The Pandämonium manifestos — Pandämonium I (1961) and Pandämonium II (1962) — were lithograph broadsheets produced by Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck in West Berlin. Printed in tiny editions by hand, they are savage, hallucinatory critiques of West Germany’s “economic miracle,” academic art, and the exhausted legacy of Abstract Expressionism.
The manifestos praise outsider art, schizophrenia, and the irrational as necessary responses to a bankrupt, conformist society. Baselitz called for a “new world” built from disaster. The imagery combines scarred figurative fragments, expressionist scrawls, and harsh typography — an aggressive declaration of a return to figuration.
Schönebeck left painting around 1964 for psychiatric reasons and disappeared from the scene. Baselitz carried the project forward alone. The manifestos remain the movement’s founding texts — not policies, but declarations of temperament.
See also
- Georg Baselitz — the surviving signatory
- bilderstreit — the postwar context the manifestos opposed
- formal-grammar — for the anti-academy rule