Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Jörg Immendorff was one of those rare artists who understood that true art does not console, but disturbs. It does not reassure, but questions. And above all, it does not decorate, but dynamites. When we contemplate the whole of his work, from his first revolutionary LIDL actions to the dark and personal canvases of his later years, we immediately grasp that we are dealing with a creator who categorically refused to be tamed by the artistic or political conventions of his time.
Born in 1945 in that Germany shattered by war, Immendorff grew up in a divided country, haunted by its demons and in perpetual search of identity. This particular geopolitical situation would profoundly shape his artistic vision, but it would be a mistake to reduce his work to a simple reflection of East-West tensions. For Immendorff, from his first steps in art, understood that authentic creation requires prior destruction, a radical questioning of established structures.
His time under the tutelage of Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy marked a decisive turning point. But unlike many of Beuys’ students who remained in the protective shadow of the master, Immendorff quickly developed a personal approach, perhaps more direct, more brutal. His LIDL actions of the late 1960s testify to this desire for emancipation. The famous block of wood painted in the colors of the German flag that he drags in front of the Bonn Parliament in 1968, this seemingly absurd action actually reveals a keen political intelligence. By getting arrested for desecration of the flag, Immendorff exposes the contradictions of a society that claims to defend democracy while repressing dissident artistic expression.
This LIDL period, named after this invented word evoking a child’s rattle, reveals a fundamental aspect of Immendorff’s artistic personality: his ability to use apparent naivety as a weapon of subversion. The performances he organizes with his accomplices, featuring domestic animals, children, and everyday objects, create a new artistic language, halfway between Dada and agit-prop, which combines agitation with propaganda. This approach finds its deep roots in the theatrical heritage of Bertolt Brecht, whose influence on Immendorff deserves in-depth analysis.
Brecht had theorized the distancing effect, a dramaturgical technique that prevents the spectator from emotionally identifying with the characters to better lead them to critically reflect on the situations presented. Immendorff transposes this concept into the field of visual arts with remarkable mastery. His paintings from the Café Deutschland series, created between 1977 and 1984, function exactly according to this Brechtian principle. These monumental canvases present nighttime cabaret scenes where historical figures, contemporary figures, and political allegories mix. But far from offering a romantic or nostalgic vision of divided Germany, Immendorff confronts us with a decadent and disturbing spectacle, where the borders between East and West dissolve into alcohol and debauchery. The spectator cannot identify with these grotesque and pathetic figures, they are forced to take a step back, to analyze the social and political mechanisms that produce this situation. As with Brecht, art becomes an instrument of political awareness, but Immendorff adds to this dimension a sensual and visual charge that theater cannot offer. His acidic colors, his vertiginous compositions, his deliberately theatrical pictorial gestures create a unique artistic language, which borrows from Brecht its critical dimension while developing a specifically pictorial aesthetic. This synthesis between Brechtian commitment and visual expressiveness constitutes one of Immendorff’s major innovations in contemporary art. He demonstrates that it is possible to create politically engaged art without sacrificing formal complexity and aesthetic impact. His constant references to the theatrical universe, his compositions in the form of scenes, his characters who seem to play roles, all reveal an artist who has perfectly assimilated the Brechtian lesson that art must show that the world can be transformed. But Immendorff goes further than Brecht by integrating this critical dimension into a pictorial language of extraordinary richness and complexity, thus creating a form of total art that simultaneously engages the intellect and the senses [1].
