One decisive factor in Cologne’s pull was Kunstmarkt, the art fair Rudolf Zwirner and Hein Stünke had founded in 1967. It was a small affair at first, with only eighteen galleries represented, but “after all, that was all there was of the German avant-garde at the time,” Zwirner says today. “The market was very, very limited: few dealers, few artists, and even fewer collectors.” In gallerist Hans-Jürgen Müller’s words, “For us, a collector was someone who owned five pictures. Even the banks hadn’t started to collect seriously.” A few days before the start of the first Kunstmarkt, a colleague called Müller and told him he should bring a chess set—otherwise, they would be bored to death at their booths. It didn’t turn out that way.
The success took them by surprise at first but soon became the norm. The first Art Basel fair took place in 1970; ARCO in Madrid was in 1981; London, Berlin, and Miami followed. Cologne quickly became what Germany had never had up until then: an art capital. “Until then,” Müller said, “foreign dealers and collectors had to travel around the whole country to buy—Cologne, Düsseldorf, Stuttgart, Hannover, Munich.... Now everything was in one place on the Rhine.”
Like many gallerists (such as Michael Werner), Müller moved to Cologne in the rush of this success. The artists, he said, had forced him to. He did good business there—the Rhineland was affluent, with many collectors, and he sold as much in a month as he had sold in a year in Stuttgart. But with the success came pressure. “Cologne was tough, like New York,” the gallerist realized. For Müller, the city came up short on intellectual or sensual life: “In culinary terms, Cologne was barbaric.” And as for wine, “You had to bring it up from southern Germany yourself.” In 1973, Müller moved back to southern Germany.
Along with the Kunstmarkt, there was another revolution attracting artists to Cologne: the Ludwig collection, on loan to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum starting in 1969. Not even in America was there so much American pop art to be seen in one place: Lichtenstein, Warhol, Rosenquist. When I talked to Rudolf Zwirner, he held the heavy catalog from the time up over his head and said, “Look at that! It’s like a bible. Try to imagine, it’s the late sixties and the venerable Wallraf-Richartz Museum is putting garbage like that on the walls! Every museum curator in the world was shocked. You can’t overestimate the difference that made.”
According to Zwirner, up until that point the museums were showing only abstract art: “They were only interested in restitution, in art that atoned for the past. Everything they showed had to be [what the Nazis had vilified as] ‘degenerate art,’ or, if it was modern, then École de Paris, Henry Moore, nothing offensive. Abstract art was a guarantee that you wouldn’t have to engage with German history.” So no Neue Sachlichkeit, no Dadaism, no surrealism: “Anything representational at all, and the official collectors were not interested—and stuff like Kippenberger did later, politically/sociologically/otherly critical, was even worse. The scene couldn’t have been more conformist: abstraction was the only style in the world. In that context,” says the dealer who played a major role in building up the collection, “Ludwig and his stuff was a shock.”
This view was shared by Johann-Karl Schmidt, the curator who would invite Martin to give his first solo show in a German museum (Darmstadt, in 1986). He arrived in the Rhineland from Florence in 1970, an art historian “with the baggage of a completely classical, academic way of looking at things.” He first heard the names Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg in Cologne, and he was surprised not only by what the Ludwig collection contained but also by how it was shown: “It was the most contemporary mode that existed in museum practice. The museum didn’t address itself to just a narrow, bourgeois, self-improving class of viewer, it threw everything open—it set out not to preserve, but to experiment. You didn’t have to go down on your knees in respectful silence before the Great Art, you were taking part in the present moment of the culture.”
The temporary loan was made permanent in 1976 and the collection became a museum; ten years later, it would move to a new building of its own near the cathedral and the main train station. By then, the collection and its museum practice no longer seemed so revolutionary—a new avant-garde, a German avant-garde, had taken root in the city. It was in order to see their work, which was not in the Ludwig collection, that American curators, artists, and gallerists flocked to the Rhine.
Meanwhile, the hip art-city had gotten even hipper, the art market even more lucrative, the artists younger, the pictures bigger, and the public greedier. “At some point,” in Max Hetzler’s words, “it was clear that you had to go to Cologne.”
