Sigmar Polke, one of Germany’s best-known artists, died Thursday night from cancer at the age of 69. Polke, a painter, graphic artist and photographer, was “one of the most important and most successful representatives of German contemporary art and had an important international reputation. The record price for Polke’s work at auction was 2.7 million pounds (then $5.3 million) for a 1966 canvas titled “Strand” (Beach) that sold at Christie’s in London in 2007. Stephanie Barron, curator of modern art at LACMA who included Polke in the 2009 show "Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures," called him "one the most important painters of the postwar generation and a leader among German artists." Born in 1941 in eastern Germany, Polke emigrated to the west in 1953. He settled in Dusseldorf, where he studied at the Art Academy. In 1963, he founded the “Capitalist Realism” painting movement with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg. The three artists mocked both the realist style that was the official art of the Soviet Union and the consumer-driven pop art of the west. Polke moved to Cologne in 1978. He experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matter and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them. Polke was "incredibly adept at blending together images taken from many different sources," Barron said. "In his paintings he would bring together images from advertising, newspapers, film stills, and more in an incredibly eloquent and layered way." Nicholas Serota, director of London's Tate Modern art gallery, said Polke's "sublimely beautiful paintings" often carried a "tough message about society and its values" and were enormously influential on younger generations of artists.