Alongside this Brechtian filiation, Immendorff’s work reveals a troubling proximity to the tragic conception of existence developed by Arthur Schopenhauer. This philosophical kinship, rarely highlighted by critics, nevertheless sheds new light on the existential dimension of his late paintings. Schopenhauer conceived human existence as a perpetual oscillation between need and boredom, a tragic condition from which only aesthetic contemplation can momentarily free us. This pessimistic vision finds a striking echo in Immendorff’s melancholic self-portraits, particularly those created after 1989, when the fall of the Berlin Wall suddenly deprived his art of its immediate political dimension. Confronted with the loss of his privileged subject, the artist turned to a painful introspection that reveals the underlying influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. His canvases from this period, populated by ironic painter monkeys and pathetic doubles of himself, express this Schopenhauerian intuition according to which authentic art is born of suffering and lucidity about the human condition. Immendorff’s obsession with self-portraits, his recurrent representation of the artist as a fallen or ridiculous creature, his permanent exploration of the themes of death and decay, all reveal an artist haunted by the fundamental vanity of human existence. But unlike the philosopher from Frankfurt, Immendorff does not seek in art a refuge against the suffering of the world. On the contrary, he uses painting to intensify this suffering, to make it visible and shareable. His last works, created while he was struggling with Charcot’s disease, reach a degree of cruelty towards himself that recalls the darkest pages of The World as Will and Representation. But this cruelty is never complacent, it always aims to reveal a truth about the human condition. Like Schopenhauer, Immendorff considers that true art must confront us with the reality of our finitude and our fragility. His paintings function as ruthless mirrors that reflect back at us the image of our lost illusions and our disappointed hopes. This Schopenhauerian dimension of his work perhaps explains why his canvases, despite their apparent brutality, exude a profound melancholy that touches directly on the universal. By revealing without concession the tragic dimension of existence, Immendorff paradoxically joins that cathartic function of art that Schopenhauer had theorized, proving that a lucid pessimism can become a source of beauty and truth [2].
The strength of Immendorff’s work lies in its ability to transform political commitment into pure pictorial matter. His Maoist paintings from the early 1970s, with their frank colors and revolutionary iconography, might be mistaken for mere propaganda if they were not inhabited by an extraordinary plastic energy. For Immendorff never merely superimposes a message onto an image, he invents a visual language specific to each period of his work.
The Café Deutschland series undeniably represents the culmination of this research. These monumental paintings, inspired by Renato Guttuso’s Caffè Greco, function like machines for producing meaning. Every detail counts, each character carries a symbolic charge, each color participates in a general system of signification. Yet, these canvases never succumb to didactic illustration. Immendorff’s intelligence consists in creating images sufficiently ambiguous to resist a univocal reading, sufficiently complex to arouse prolonged contemplation.
The evolution of his style after German reunification reveals an artist capable of constantly reinventing himself. Deprived of his privileged political subject, Immendorff turns to a more personal exploration of the relationships between art and power, between creation and destruction. His references to William Hogarth, particularly in his series The Rake’s Progress, testify to an acute awareness of art history and his ability to draw from the past to invent the future.
This late period, marked by illness and scandals, could have seen Immendorff sink into bitterness or self-pity. On the contrary, it reveals an artist freer than ever, capable of fierce self-mockery and relentless lucidity about his own condition. His last canvases, created when he could no longer hold a brush, directing his assistants from his wheelchair, achieve a striking dramatic intensity.
The controversy surrounding the authenticity of certain late works raises fundamental questions about the nature of artistic creation in the age of technical reproduction. Immendorff, by accepting that his assistants execute his last paintings under his direction, challenges traditional notions of originality and artistic paternity. This approach, far from being a concession to illness, perhaps constitutes his last act of subversion.
The fact that he organized cocaine-fueled orgies in Düsseldorf palaces does not diminish the scope of his work. On the contrary, this ability to live his contradictions to the fullest, to fully embrace his role as a cursed artist, contributes to his greatness. Immendorff understood that authentic art can only be born from total experience, without sugarcoating or compromise.
His official portrait of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, created in his later years, constitutes an artistic testament of grating irony. Depicting the politician as a Roman emperor surrounded by painter monkeys reveals a sense of derision that spares neither power nor art itself. This ability to bite all the hands that feed him makes Immendorff a truly free artist.
Today, eighteen years after his death, Immendorff’s work regains a troubling relevance. At a time when contemporary art seems increasingly tamed by market and institutional logics, his paintings remind us that art can still be a force of resistance and transformation. His lessons remain more necessary than ever: art must remain unsettling, the artist must retain his critical function, and beauty can be born from destruction.
Immendorff’s work teaches us that there is no innocent art, that all authentic creation engages a vision of the world and a conception of man. By systematically refusing aesthetic ease and political consensus, he has traced a demanding path that continues to inspire creators concerned with preserving their independence.
Faced with the contemporary trend to neutralize art, to make it a simple object of decorative contemplation, Immendorff’s example reminds us that painting can still serve something essential: reveal the contradictions of our time and force us to look at what we would prefer to ignore. This is perhaps his most beautiful lesson: art must never cease to be dangerous.
- Bertolt Brecht, Writings on Theatre, Paris, L’Arche, 1972
- Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Paris, PUF, 1966