Martin moved there at the end of 1982. He had visited the region many times already: his friends and fellow Hetzler-artists Markus Oehlen and Meuser lived in nearby Düsseldorf; Martin had visited Hans-Peter Feldmann there, a maverick artist he held in high esteem; one of his most famous self-portraits, from the Dear Painter, Paint For Me series, shows him in front of the Düsseldorf club Ratinger Hof, arm in arm with a fat man. Earlier still were the visits to Sigmar Polke’s farmhouse. He had also had a girlfriend in Düsseldorf, Brigitta Rohrbach.
But Düsseldorf was not for Martin: it was too chic, too smooth, too academic. The art scene was deeply under the influence of the Academy, with its hierarchies and traditions. Our great-grandmother had studied there; the über-father Joseph Beuys taught there; the Bechers and later their students were about to cause a sensation there with their cool, forbidding, mostly uninhabited photographs. “Düsseldorf,” in the words of the Berlin gallerist Bruno Brunnet, “was the High Mass of dogmatism.”
Cologne, by contrast, was free of the dust of the Academy; it was also, for Martin, virgin territory, a land you could conquer. Before long he was the “King of Cologne,” in the words of Thomas Borgmann, an art dealer who had long been based there: “He was so funny, loud, and quick-witted. The people who had been established there a long time benefited greatly; he really brought new life into the whole scene.” As in the other cities where he lived, Martin put his stamp on this one with exhibitions, posters, and “hotel improvement actions”; with talking, going to bars, having affairs, and birthday celebrations; with his omnipresence. The king gathered his court around him in the bars, a regime devoted to art. “Martin dashed through Cologne full of excitement,” Jörg-Uwe Albig wrote in Art magazine in 1985, “hounding gallerists, tracking down raw material, recruiting assistants.” The only star in Cologne whose status was arguably higher was Polke, who ruled the city in the opposite way: by making himself scarce.
Martin and Max Hetzler in Hetzler’s gallery, in front of the series “8 Pictures to Think About Whether We Can Keep This Up” (1983)
© Wilhelm Schürmann
Martin stayed in Cologne longer than anywhere else—more than a decade, though not in the same place the whole time. As always, he constantly changed apartments and studios: Friesenplatz, Lindenstrasse, Hildeboldplatz, Hansaring, Eifelstrasse, Jülicher Strasse. Cologne was also his home base for trips out into the world, a few weeks here, a few months there: Vienna and the Burgenland, Syros and Brazil, Sevilla and Madrid, Nice and Los Angeles. Cologne was the opposite of Berlin: not an island, but a hub. You could get to Holland, Belgium, or France in an hour.
Even long after he left Cologne, he remained “the Cologne artist.” This city was the organizing center of his life; his gallerist, Gisela Capitain, was there, along with his office, his assistant, his collectors, his storage room, and his hotel room. His friends lived there, and later his daughter and her mother.
The wide world lay right outside Cologne but the city itself was a village, despite its million inhabitants—more manageable and contained than Berlin. Bars, galleries, museums, bookstores, cafés: in this metropolis with a Roman foundation, medieval street plan, and narrow alleys, everything was within walking distance (or, if necessary, a quick taxi ride away). Jochen Siemens, a journalist, wrote in Tempo , a trendy magazine for young people, “You can spit across Ehrenstrasse, one of the Cologne boulevards, it’s so narrow
. All the buildings in Cologne are dull and dirt-colored, like the striking-surface of a matchbox. The people of Cologne stand in front of them and talk. In no other city in the world is there so much talking as in Cologne; people here talk even when they are by themselves on the street.” They weren’t alone often, though: you had only to cross the street and you would have already bumped into five people you knew, not only residents of Cologne, but art-lovers from all over the world.
TEN MINUTES IN A CIRCLE
The central meeting point, where sooner or later you ran into everyone no matter what artistic camp they belonged to—the village pub, as it were—was Walther König’s bookstore. Martin called it his “bar” even though no drinks were served there. It was in the heart of the city, on the so-called Bermuda Triangle adjoining Ehrenstrasse, just steps away from galleries, studios, paint stores, the Bittner Bookstore, Café Broadway, and the Italian stand-up restaurant Ezio.
