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拍品专文
Markus Lüpertz’s Weintraube (Dithyrambisch) (Grapes (Dithyrambic)) is an enthusiastic and emboldened display of painterly drama: a simplified bunch of ripe grapes dominate the oversized canvas, each a generous sphere of opaque dark green. With a few, thick brushstrokes Lüpertz indicates a vine, while the background is a criss-cross of painterly grey. On the surface of the canvas, figuration and abstraction vie for dominance – a coupling which fascinated the artist: ‘We’re lucky to practice painting in its purest form,’ he said, referring to a generation of post-war German painters who initiated a return to figurative painting, ‘a cast of ambitious warriors’ which included Georg Baselitz, Jörg Immendorff and A. R. Penck. ‘Abstraction was as an outstanding discovery, and we combined this abstraction with figuration, and that was a dimension that had never existed before in art’ (M. Lüpertz, interview with H. Neuendorf, Artnet News, June 5, 2017). Taking familiar motifs such as grapes, sheaves of wheat, or antlers, Lüpertz depicted them in a monumental format with an inconclusive viewpoint, subsuming and dissolving the everyday objects into a dance of primary shapes.
The word dithyrambic, which Lüpertz began to append to his titles in 1963, inspired by his reading of Friedrich Nietzche’s Dionysian poetry, refers to both wildly irregular and unrestrainedly enthusiastic form, and captures the effervescent energy of Weintraube (Dithyrambisch). ‘It is both real and unreal…the point was the poetical effect of the painting, beyond questions of the motif,’ wrote the art historian Siegfried Gohr. ‘Here the adjective ‘dithyrambic’ comes to refer not only to the artist’s state of heightened creativity but also to the mood of ‘poetic reverberation’ of a seemingly banal source’ (S. Gohr, Markus Lüpertz, Barcelona, 2001, p. 52). Lüpertz saw the role of the artist as one without responsibilities – ‘The artist has nothing else to do except make art—that’s all,’ rejecting the recent past, declining to comment on social or political issues, and concentrating instead of the essentials of painting (M. Lüpertz, interview with H. Neuendorf, Artnet News, June 5, 2017). Foreshadowing the fierce painterly energies which dominated the canvases of the Neue Wilde generation in the 1980s, Lüpertz’s canvases paved the way back to figuration, bold colour, and unrestrained form. The simplified forms and intensified elements of Weintraube (Dithyrambisch) are a fully-worked manifestation of the artist’s explosive passion for painting.
The word dithyrambic, which Lüpertz began to append to his titles in 1963, inspired by his reading of Friedrich Nietzche’s Dionysian poetry, refers to both wildly irregular and unrestrainedly enthusiastic form, and captures the effervescent energy of Weintraube (Dithyrambisch). ‘It is both real and unreal…the point was the poetical effect of the painting, beyond questions of the motif,’ wrote the art historian Siegfried Gohr. ‘Here the adjective ‘dithyrambic’ comes to refer not only to the artist’s state of heightened creativity but also to the mood of ‘poetic reverberation’ of a seemingly banal source’ (S. Gohr, Markus Lüpertz, Barcelona, 2001, p. 52). Lüpertz saw the role of the artist as one without responsibilities – ‘The artist has nothing else to do except make art—that’s all,’ rejecting the recent past, declining to comment on social or political issues, and concentrating instead of the essentials of painting (M. Lüpertz, interview with H. Neuendorf, Artnet News, June 5, 2017). Foreshadowing the fierce painterly energies which dominated the canvases of the Neue Wilde generation in the 1980s, Lüpertz’s canvases paved the way back to figuration, bold colour, and unrestrained form. The simplified forms and intensified elements of Weintraube (Dithyrambisch) are a fully-worked manifestation of the artist’s explosive passion for painting.