Markus Lüpertz was born in 1941 in Reichenberg, Sudetenland (now Liberec, Czech Republic). His family moved to Rheydt in the Rhineland in 1948, when he was seven. He was dismissed from an apprenticeship painting wine-bottle labels for alleged lack of talent. A second teacher, a commercial artist, went bankrupt. In 1956 he enrolled at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld under Laurens Goosens, then spent a semester at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf that ended, in his own words, as a “huge fiasco” — a physical conflict led to his exmatriculation. In 1961 he moved to West Berlin to avoid military service and began his actual painting career.
In 1962 he developed what he called “dithyrambic painting.” The term is Nietzsche’s — from the Dionysian dithyramb, the wild choral hymn — and it describes what Lüpertz does: vehement, aggressive, unblended paint applied with tools other than the brush, often at monumental scale. In 1964 he held his first exhibition of the Dithyrambic Paintings. In 1966 he published the “Dithyrambic Manifesto”; a second, “The Grace of the Twentieth Century,” followed in 1968. These are not ironic performances; they are genuine theoretical claims that painting can recover the ritual function it held before the modern museum.
In 1964, together with Karl Horst Hödicke, Hans-Jürgen Diehl, Wolfgang Petrick, Peter Sorge, and eleven others, Lüpertz founded the gallery Grossgörschen 35 — one of the first artist-run spaces in West Berlin, predating the Junge Wilden’s Moritzplatz by more than a decade. The gallery showed work that the established venues would not touch.
In 1969, Klaus Gallwitz, director of the Baden-Baden Kunsthalle, presented Lüpertz in a talent show that brought him broader notice. In 1970 he received the Villa Romana Prize and spent a year in Florence — the same scholarship program that had taken Baselitz there in 1965. The Italian experience deepened his sense of painting as a monumental, public language.
From 1969 to 1977 Lüpertz painted what he called his German motifs: steel helmets, shovels, antlers, flags, military insignia rendered in thick impasto and high-contrast palette. The iconography is national but emptied of heroism — the helmet is an object, not a symbol of glory, and the palette is deliberately earth-toned and heavy. The paintings thematize what the scholarship calls “unmanaged German national pathos” — the legacy of the Third Reich evoked without catharsis.
The “Stil” series (1977–1984) pushed further into abstraction, treating paint itself as the subject and the play of surface and volume-forming form as the entire content. From 1985 to 1990 he turned to Corot and Poussin, reinterpreting their compositions in a strategy of deliberate artificiality — painting parallel to nature rather than descriptive of it.
Lüpertz was represented by Galerie Michael Werner from early in his career, placing him inside the same commercial infrastructure as Baselitz, Penck, and Immendorff. Werner’s gallery in Cologne, and later New York and London, gave him the international platform the work required. In 1986 Lüpertz became professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf; in 1988 he was appointed rector, a position he held for over twenty years. He filled vacancies with Penck, Kounellis, Trockel, Immendorff, Oehlen, Doig, and Cragg — effectively using the academy to extend the Neo-Expressionist scene into the next generation. In 1993 he was invited to the Venice Biennale German Pavilion together with Baselitz and Kiefer, a triangulation that marks the institutional center of gravity.
Throughout, Lüpertz cultivated a theatrical public persona — orator, jazz pianist, magazine publisher (Frau und Hund, founded 2003), poet — that made him a celebrity in Germany in a way Baselitz never was. The German press called him a “painter prince” (Malerfürst); he claimed to hate the term. His temperament is different from Baselitz’s: more rhetorical, more performative, more invested in the figure of the artist as public prophet. Where Baselitz paints muteness, Lüpertz paints proclamation.
See also
- dithyrambic-painting — the concept
- galerie-michael-werner — the shared dealer
- formal-grammar — vehement paint as declaration
- Georg Baselitz — the scene’s center of gravity
- A.R. Penck — the East German theorist-painter
- Jörg Immendorff — the Beuys student who turned to painting