MARTIN KIPPENBERGER

Picasso looms large throughout Kippenberger’s life. Almost always described in mystical terms as a sorcerer or magician, Picasso is the paradigm of the unimpeded genius, the epitome of the modernist painter-hero who never ceased to reinvent himself, even in his old age. As his biographer, John Richardson, recounts, Picasso was highly conscious of the importance of a “Great Late Phase” in solidifying his place in the art historical pantheon. Like Picasso before him, by the mid-1990s, after years of hard living, Kippenberger was increasingly aware that he too was entering his Late Period. However, instead of Picasso’s virile musketeers, with his Egg Paintings, Kippenberger cast himself as the Eggman as he deployed the egg, in its various guises, to perform an incisive critique of the cultural status quo. An equally ironic and iconoclastic act, the invocation of the egg marks a refusal of the heroic self-fashioning that dominates Picasso’s late work.

In 1996, Kippenberger explicitly resumed his identification with Picasso for the series, Jacqueline: The Paintings Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore, but this time, he set out to achieve what even the master of modernism could not: to paint his grieving widow, Jacqueline. Yet Kippenberger’s triumph over Picasso is undermined by the signature stamped on the canvas: ‘J.P.’ (Jacqueline Picasso). It is as if, when applying the final stroke which would cement his triumph, Kippenberger’s identity disappeared into the surface of the painting only to be replaced by the spectral presence of the model whom he had been painting.

Although the Jacqueline paintings do mourn Picasso’s death, more fundamentally, they mourn the death of the modernist author par excellence. By specifically identifying with a post-mortem Picasso, Kippenberger laments the impossibility of a certain model of authorship that died with Picasso. As Ann Temkin writes, “Through no fault of his own, [Kippenberger] was late to the party of modernism [...] It was no longer credible to relate oneself to prior work in terms of progress–one could only portray the reality of one’s own belatedness.” Particularly in the late paintings, with their echoes of color field painting, passages of gestural abstraction, overlaid grids, and Barnett Newman-esque zips, Kippenberger trudges through the marshlands of modernist aesthetics unable and unwilling to lay claim to a style that would be distinctly his own. Through his various performances, appropriations, and parodic identifications, Kippenberger revels in unoriginality; he disperses his authorial voice in a style-less style, weaving together diverse cultural and art historical fragments to form authorless assemblages.

Even in The Raft of Medusa, where he most explicitly engages with the prospect of his own death through a theatrical deconstruction of Géricault’s masterpiece, Kippenberger never veered into self-pity or a desperate attempt to assert his immortality as a painter. In Untitled (from the series The Raft of Medusa), Kippenberger anticipates his own death through an unidealized depiction of his sagging head, which already shows the onset of rigor mortis. However, Kippenberger stages the existential drama of the human body against a parodically Rothko-esque background. In contrast to Rothko’s desire to provoke intense emotions like tragedy or despair through his work, Kippenberger’s candy-colored compositions in The Raft of Medusa series undercut the mounting pathos through an ironic détournement. As Untitled oscillates between the tragic and the parodic, the heroic and the anti-heroic, Kippenberger ultimately refuses the seduction of painterly apotheosis –– even as the cancer spread throughout his dying body.

In this way, we begin to question if we can really identify a so-called Late Period in Kippenberger’s oeuvre at all. These paintings, in their radical heterogeneity, seem to prohibit any chronological periodization whatsoever. And they can furthermore only be considered ‘late’ according to the mythologized biography of the painter whose early death lends them an air of tragedy. However, the paintings gathered here seem to undermine the very authority of the modernist painter-hero who could ensure the validity of such a periodization. Once liberated from a heroic chronology, Kippenberger’s late paintings no longer seem to represent a coda, a grand finale, or some neat conclusion to his career; rather they seem to represent an opening –– the latest evolution of a body of work which thwarts reductive interpretations and continues to generate proliferating meanings.