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Maybe he was just born in the wrong century.

Back then in Florence at the Medici court, the Principe had the knife brought to Markus and, with a patronizing air, wanted to know why his Hercules must look so terribly jagged.

But in the Renaissance nobody was called Lüpertz.

And so it is already correct that the hero story begins in the 1960s.

Nobody was prepared for someone like Markus Lüpertz.

It was still the Cold War, and the mighty were thinking of arming, only the powerless art disarming everywhere.

Popart, Fluxus, happening - lots of cheekiness against the uplifting taste.

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Lüpertz had moved with his family from Czechoslovakia to the Rhineland and for a long time did not know what to do with himself.

Commercial artist, stay at a monastery, mining, internship at the art academy, Foreign Legion, desertion, West Berlin.

It only got better there.

There the young man found his role in life: “Bohème”.

Now Lüpertz was painting pictures that were decent to look at, but which you couldn't figure out: telegraph poles, tree trunks, tents, Donald Duck's wedding, water lilies, steel helmets.

And always in small series or “dithyrambic”, as the painter prescribed.

And one looked up and read about the ancient refrain of the maenads, which they are said to have toasted to their god Dionysus in their drunken state.

These were new notes.

It sounded most shrill when the artist spoke of himself as a genius with a stage-ready bass-baritone or at least claimed that he was related to the singer Orpheus.

Lüpertz drawing from the exhibition "Dance Master of Life" in St. Franziskus Mönchengladbach-Rheydt

Source: Carlos Albuquerque

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Orpheus remained a desperate loner with his miraculous gifts.

And Markus Lüpertz never really belonged there either, not then, not later, not today.

Even as a professor and then rector of the Düsseldorf Art Academy, self-presentation as an exceptional person always had more weight.

At the beginning of the work there was still a bit of an art-critical dispute: Should the moss-green steel helmets painted in rows be a political statement?

But the subject was not enough to create real excitement, especially since the master was saying goodbye more and more to Orphic and giving his characters antique stages.

You couldn't really keep up with it.

Every time I encountered the work again, it became more obvious how tragic self-arrogance is bought with bondage.

Genius is compulsion - that is the teaching of Markus Lüpertz.

As an artist figure he was interesting

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Half of the city of Karlsruhe is upside down because they find the monumental story of creation, which he designed as a tunnel decoration for the tram stops, unbearable.

This cannot challenge

the

Creator artis

.

Especially since he has a wealthy proselyte at his side.

But it will not have been many who saw the triumphant Lüpertz retrospective in October 2019 in Munich's Haus der Kunst.

Mercilessly, the styled picture corpus fell out of history at some point.

Painting as the evocation of what is lost, for which there is no longer any longing.

"Echo des Poseidon", the sculpture by Markus Luepertz, is in Duisburg

Source: picture alliance / Rupert Oberhäuser

Markus Lüpertz has always been more interesting as an artist figure than as a painter or sculptor.

And when you have forgotten all the dithyrambs, the memory of the grandiose self-creation of an artist-ego that hovers over the world so as not to have to suffer from it remains.

If someone came now and Lüpertz presented the NFT “art” from the blockchain, he calmly leaned on the silver knob of his walking stick and would point out what kind of art machine it was that one had to dictate everything to, but never and would never be able to say of herself that she was a genius.

Markus Lüpertz will be 80 years old on April 25th.