Lüpertz and Poussin

“This is why I concern myself with other artists at all, because they offer me a vocabulary that can lead me to new formations.”

Markus Lüpertz’s work is strewn with fragments and quotations of works by Nicolas Poussin; but not just Poussin, of course, but also Gustave Courbet, Hans von Marées, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Aristide Maillol, Eugène Delacroix, and many others, exhibiting an omnivorous enthusiasm for the great art that precedes him, from classical antiquity, modern masters, and cool classicism, to the fury of Expressionism. He slides between art historical moments and artistic styles with disconcerting ease and disregard of hierarchies. There is simultaneously a sense of profound meaning and indiscriminate interchangeability in the artist’s approach to Poussin.

Lüpertz proudly asserts his pedigree, claiming that he is “descended from all painters,” but at the same time absorbing multitudinous artistic citations into his vast internal intellectual library, his indiscriminate source book of ordinary objects that includes as well, advertising clips, urns, birds, skulls, goats; Tower of Babylon, men in suits, centaurs, palettes, helmets, ears of grain, ship sails. In this sense, the citations from his artist predecessors are absorbed into his aesthetic campaign to invent “something abstract that is also figurative, a dithyramb.” In this way, Lüpertz freed himself from traditional realism and also from the strictures of abstract orthodoxies. Lüpertz explains: “The dithyramb was my totally individual contribution to abstraction, abstraction not in the sense of rational analysis and reduction, but as in the invention of a non-sense object.”