Markus Lüpertz. Threads of History

Markus Lüpertz. Threads of History
May 24–Sept 10, 2017

Markus Lüpertz has been showing his splashy German neo-expressionist paintings in Europe galleries and museums for more than 50 years. But only now is he strolling through his first major U.S. museum survey, shared by two different Washington, D.C. institutions.

“I never see these paintings because they are in collections or in warehouses,” he says approvingly through an interpreter.

One, at the Phillips Collection, Markus Lüpertz is a survey of his entire career, with works from 1964 to 2014. The other, at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Markus Lüpertz: Threads of History, concentrates on the period from 1962 to 1975, which curator Evelyn Hankins calls his “early mature work.”

But the artist himself, at 76, had a hand in its presentation, at least at the Phillips Collection.

Phillips collection director Dorothy Kosinski, who curated its retrospective, said her approach was originally the traditional overview—with a statement and artists’ picture to begin, followed by the work, carefully presented chronologically.

“What happened was, Markus Lüpertz walked in and he said, ‘I’m going to look around.’” As a result, Kosinski says, “Every painting in this exhibit of 50-some works moved—and many of them more than once or twice.”