met Martin, Peter Preller introduced him to her as “very gifted,” although she didn’t know why. Martin had not yet started painting seriously. She met him as “someone wild and restless, seeking creative expression on all levels.”
The next time she saw him it was as a fallen angel. He called her one night and wanted to meet her in a bar. That was impossible, since she had a small child, but he needed to see her, he said, so he went out to her neighborhood and when he showed up at her door, quite late, he was a mess: he had gotten into a brawl, had a cut under his eye, and had shaved off his hair. There was for it but to bandage him up. “He wanted to be under someone’s wing, wanted a mother to take him in.”
This destructive and self-destructive side of Martin, Gisela Stelly-Augstein says, “was the other side of the coin.” Once, after two weeks on Ibiza, he wrote, “Got myself some suntan, booze, and beatings.”
They continued to use the formal pronoun with each other for a long time: “it went with his romantic ideas.” [4] He asked if she would be opposed to his being her admirer: would that look wrong? He would write her letters, give her presents, visit her, make a little installation for her out of toys and cheap department-store kitsch.
Love and Adventure was the name of her movie, whose lead actress Martin had discovered at a flea market. He himself insisted on playing a policeman with a German shepherd. Filming with him was a lot of fun, and he entertained the whole crew over meals. Later he often visited from Berlin, sometimes overnight, and when he did “he was totally different than out in the wild world. He still talked nonstop, but he didn’t have anything he was trying to prove.” Her husband and Martin never exactly got along. It was Rudolf Augstein who uttered the sentence that Martin was all too happy to quote later: “Kippi can’t even make himself a sandwich.”
UNO DI VOI, UN TEDESCO IN FIRENZE
Martin was done with Hamburg. He went to Berlin more and more often, stopped going to class, and “just decided in 1976 to be a professional artist,” according to Daniel Baumann, the curator of his major Geneva “Respective” covering the years “1997–1976.”
But before he moved to Berlin, there was one more stop he had to make. In 1976 the family celebrated Christmas together at Tina’s house in Chiemsee—three months after our mother had died and a month after the birth of our first niece, Lisa. Martin came with Inka and her daughter. From there he took the train to Florence.
Self-portrait from Florence, 1977
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
Clearly, as a German Romantic, he had to go to Italy at some point—the home of noodles and art, of love and cinema. He wanted to stay in the Villa Romana, a German artists’ residency in Florence, but they didn’t accept him.
At first, Martin felt homesick and alone in Florence, and maybe abandoned as well, since our mother had died. Toward the end she had been optimistic about his future—if he was in good spirits then so was she. “He is really satisfied with himself now and I think happy too. In terms of quality, I think what he’s doing is very good.” Six months before her death, when she thought she had discovered a new lump in her remaining breast, she wrote to him, “I so want to live long enough to see the great artist you are becoming. But it’s out of my hands.”
Florence did not welcome Martin with open arms; quite the contrary. It didn’t help that he didn’t speak the language. “It’s Monday today,” he wrote in a letter, “which means Der Stern and Der Spiegel on the stands at the train station—overjoyed—something in German. I read more intensively now that I’m in Italy.” Our father wrote an admonishing letter, surprised that Martin hadn’t learned any Italian yet, but still wished him good luck during his stay. “In my life I myself always put more weight on work than on luck though.”
The prospect of having no one to talk to but himself horrified Martin. “Searching for nothing (in particular)—looking around—drinking—keep searching, don’t know for what,” he wrote to our father shortly after he arrived. He found it annoying to have no schedule, no guiding thread. In frustration he went “shopping, shopping, shopping. It’s so sh---y to be alone.” The Italians called him “Adolfi” since “I apparently look like Adolfi, the way they imagine Adolfi to look down here.”
He would never again write as many letters as he did then. It was a mountain of letters, already practically conceptual art: one on vellum, another on postcards glued together to make a sewing pattern; one letter was three feet long. Every day he waited desperately for the mail, like an addict. He didn’t like silence; peace and quiet had nothing to offer him. He wrote to Gil Funccius that he was grateful just to hear a dog bark. The card game mau-mau, his lifelong passion, was what he longed for the most: his “fantasy. Like in Mexico, when I had the shitters, when all I dreamed of was a clean toilet, a loden coat, and noodle casserole.”
Florence was too much for him at first—too beautiful, too chic, too old. “Let’s just say: It made me insecure.” But he stuck it out and asserted himself. “I’ve gotten past the worst of it now”: after a long, demoralizing search, he found a room in a villa away from the crowds of tourists, “very magnificent architecture: hall, foyer, another hall, with a sun porch (giant), massive wood furniture, doors, windows, guest room. Feels like a room, not an in-an-out booth.” Many of the pension’s guests had lived there for months, even years, and at last Martin had people to play cards with: “I love being able to cheat.” He added, “The upper crust of German artists used to come and go here before the war.” The writer Oriana Fallaci had lived there too, and “I read her book Letter to an Unborn Child in bed, everything in the book happened in that room. Live theater.” There were landscapes and ancestral portraits hanging in the hallways, picturesque views out the windows (the square, the roofs, the houses, the mountains), the Boboli Gardens around the corner, and an aristocratic landlady over eighty years old.
Despite his initial disappointments, Martin turned Florence into his “happy hunting ground.” First he went looking for a local bar and found the café where he would have breakfast every morning and take his many visitors. He met his landlady there: the Principessa del Mare. The café was across the street from the Palazzo Pitti and was run by two brothers, whom he soon painted. One brother always stood on the left behind the counter, the other on the right; they spoke English and a few words of German and tried to teach Martin some Italian. They also translated for him what the other regulars were saying: the sourpuss, the park warden, the former consul, the head of the Boy Scouts (no one knew if that’s what he really was), all talking about kidnappings, the Communist Party, and everything else. What especially fascinated Martin was how the Italians talked with their hands and their eyes, and how fast they ordered, drank, paid, and left. And came back. “If you stay in the café you can see almost everyone come back every half hour, or at least every hour.”
Martin stopped by the Villa Romana regularly, even if he hadn’t been invited to stay there—it was right across from his pension. He liked the atmosphere there better than the scholarship-holders’ art, though. Anna Oppermann was his favorite: “We’re both from Hamburg and that’s a tremendous bond.” She was later one of the artists he showed on Feldbrunnenstrasse in Hamburg, in his Chimerical Pictures exhibition. She showed her work there as a favor to him, and he was duly grateful. She “looked a little like a witch in a gingerbread house” and “she protected me from inappropriate remarks in the Via [ sic ] Romana.”
What he really wanted in Italy was to star in a movie, “but no one discovered me,” even though he looked, as he himself liked to say, “like Helmut Berger in his good years.” So instead he made the big move and bought turpentine and paint. “My head is giving off puffs of smoke and seeing good things,” he wrote. He had been spoiled by photography, which let him shoot dozens of pictures in a few minutes, and was a little afraid of painting, but then he bought his canvases (twenty by twenty-four inches, “a transportable size—I made sure of that”) and an 6’2” easel, the same