Jörg Immendorff

Jörg Immendorff (June 14, 1945 – May 28, 2007) was one of the best known contemporary German painters; he was also a sculptor, stage designer and art professor.

Immendorff was born in Bleckede, Lower Saxony. When he was 11 years old, his father left the family. This traumatic experience has been used to explain Immendorff's later feelings of inadequacy and emotional remoteness. He attended the boarding School Ernst-Kalkuhl Gymnasium as a student.

From 1963, Immendorff studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf (Kunstakademie Düsseldorf). In the beginning, he studied for three terms with the theater designer Teo Otto. After Otto threw him out of his class for refusing to let one of his paintings serve as stage-set decoration, Immendorff was accepted as a student by Joseph Beuys. The academy expelled him because of some of his (left-wing) political activities and neo-dadaist actions. From 1969 to 1980, he worked as an art teacher at a public school, and then as a free artist, holding visiting professorships all over Europe. In 1989, he became professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and in 1996 he became professor at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf — the same school that had dismissed him as a student.

Immendorff's paintings are sometimes reminiscent of surrealism and often use irony and heavy symbolism to convey political ideas. He named one of his first acclaimed works "Hört auf zu malen!" ("Stop painting!")

Immendorff was a member of the German art movement Neue Wilde. In January 1968 he appeared in front of the West German Parliament in Bonn with a wood block labeled “Lidl” tethered to his ankle and painted in the colors of the German flag; he was subsequently arrested for defaming the flag. Best known is his Cafe Deutschland series of sixteen large paintings (1977–1984) that were inspired by Renato Guttuso’s Caffè Greco; in these crowded colorful pictures, Immendorff had disco-goers symbolize the conflict between East and West Germany. Since the 1970s, he worked closely with the painter A. R. Penck from Dresden (in East Germany).

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