture's title. 'In my paintings,' Immendorff said recently, 'symbols associated with National Socialist Germany function as kinds of clichés in so far as they stand for universal evils. The factors that led to (Hitler's) rise to power and the destruction he subsequently wrought remain permanent dangers. Such images must be painted. To make them taboo would be regressive. The smoking swastika indicates that the matter is far from closed, be it in Germany or - from the perspective of 2003 - the malicious terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Evil takes root and flourishes when art and freedom of expression are censored...It is almost impossible to recapture the utopian spirit of the 80's today, not only because there are no cultural dialogues, but because there is less possibility today of reconciling religious, racial, and moral differences. In my eyes, everyone in the world should put the questions on the table again just as they did in the 80's' (Jörg Immendorff in conversation with Pamela Kort in: Artforum, March 2003).