I remember the avant garde art world rejecting painting as an art form. That was in the 1980s, and performance was all the rage. Then along came neo-expressionism in Germany.

The "Cafe Deutschland" paintings were started in 1978 and work on the cycle stopped around 1982..


Joerg Immendorff, Cafe Deutschland - Cafeprobe, 1980, Synthetic resin on canvas

An imaginary nightclub sits on the east-west border, an independent territory where the burlesque theatre of cold-war politics, national identity, and battle of artistic legacy is played out night after night in all its subterfuge and drama.

In this interview with Pamela Kort in Artforum Immendorff states:

You might compare "Cafe Deutschland" to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. That painting is permeated by a certain melancholy and isolation inherent in a big city like New York. My "Cafe Deutschland" works addressed the situation of a divided Germany, but they are similar to the Hopper in that they are also about alienation. They represent my attempt to break through a wall--and not merely the one that separated the former East and West Germanies. How odd it is that, despite the many ways we have of communicating with one another, we seem to be building up walls between ourselves rather than dismantling them. So the " Cafe Deutschland" paintings stand just as much for a then externally divided Germany as for the condition of an internally split man, who struggles to communicate not only with himself but also with his colleagues and lovers.

This is an image of both big-city loneliness and of existential loneliness. Ironically, Hopper was marooned artistically by the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

previous