No contemporary painter has lived and suffered with his time like Jörg Immendorff. He was born the son of an officer in Bleckede near Lüneburg on 14 June 1945; he died on 28 May 2007 in Düsseldorf of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), a rare fatal neurone disease. On his deathbed, he still dictated his dark paintings to his assistants and at the same time invented wonderful, crazy, and odd stories, which reflected his own situation in the world.

Immendorff hat two great teachers when he came to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1963. One was Teo Otto, a decisive opponent of National Socialism and the most significant stage designer of German-language theater in the post-war period. Immendorff studied under him in 1963/4. After three semesters, he switched to Joseph Beuys who was very close to theater with his Fluxus actions at that time. As a nineteen-year-old student, Immendorff performed in swim shorts and held up towards the audience smiling heads of painted cardboard babies symbolizing innocent beings beyond all social pressures.

Soon Immendorff took a stance, not only theoretically but also practically. He squatted, supported the cause of the homeless, and demonstrated for a better world. Subsequently he changed his methods. The protestor became the teacher. From 1968 to 1980 he taught at a secondary school in Düsseldorf. From 1989 on he was professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and from 1996 until he died at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. “With all means, I believe I can create something that will change people,” he said.

In the late 1970s he began to be interested in painting; this went hand in hand with his friendship to Ralf Winkler who took on the pseudonym A. R. Penck. Immendorff was just about to create the most important work in the period of the cold war, Café Deutschland, when he met Penck in East Berlin and Dresden. In his paintings, he depicted the East with hammer and sickle, the West with the brash pub atmosphere of the Düsseldorf discotheque Revolution, where punk and politics, the demimonde and Bohemia carried on. With every brushstroke the painter became a contemporary witness and demonstrated the breaks and inconsistencies in the German-German history. He created burstingly full colorful scenes where otherwise minimalism ruled. He satirized and exaggerated. All his imperatives and dialogues of the late 1970s and ‘80s addressed the political ice age. The barbed wire cut through the heart’s chamber.

In 1984 Immendorff opened the pub La Paloma in St. Pauli (the nightlife and red-light district in Hamburg) and from then on he always played the double role of waiter and guest in his paintings. Further roles emerged. In 1985/6 he designed the stage setting for the Strauss opera Elektra for the Bremer Stadttheather, in 1994 the Stravinsky opera The Rake’s Progress for the Salzburger Festspiele. The stage’s floorboards, curtains, scenery, and requisites became the backdrop to his paintings and symbols for life’s stage.

In the late 1990s his illness emerged as symbol in many paintings. Black and red nerve endings snaked through the scenes; Fortuna swayed on crutches. From 2003 on his hands were largely paralyzed. With Jörg Immendorff, a wonderful story teller and a great, funny, and provocative teacher passed away. In his last sculpture, a golden yellow bronze bee, the personified animal sweeps the refuse together to finally put things in order.