and through; the enfant terrible rushing around the world also cherished the family traditions. Our mother died young, and he gave his daughter her name; our father’s signet ring with the family coat of arms never left Martin’s finger. He always insisted that we all celebrate Christmas together and clung tightly to the rituals: there had to be presents and a big Christmas tree and turkey dinner—and no question about who would get the drumstick. He even came along to church sometimes; he never officially left the church. He hated routine and tried something new with every exhibition project, yet he needed rituals the way a drunkard needs lampposts.
He always said he wanted a large family of his own, but he couldn’t handle life as a paterfamilias for long after his daughter was born.
Martin never lived in a pure artistic sphere. He brought us, his thoroughly unglamorous family, everywhere—to tea with Rudolf Augstein, publisher of the news magazine Der Spiegel, when we were still practically children; to luxury hotels in Geneva, where he got us free rooms; to the wild party celebrating his opening at the Pompidou Centre. “Are you coming?” read the invitation, and woe to those who didn’t. He would feel as hurt as a little boy. He had our mother stay in his substance abuse halfway house, and showed work with our father.
The enfant terrible really was a child his whole life, one who gathered families around him: friends, collectors, landlords and landladies, fans. He could beam with pleasure, sulk, run rampant, lose his temper, and be unfair, like a child—but then, the next day or next year, own up to it like a man and publicly apologize. He threw himself at our grandmother during a summer vacation once—through a glass door that he was too excited to notice—and would later throw himself into ideas and projects the same way, sometimes causing as much pain as the broken glass did back then.
He could be greedy, jealous, and egocentric, but also proud, of himself and of many other people, of their art, their craft, their cooking. He didn’t just brag about himself. And he wanted presents like a child, too. For his fortieth birthday, an orgy of spending and dissipation, he wanted a Carrera slot-car racetrack; he would stand under the Christmas tree with shining eyes. “Childhood never really ends,” he said in an interview with artist Jutta Koether.
He was extremely intelligent but never an intellectual. He read the Bild tabloid and Mickey Mouse comics, not Roland Barthes and James Joyce. He drew his material from popular culture. He let someone else read Kafka and tell him about it, the way he let others travel and draw and build sculptures for him. He would discover things lightning-fast, seize on ideas, and assimilate them. If there was something he couldn’t do in the morning, he would show people that he had learned to do it by the afternoon: make etchings, play the accordion, speak Dutch. It wasn’t real Dutch, of course, but it sure sounded like Dutch.
“Think today, done tomorrow” was one of his most well-known sayings. It was only half true. His major projects, such as The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika,” percolated for a long time before they were ready. One year he would paint three or four pictures; the next year, forty or fifty.
He overflowed with ideas that no one else had, or if someone else did have them, he simply appropriated them, whether they came from Picasso or his students or his daughter, Helena. He was as generous in taking as he was in giving, and he always demanded from others what he himself offered: everything. “You had to take care not to turn into a Kippenberger slave,” Bärbel Grässlin said.
He wanted fries and croquettes served at the opening of his exhibition at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam because that’s what we ate on our summer vacations in Holland, every night for six weeks. The museum would have preferred tomatoes and mozzarella but Martin had nothing but contempt for such things. He hated the prevailing fashions—postmodern architecture, arugula, shoulder pads, video art. Whatever was “in” was “out” for him—good only for material. Political correctness disgusted him. He built postmodern houses out of plywood and glued lighters all over them, or produced a multiple for documenta: a white plate with a big hole in the middle, “ Ciao rucola mozzarella tomate con spaghettini secco e vino al dente. ”
He likewise discarded his hippie look early and cut his hair short, put on a tie—unheard-of in Kreuzberg in the seventies—and wore only the finest suits and most expensive shoes, even in the studio. Clothes, too, were a costume. He wanted to be a walking contradiction to everything people expected from a crazy artist. Aside from that, he liked to look good, at his best like the Austrian actor Helmut Berger. He loved to hear people remark on his similarity to Visconti’s leading man. He would have loved to be famous as a movie star, or a poet. Opera and theater didn’t interest him. But movies! He knew the Hollywood classics by heart, even years after he’d seen them, and could recall scenes in the most minute detail. “Anyone who saw him in action, ranting and raging, swinging his mic onstage at 5 a.m., could see his genuine, abiding star quality, a charisma which happened to have been diverted into the art world,” said the obituary in the Independent.
In his worst periods he looked like a shabby artist: unwashed, drunk, and fat. So he pulled his underpants up over his belly like Picasso, stuck out his paunch, had a photo taken, and turned it into an exhibition poster, or a painting, or a calendar. Every weakness became a strength when transformed into art, even if the pain remained. When punks beat him up in Berlin, he had his picture taken with his bandaged head, swollen face, and crooked nose, and later painted himself like that, too. He titled it Dialogue with the Youth, part of a triptych called Berlin by Night, and he also used it as an admission ticket; he loved repurposing things as many times as he could.
He was a child of the Ruhr District, the industrial center of Germany that gave him his directness, fast pace, and dry humor. He liked how people there interacted with each other naturally and honestly. They were raw and unsentimental, always aboveboard, never stuck-up. He was an absolute master of the notes on the social keyboard, but he didn’t divide people into important and unimportant. When his neighbor, a good, honest photographer, didn’t understand Martin’s art, Martin explained it to him seriously and in detail. He met everyone at eye level, whether millionaires or children, neither looking up at them nor looking down on them. That is why children loved him so much. They also often understood his humor better than the critics and curators, and didn’t automatically feel offended by his outrageous sayings and provocations, which, in his friend Meuser’s view, were “just his way of saying, ‘Hello, so who are you?’”
He liked to quote Goethe and our mother: “From my darling mother my cheerful disposition and fondness for telling stories.” From her also came his generosity, social conscience, and pleasure in meeting new people no matter where they came from—the ability to see what was special about others no matter what form it took. From our father he inherited artistic talent, a tendency to excess, lack of inhibition, and love of enjoying himself, self-presentation, staging scenes. Artist Thomas Wachweger coined a word, Zwangsbeglücker (someone who forces others to have fun), that fit both father and son.
He was full of longing. He craved drugs, then alcohol; recognition and attention; love, TV, and noodle casserole. Martin asked lots of mothers to cook him our mother’s noodle casserole, and of course turned it into art, too. Kippenberger in the Noodle Casserole Yes Please! was the title of one of his first exhibitions, in Berlin. “Addiction [ Sucht ] is just searching [ suchen ],” he explained to Jutta Koether in an interview. “I reject everything and keep searching for the right thing.”
“Man Seeking Woman,” along with his photograph and address, was printed on the sticker the size of a visiting card that he put up all over Berlin in the seventies. It was more than a good joke—behind the irony was a deeper seriousness. He called one of his catalogs Homesick Highway 90, and on the title page was a picture of him with our father crammed into a photo booth. Homesickness and wanderlust; longing for a place to call home and running away to be free of all ties, obligations, and labels; the desire for peace and quiet and the restless curiosity and dread of boredom; the paradox of wanting to be recognized, wanting to belong, but not wanting to be pigeonholed. That was his lifelong struggle.
Self-portrait in friendship book, 1966
© Estate of Martin