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Sigmar Polke
b. 1941
UNTITLED (DOPPELPORTRAT)
signed on the reverse
lacquer on canvas
128 by 194 cm.
50 3/8 by 76 3/8 in.
Executed in 1963-64.
Provenance
Rene Block, Berlin
Henning Christiansen, Copenhagen
Untitled (Doppelportrat)
Sigmar Polke's imposing Untitled (Doppelportrat) is one of the artist's most important early works. It is a powerful testament to Polke's superlative painterly powers and inventive qualities, as well as his discerning and prescient eye. Ostensibly deliberating upon the subject of 'idealised beauty' (which must be seen in the light of Pop Art and his own theories of Kapitalische Realismus) this work also questions the very mechanics of the art of painting, again finding a synergy with Pop Art and also Gerhard Richter's work. This intelligent and daring canvas is a masterpiece of intellectual poise and artistic precision and can be seen as part of a body of work that includes some of the most significant paintings and ideas to have emerged from the radical 1960's.
Untitled (Doppelportrat) needs to be considered in the same light as Polke's early drawings of women, executed predominantly between 1963-64 (see Fig. 1). Other than their obvious comparison in terms of subject matter (see also Fig. 2), many of these drawings can be seen as experiments for larger paintings, undertaken by Polke in his efforts to arrive at an image which traverses the line between the 'subjective' and 'objective'. Their rather 'artificial' mood is similar to that found in masterpieces such as Doppelportrat Fabiola (Fig. 3) or Liebespaar II (Fig. 4), both from 1965, where the distilled air of 'distance' prevails, but which is, ironically, generated by a painting that calls attention to its own construction. By letting certain areas of the paint drip, or by boldly delineating the yellow line down the centre of the composition, Polke is always reminding us that we are, first and foremost, observing a painting. This will, of course, become the main concern in his later series of Streifenbilder, where he takes issue with the Abstract Expressionist 'gesture' or 'mark making'.
By making transparent the construction of his image, Polke appears to not only acknowledge the historical relevance and parameters of painterly convention, but also sets out to challenge and extend them. One must therefore also view the present work in the same context as Polke's other deliberations on painting, in works such as Wurstesser or Plastik-Wannen (both 1964, see Fig. 5). One can also see them sharing the rebellious attitude to the act and art of painting inherent to Pop Art. Andy Warhol's series of 'paintings-by-numbers' (such as Do-It-Yourself, (Flowers) [1962]), share a common currency of thought with Polke's Untitled (Doppelportrat). Both reveal only partly finished canvases in a large format; both have schematic, sketchy compositions; both rely heavily on simple design, pattern and colour. Of course, the point both Polke and Warhol make is one which questions the status of the finished object, the 'skills' of the artist, and thus one can see these paintings almost as 'lessons' in art. Crucially, they illuminate the then radical debate surrounding the very status of 'art' in an age influenced by the freedom of the post-Duchampian object. Whilst many of the drawings from this germinal period of Polke's oeuvre survive, very few large-scale paintings exist, further highlighting the importance of the present work. Polke's source material would have been a random image, no doubt taken from a popular magazine, such as Revue. His choice of such a banal image again firmly connects his enterprise with that of Gerhard Richter's, as well as the American Pop artists. By taking as his point of departure a privileged token of consumer society such as a 'Beauty Queen', Polke reflects upon the radically changing relationship between fine art and commercial culture. A temporary, disposable image has now been catapulted into the realm of 'High Art', preserved as a monument to a concept and aesthetic that, ironically, questions the legitimacy of this painted image and its source.
Polke offers his viewer a canvas with 'two portraits', separated by this single yellow line. On the left we see a nubile young woman with jet-black hair and enticing blue eyes. She has a coy smile and rosy cheeks; her scarlet lips and slight tilt of the head serve to enhance her physical beauty and sexual attractiveness. The right-hand side of the canvas depicts an entirely different visage. The same physiognomy has now been 'transformed' into a shell of its previous, glorious state. Eyes now become sockets; the slender neck is replaced by a cubistic trunk that looks like it was carved out of marble; the long, flowing locks now become sharper, shorter and flatter. Above all else, the beautiful fleshy pinks of the youthful skin have become a lead white, like the mask of Queen Elizabeth I, engendering a ghostly pallor.
