ART REVIEW : Solid Tribute to an Elusive Master Painter

Sigmar Polke is a terrifically important artist, and “Sigmar Polke” is a terrifically important exhibition.

Just about the only disappointment attached to the sprawling retrospective, which opened Thursday at the Museum of Modern Art here, is that it won’t be traveling to Los Angeles. (After San Francisco, it moves to Washington, D.C., Chicago and New York.) That, and the museum’s notoriously awkward gallery spaces, which make coherent installations of many an artist’s work exceedingly difficult to accomplish.

The problem is especially vexing for Polke, the elusive German painter whose development since the early 1960s has been broadly influential for both European and American artists, but whose work has not been shown in much abundance in the United States. (Almost never is it in evidence on the West Coast.)

The retrospective is large--more than 90 paintings, from 1963 on, as well as an extensive group of often wonderful drawings and a new installation, featuring a gigantic ladder leading to an escape hatch through a skylight, made specially for the museum’s Beaux-Arts rotunda--and it offers nearly as complete a survey as one might hope for. Certainly there are gaps (the ‘70s are not well represented), but it’s safe to say a substantive effort such as this isn’t likely to come this way again for a very long time. Miss the show only at your peril.

Still, piecing together how Polke got where he did, which is one aim of any retrospective assessment, isn’t easy in the show. The entry galleries present the artist at his most consistently compelling--the richly disorienting work of the 1980s--while his formative pictures from the 1960s occupy a string of galleries to the side, displays that here and there are punctuated by more recent canvases. The trajectory is jumpy.

Of course, with Polke, a strictly chronological survey may not be exactly essential. He’s the kind of artist who periodically doubles back on himself, in paintings whose two principal trademarks are, first, multiple layers of imagery, one painted atop another, sometimes on commercial fabric also printed with patterns; and, second, decidedly unusual materials--goopy stuff such as alcohol-diluted pigment and beeswax on canvas, or acrylic on Turkish blue Lurex, or silver, silver nitrite, iodine, cobalt chloride and artificial resin on canvas. (Reading the labels can make you feel like Ralph Nader at the supermarket.) Together, they yield anything but paintings with linear narratives.

And, for an artist known to have made paintings that use mineral pigments whose color changes with the climactic conditions of the places in which they are shown, the idea of a tight, strictly ordered historical presentation doesn’t really compute.

The catalogue, too, is appropriately quirky. While the quality of the color reproductions is sometimes disappointing (near as I can tell, given paintings whose color isn’t always fixed), the texts are often good. They’re also all over the map, with contributions by the show’s organizer, John Caldwell, the new curator at the museum whose debut this is, as well as by a critic, a historian, another artist, a filmmaker and even a collector. Each has something worthwhile to say, and the unusual diversity of voices serves Polke’s internally diverse paintings well. This is an art that attempts to ground metaphysical experience in the muck and mire of the everyday--a swamp that includes painting itself--and the cacophony in the catalogue oddly fits.

For Americans, Polke’s art from the last 10 years is his most familiar, and for three notably interrelated reasons. He has been among the leading artists to have emerged in the recent internationalization of the contemporary art world (Polke was awarded the Golden Lion Prize for painting at the 1986 Venice Biennale). His work is the aesthetic offspring of perhaps the two archetypal artists of the post-1960 milieu, Germany’s shamanistic Joseph Beuys (with whom he studied) and American Pop-meister Andy Warhol, whose influences were everywhere to be seen in the last decade. And his art’s arrival on these shores was preceded by the widely publicized paintings of the younger American artists David Salle and Julian Schnabel, who couldn’t have done what they did without having seen Polke’s example on European sojourns.

So Polke has celebrated forebears and followers, yet his own widely acclaimed work has been remote. We “know” it chiefly through means other than direct experience. Which is to say, we know it the way we know so much else in contemporary life, a distended knowledge that is itself central to Polke’s art.

Polke was born in Silesia (once part of East Germany, now part of Poland) in 1941, and he immigrated to West Germany at the age of 12. Imagine growing up in a historically torn and ravaged land, physically and psychically, and to unprecedented degree, that was simultaneously being rebuilt in the image of the youthful culture of America. Something of both will be found in Polke’s best work, which features evanescent imagery disappearing into the paintings’ dilapidated material stew.

Polke’s paintings from about 1963 to the beginning of the 1970s feature the consumer goods, kitschy decoration and benday dots of Pop art, but they’re vastly different from Warhol and Lichtenstein. Awkward and grubby, they don’t possess the flashy urgency or cheerful anarchy of the Americans’ work, seeming more like ancient talismans than reverential icons of the new. Together with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer (then an artist, now an influential dealer), Polke dubbed this putative movement Capitalist Realism, a wry if provincial response to Pop by artists more than familiar with the enforced conventions of Socialist Realism.

Most of these paintings are insistently ugly--and it’s hard to take your eyes off them. The paradox might partly be explained by the reliance on down-and-dirty, banged-up execution to render conventional concepts of beauty: tropical islands, flowers, birds, Playboy bunnies, young lovers and such. Drained of pop-culture slickness, the subjects seem damaged and oddly poignant.

Polke followed these with several works examining other new conventions. A painting of simple mathematical equations that don’t add up slid the rug out from under Conceptual art, while others took on the lowly decorative element of high-toned gestural abstraction and the godlike perfection of hard-edge painting. They bear a decided affinity to the contemporaneous early work of John Baldessari (the artist, incidentally, who contributed brief notes to the catalogue).

These ruminations on the nature of art merged with Polke’s prior concerns to form the great work of the 1980s (anticipated in some earlier gems, like the pivotal “Alice in Wonderland” from 1971). Here, pungent acknowledgement of the traditional structure of the object called a painting comes together, wildly, with the new pictorial structure of mass-culture imagery.

Stretcher bars are a painting’s skeleton, canvas its skin. Polke began dousing his canvases with resin, which turned the surface into a yellowed, cracked and translucent “flesh,” through which the painting’s “bones” are eerily glimpsed. Elsewhere, quilted cloth or patterned fabric substitutes for canvas, to “clothe” the painting’s “body.”

This patterned fabric also offers one tumble of images on which other layers of painted pictures cavort. For Polke, a painting seems not to be a blank canvas or an empty field on which new images are invented. Instead, it has the feel of a metaphoric body existing as a blank screen, across which phantoms, specters and mysterious shades are projected.

The transformative yet Earth-bound mysticism of Joseph Beuys and the receptive-to-anything “blank body” of Andy Warhol stand behind this uncanny quality. Polke’s achievement has been to harness them together in his art--a transfiguration that appears to stand behind the curator’s firm commitment to Polke’s work.

Following a prescient 1987 show at the Milwaukee Art Museum grouping Warhol, Beuys and Polke, John Caldwell paired work by the two older, late artists in a much-remarked installation at Pittsburgh’s 1988 Carnegie International. This corner room was matched, at the opposite end of a string of galleries, by a special installation of five, large paintings by Polke, variously composed from meteorite dust, silver leaf and Paleolithic tools scattered across glowing pools of resin. Those five paintings are now in San Francisco, one in the collection of the museum, four in Bay Area private collections. “Sigmar Polke” is their trenchant validation.

“Sigmar Polke” remains at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to Jan. 13, before traveling to the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (Feb. 12 - May 7); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (July 20 - Sept. 8) and the Brooklyn Museum Oct. 11 - Jan. 6, 1992).