The regulars gathered at the table in the middle of the narrow bookstore, packed with new books, catalogs from all over the world, and catalogs of the house press. “Every morning the Cologne artists crept around the table in single file,” Siemens wrote in Tempo . “The ‘König roundabout’ is an unofficial requirement for anyone who wants to stay up to date in Cologne. The important thing is who walks in front of you and who walks behind you.”
Martin said, “Ten minutes in the circle and I knew whatever I needed to know in Cologne.” He came by every day, on his way to or from Hetzler, Capitain, Zwirner, or Nagel, or the Broadway, or the paint store. He sent his students and assistants there too, to browse and buy books. Circling around the table saved him lots of trips to museums: nowhere else could you get more current information about what was happening in art; the bookstore itself was like a museum, showing not only pictures but also the artists’ books.
Martin bought books at König by the bagful, spending thousands of marks there. Being a regular, he took books on credit, wrote up his own IOUs on the pad lying next to the cash register, and sometimes paid with drawings. He often sat down at the big table on the second floor as though he were at home. “At König’s it feels like at a bar, and if you have nothing better to do you can always say I have a good idea for a book, so what about printing it here?” Then Martin and König would sit down for an hour or two and work out everything that needed to be worked out for a new book.
Martin signing books with the Cologne book dealer Walther König
Chop-chop! That was their speed. Walther König was another wild man, possessed by art and stubborn as a mule; no wonder Martin liked him so much. He was everywhere and nowhere, often perched at his tiny little table in the gallery, where he could talk on the phone, write, observe the whole store, send employees scurrying, and advise customers on the other side of the room all at the same time. Martin maintained a kind of respectful dislike of König’s brother Kasper, the curator, but with Walther there was a relationship of mutual friendship and respect. They used the formal Sie with each other until the end.
BREAKTHROUGH
Cologne’s having been so badly destroyed during the war, and so hideously rebuilt afterward, was no disadvantage, in the view of the critic Wolfgang Max Faust. In fact, he felt that this was one of the crucial reasons why the city became such a center for art. The postwar architecture was so boring, Faust wrote in the journal Artscribe in 1986, that all of one’s attention was channeled onto the people there. For him, that was the main feature of the Cologne art scene: “It’s about people, about communication and relationships. It’s about debate, argument, competition.” A city of talking, playing games, and having arguments; a liberal, laissez-faire city, a little slovenly even, marked by cliques and Carnival and the Catholic church, whose magnum opus, the Cathedral, had been worked on for centuries and never finished—a city made for Martin. Heinrich Böll described this city of his heart as having a “Neapolitan flair.”
When Martin moved to Cologne, the city was feeling a new sense of optimism. Spex: The Magazine for Pop Culture (a kind of German version of early Rolling Stone ) had set up its offices there and was turning lots of music fans into enthusiasts of contemporary art. Paul Maenz was successfully promoting the new Mülheimer Freiheit artists as well as painters from Italy, including Chia, Clemente, Cucchi, and Paladino. Benedikt Taschen had just founded his publishing house, which revolutionized art-book publishing; his 1991 monograph on Martin contributed greatly to Martin’s growing popularity among the cognoscenti. The young publisher had so much success, and thus so much money, that he would later become one of Martin’s biggest collectors, along with the art dealer Thomas Borgmann and the doctor and Proust specialist Reiner Speck, also in Cologne.
Cologne was where Martin’s career really got started. “Cologne was the breakthrough for every artist,” Max Hetzler said. Martin turned thirty in February 1983, shortly after his move to Cologne, and marked the occasion with a catalog called Farewell to the Youth Bonus. Our father had always said that you have to make it by the time you’re thirty; Martin himself said, in his 1991 Artfan interview, that by the time you’re thirty your years of development are over: “You need to have figured yourself out enough so that you can make your mark at 30.” At thirty, Martin also put the name “Kippi” officially behind him. Or tried to, “but no one wanted to listen.”