By presenting these two binary opposites on the same canvas, and within the same physical structure, Polke immediately highlights two points. Firstly, by drawing attention to this transformation, he makes explicit the fact that he has deliberately not finished the surface. The left-hand side appears highly worked, whereas the figure on the right seems to struggle to emerge from the painted ground. He has consciously made this so in his effort to force the viewer to contemplate Polke's own act of painting. It is as if he shows two stages of the composition, a 'before' and 'after', and this may be connected to Warhol's own Before and After III (1962, Fig. 6), where the physical transformation achieved by the plastic surgeon is linked to those transformational powers possessed by the artist. Typically, Polke of course does not make clear which painted 'state' is to be preferred. Secondly, the present work prefigures Polke's Rasterbilder of young women (such as Freudinnen [1965, Fig. 7] or Bunnies [1966]) that seem to question the very politics of beauty. Here, we have two images, based on the same format, executed by the same hand on the same support, yet wildly different. Perhaps Polke is illuminating society's uncontrollable desire to conform to a certain set of 'aesthetic' rules, championed by the 'Beauty Queen' and all those who create her.
Where Polke's ideas of transformation encapsulate the polarity between the 'finished' and 'unfinished' painting, they also highlight the distinction between 'self' and 'other'. Indeed, Polke would have been influenced by the interdisciplinary and subversive acts associated with Performance art and Fluxus 'Happenings' which took place at the Dusseldorf Academy in the early 1960's, where Polke studied under Joseph Beuys. Those ideas of object-subject transformation would have certainly made an impact on his early paintings. Andy Warhol's Liz (1963-65, Fig. 8), for example, sees the famous actress dissolve into thin air. Polke's young woman, however, is transformed into something almost alien: one is not sure if we are even meant to think of the figure as a 'woman', but perhaps more of a 'mask'. This seems to embody the notion of 'erasure' or of the 'vanishing image', which would become a major concern in Polke's photography, attempting to convey the presence and absence of the thing itself. The same dynamic is in operation here, resulting in a shifting paradigm between 'self' and 'other'; between the 'reality' and 'fiction' of both the subject and object, and the blurring of those two boundaries.
The dominant motif in both 'portraits' are the figure's lips. Polke seems to want to carry over into the 'abstracted' half of his composition a memory of the previous 'state', which also acts as a visual reminder of his painterly abilities. In both cases the lips are full and red and thus highly erotic. Their focussed presentation can be compared to Warhol's celebrated painting of Marilyn Monroe's lips (Marilyn's Lips 100 times [1963]), where the signifier of her beauty, and thus value, is condensed to its logical extreme. Polke makes the same point, causing the Signifier to slip by painting the lips in exactly the same fashion. In this sense, one can compare Polke's focus on the lips with Man Ray's famous contemplation on this subject in his photograph Le Baiser (1930). This work highlights the Surrealist tension drawn between the drama of the Sign and Signifier: the disconnected nature of this 'kiss' is continued in the present work by Polke's conscious separation, but occasional yet crucial conflation of this visual determinant. Furthermore, the present work seems to come out of the Surrealist tradition of tackling the art of painting in an almost 'trivial' fashion, best described in paintings by Man Ray or Francis Picabia.
Sigmar Polke stands out as one of the most innovative and challenging artists of his generation. His creative vision, a profoundly dynamic cross-fertilisation of aesthetic, conceptual and socio-political tributaries has, at times, bemused and bedazzled audiences around the world for nearly forty years. For all its intellectual rigour, Polke's Untitled (Doppelportrat) is a truly visual feast upon which to delight one's senses and mind. It is a masterpiece of Polke's sometimes terse, often idiosyncratic expression. One must see this painting as a defining moment in the artist's oeuvre. It is an image that teems with both painterly and intellectual vigour and which appears to have inspired the artist to continue these varied explorations, in other forms and media, in a career that is and will be celebrated for decades to come.