Markus Lüpertz’s term for his own vehement-paint manifestos of the late 1960s. The dithyramb was a Greek choral hymn to Dionysus — ecstatic, ritual, intoxicated. Lüpertz adopted it to describe painting as Bacchic declaration rather than description.
The formal marks are rapid, unblended, often applied with tools other than the brush. The palette is saturated and high-contrast. The scale is monumental. The subject is not depicted so much as enacted through paint. The dithyrambic period established Lüpertz’s public persona as the scene’s showman — orator, jazz pianist, magazine publisher — and made him a celebrity in West Germany in a way Baselitz never was.
See also
- Markus Lüpertz — the practitioner
- formal-grammar — vehement paint as declaration
- gesture — the canonical formal-analysis term