THE HETZLER BOYS
“Martin was in the vanguard,” Max Hetzler said. “He led the way. Wherever he was, you couldn’t miss him.” Hetzler followed Martin to Cologne in 1983, with Bärbel Grässlin, and opened a new gallery in Dokoupil’s former studio, on Kamekestrasse. Gisela Capitain left Berlin and gave up her teaching job to join them, and then in 1986 she started her own adjunct gallery of Hetzler artists’ drawings. Tanja Grunert and Achim Schächtele moved from Stuttgart, Hans-Jürgen Müller moved back to the area for a short interlude (into Paul Maenz’s former space), and Monika Sprüth opened her own gallery.
Martin’s move from periphery to center was much more than a change of address. “It wasn’t all lovey-dovey like in Stuttgart,” Hetzler recalled. “For the first time, artists and galleries saw themselves as each other’s competitors. You had to assert yourself, define yourself, stand out.” Especially, in Hetzler’s case, against Monika Sprüth, who represented many women artists, and Paul Maenz, who had been running a gallery in Cologne since 1970. Martin couldn’t stand Maenz and what a friend of Martin’s called his “affected, eety-peteety gayness,” but he respected Michael Werner, who had moved to Cologne from Berlin in 1969 and whose gallery, where he showed Baselitz, Lüpertz, Immendorff, Polke, and Penck, was a model for Hetzler and his boys.
The Hetzler group consisted of Albert and Markus Oehlen, Günther Förg, Werner Büttner, Hubert Kiecol, Reinhard Mucha, Meuser, Georg Herold, and Martin. They did not represent a single school or have a style or even a medium in common: Meuser, Mucha, Herold, and Kiecol were primarily sculptors; Förg was a photographer in the early years; the others made paintings, drawings, and collages. What linked them was their attitude, their way of thinking, their themes, humor, language, age, and gender. They provoked and polarized and were as hard to handle as their art. Hetzler again: “They were artists who took extreme positions and brought a sharp intelligence to bear.” They admired and criticized each other, took each other’s places, and motivated and competed against each other. As Albert Oehlen said later, “We were a group without a name, without an agenda. We spurred each other on, and every one wanted to wow everyone else.”
Opening of Martin and Albert Oehlen’s show “Women in My Father’s Life,” in the Erhard Klein Gallery in Bonn, 1983. Max Hetzler, Werner Büttner, Albert Oehlen, and Martin singing the miner’s song “Glück auf, Glück auf”
© Galerie Klein
Most of them worked independently, but their joint appearances at openings, or in bars and restaurants, reinforced their cohesion—both within the group and in how they were seen from the outside. The Hetzler Boys almost always appeared as a group in the early eighties: t
alking, singing, provoking, and stripping. The main thing was to be loud. “With Hetzler,” Oehlen later said, “we made asses of ourselves and made everyone hate us. We climbed on the tables and pulled down our pants—extreme artist-behavior. It was also extremely exhausting.” They ruled Cologne and excluded, practically exiled, others; their judgments were merciless. And according to Andreas Schulze, one of Monika Sprüth’s artists and thus from the enemy camp, as it were, Martin “was the boss. He always had the biggest mouth, and the others followed him.”
As a group consisting solely of boys, they forced women aside, and their macho slogans and comments didn’t help their popularity. Hetzler supposedly said that women weren’t meant to be artists, maybe gallery assistants at best. The Hetzler Boys ordered women over forty to lay their sagging breasts on the table and grabbed the breasts or crotches of younger women. They tolerated very few women of any age at their table, and when one did join them, other women attacked her for it afterward.
In Cologne, as elsewhere, Martin did not limit himself to producing works of art; he worked on how the art was presented, the framework and the sideshows. “Martin was tremendously committed to the gallery’s artists,” Max Hetzler said. The Vienna gallerist Peter Pakesch thinks Martin did an enormous amount for the Hetzler Gallery’s success in his double role “as clown and strategist.... Max without Martin’s strategy would have been unimaginable in the early years.” In Jutta Koether’s view, Martin “was the one who brought the movement to life so that it became known outside Cologne.”
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