Born in 1941 in Oels (DE)
Died in 2010 in Cologne (DE)
1988
Mixed media on cloth
180 x 200 cm
Actuellement en dépôt : Musée départemental d'art ancien et contemporain, Epinal
Year of Purchase: 1989
A year before the celebration of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the German artist Sigmar Polke, who was born in East Germany in 1941, painted this Royal Family. The imagination of this amazing collector of images, who invented ‘Capitalist Realism’, sieves a great deal of information, which we should not necessarily hasten to decipher in too precise a way. We do know, however, that the German postmodern avant-garde (Heiner Müller, as it happens) has managed to interpret 20th century totalitarianism in the light of French ideology…
The artist plays with the porousness of the media to obtain an at times random rendering with the products he uses (different types of paints and pigments which may change with time). This is why the precise line of the drawing stands out clearly from the large splashes which soak the canvas. First of all we see the enlargement of a period caricature: a sans-culotte, armed with a pike and a whip, drives a ragged flock along before him (turkey, sheep, dog, nanny- and billy-goat); their royal heads are the ones that will shortly fall. The road taken could thus be the one leading from the Tuileries to the guillotine… The artist combines the sardonic wit of this anecdotal representation with a violent pictorial quality, consisting of blotches and abstract smears. One of these blotches literally explodes above the sans-culotte’s head, for example. In the sky, a threatening skull is outlined, apparently formed by the condensation of colour, clouds, and… History.
Olivier Goetz