Jörg Immendorff was born in 1945 in Bleckede, Lower Saxony. When he was eleven his father left the family — a trauma that Immendorff’s biographers and the artist himself connected to his later emotional remoteness and his sense of inadequacy. At sixteen he had his first exhibition, in a jazz cellar in Bonn.
In 1963 he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, initially studying theatrical design under Teo Otto. Otto expelled him when Immendorff refused to let one of his paintings serve as stage-set decoration. He was then accepted as a student by Joseph Beuys. The academy itself expelled him a second time, for left-wing political activities and neo-Dadaist provocations. The Beuys inheritance — pedagogical radicalism, political action as art, the expanded concept (erweiterter Kunstbegriff) — shaped his early practice, but where Beuys worked through performance and shamanic gesture, Immendorff carried the political imperative through painting.
In 1968 he founded the LIDL Akademie, a counter-academy named after a supermarket chain. LIDL was not a school in any conventional sense; it was a period of protest, street action, and deliberate anti-aesthetic provocation. The name came from the sound of a child’s rattle. In January 1968 Immendorff appeared before the West German Parliament in Bonn with a wood block labeled “LIDL” tethered to his ankle and painted in the colors of the German flag. He was arrested for defaming the flag. Other participants in LIDL actions included James Lee Byars, Marcel Broodthaers, Nam June Paik, and Beuys himself. LIDL ridiculed the cult of creative genius and the precious aesthetic object; Immendorff assembled pretentious iconographic motifs from children’s make-believe — turtles, goldfish, polar bears — and transformed them into the “working material” of a hoped-for new functional art form.
The turn to painting came in the mid-1970s. Immendorff had seen Renato Guttuso’s Caffè Greco and conceived of the divided Germany as a nightclub — a space where East and West could meet in allegory if not in fact. The Café Deutschland series (1977–1984) consists of sixteen large paintings showing crowded, saturated, perspectival nightclub interiors: tables of symbolic figures, national emblems, political references arranged like a Brechtian stage or a comic strip. The series has a narrative ambition rare in the movement — it tells a continuing story about German partition and identity through recurring characters and motifs across multiple canvases. The palette is neon and theatrical; the camera angle is often from above, as if looking down from a balcony onto the dance floor of history.
Immendorff collaborated with A.R. Penck from 1976 onward, bridging the East/West divide in practice as well as in theme. He was represented by Michael Werner and exhibited at Documenta 7. In 1977–1984 he created the Café Deutschland cycle; in 1984 he completed the series and moved toward other projects including stage design for the Salzburg Festival (Elektra, The Rake’s Progress) and the bar La Paloma in Hamburg’s St. Pauli.
In 1989 he became professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt; in 1996 he returned to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the same institution that had expelled him as a student, now as a professor. His master students included Oda Jaune, whom he married in 2000.
In 1998 he was diagnosed with ALS. When he could no longer paint with his left hand he switched to the right; when he could no longer paint at all he directed assistants following his instructions. He painted an official portrait of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2007 — a massive, ironic work showing the Chancellor in stern heroic pose surrounded by little monkeys, the “painter monkeys” that served as Immendorff’s running commentary on the artist’s condition.
He died in Düsseldorf in 2007, age 61. His ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean. His estate was estimated at €15–18 million; a twelve-year-old son from a former relationship contested the will.
Immendorff’s position in the scene is unique: the one who studied under Beuys directly, the one who kept the political narrative most explicit, the one whose work reads as theater as much as painting. The LIDL period is the hinge: from anti-art provocation to monumental political allegory, without ever losing the provocation.
See also
- cafe-deutschland — the central series
- lidl-akademie — the counter-academy period
- A.R. Penck — the East German collaborator
- Joseph Beuys — the teacher
- galerie-michael-werner — the dealer
- critical-disputes — for the Junge Wilden market-collapse question