At the end of that night, he told her that they should try to live together. “You’re someone, I’m someone, it would have to work.” He wanted to go home with her then and there; only after she gave him a kiss on the cheek did he let her go home with her son. He called her the next day, and they spent an hour in Hotel Raffel. They went to dinner the day after that, and the day after that he wanted to meet her sons, but she had to fly to Paris for a fashion show. He went with her.
Elfie worked, and they went to La Coupole together, and Davé’s restaurant, where Martin got jealous because Helmut Lang, the fashion designer and Elfie’s best friend, was getting all the attention. Martin quickly pulled one of his old turtle jokes out of his sleeve: he wanted to be the center of attention himself.
He had already told her, “We have to get married.” She thought they were old enough to just live together. Martin disagreed: “I’ve never been married.” He was a romantic, a fan of Hollywood happy endings. He wanted a honeymoon in Venice.
Elfie had an apartment in Vienna and an old renovated farmhouse in the Burgenland that had gradually become a perfect hideaway, lovely and comfortable but not too neat and tidy. He had found what he needed among the cornfields, trees, flowers, and meadows: a nest that he didn’t have to build himself, and a family that he wasn’t responsible for.
He immediately took pictures off the wall of Elfie’s apartment in Vienna, including ones by Kurt Kocherscheidt, and hung works from his own collection, such as paintings by Büttner and Albert Oehlen. He acted more intrusively than diplomatically with Elfie’s sons too, at first.
“He didn’t beat around the bush, he asked for what he needed,” Elfie said. First and foremost, Kurt Kocherscheidt’s studio, with a view of the fields and floorboard heating that he especially liked (he may have already been suffering chills from his illness). Elfie emptied out the studio, and soon he was hauling in two truckloads from Sankt Georgen: a Franz West day bed, a huge pile of photos of Helena, two art cabinets, a leather sofa, a framed photograph of our father from the sixties, our father’s books and china cabinet with his collection of schnapps bottles and the Siegerland almanac with contributions from him, as well as Martin’s half-finished and primed paintings, models, empty frames, full slide carousels, and more. His household furnishings were smaller in scope: a Braun coffee maker, a bread knife, pasta tongs, and not much else.
Before he married into his new family, he rounded up his old family one more time. He had us spend Christmas 1995 together in Berlin—Martin, we sisters, our families, and Gabi and Helena. It was his farewell to bachelor life. We spent Christmas Eve at my apartment, with a Christmas tree and presents, then Christmas Day at our sister Tina’s, with turkey, of course, and the next day at the Paris Bar, for mau-mau and other fun.
Wedding, 1996, Vienna and Jennersdorf
© Esther Oehlen
The wedding was in February. The civil ceremony took place in Jennersdorf—a very small affair, with Helmut Lang and Jörg Schlick as witnesses. Then came the party, the way Martin had always planned it, according to Kazu Huggler: “big and endless and draining,” in three acts with a slightly shifting and ever more intimate cast of characters. It was thoroughly organized, but not nearly as wild as Martin’s fortieth birthday—he was much calmer than usual, sometimes almost melancholy.
The first act took place at Café Engländer, Martin’s regular hangout in Vienna. There was a crushing crowd that night, with friends and ex-girlfriends. There was a Vienna buffet: “totally easy, no stress” to prepare, according to the host, Attila Corbaci, “his calm had rubbed off on me.” The bride and groom, dressed in Helmut Lang, were glowing, and at one point everyone had to go out in the freezing cold night for a group photograph on the church steps. “There were no scandals,” Corbaci said. “Except the usual discussions about art.”
The next morning, some of the guests reassembled at Café Engländer with suitcases—“it looked like a group of immigrants to America”—and boarded a chartered bus for the Burgenland. For entertainment during the ride, an old German movie from the fifties was shown: The House in Montevideo, a comedy about humor, morality (and double standards), human kindness, a big family, and a house full of children.
For lunch, there were pancakes and wedding soup at Martin’s favorite inn in the region, the White Cross, where the owners had prepared a reception for the couple, including a trumpet solo and a canvas that Martin had to sit down and paint at. The party went on that night in Jennersdorf, in Elfie’s house and Martin’s studio: Rüdiger Carl played music for dancing. On the third and last night, an even smaller circle met for dinner at Club on the Border with a Hungarian band playing. Finally, at five in the morning, the photographer Albrecht Fuchs found Martin sitting alone in the snow at a campfire: he hadn’t sat there especially for the camera, but “he also knew it looked good.”
Catherine Würthle, Martin, and Michel Würthle
© Esther Oehlen
By the time of his wedding, Martin had realized that his status in Austria had changed. He was no longer a German hooligan, he was the husband of a well-known woman—a “high-class fashion photographer,” as one tabloid journalist put it—who was also the widow of an esteemed Austrian artist. In a short newspaper article on the wedding, Elfie was named first, before Martin and the “320 international art-world friends,” including John Baldessari, Coop Himmelblau, Gerhard Rühm, and Catherine David.
The wedding also provided Martin with a treasure trove of material that he turned to in his work again and again over the coming months. The photos that Gisela Capitain took on the morning of the second day, in front of Café Engländer, became the invitations to the Nada Arugula show; the last issue of the Lord Jim Lodge magazine Sun Breasts Hammer, “The Ex-Bachelor Issue,” showed photographs from all three days of beaming, talking, dancing, eating, smoking, hugging, and drinking guests and the bride and groom. Martin showed the chairs from the club’s courtyard, complete with campfire, at Villa Merkel in Esslingen. The photos Elfie took of him on their honeymoon in Venice ended up in his Academy of Arts catalog together with the drawings he had made from them. He turned one of those photos, of him in front of the German Pavilion of the Biennale, into a poster.
Martin had always avoided Venice on his many trips to Italy. He had once told Jan Hoet in Kassel: “Honeymoon or German Pavilion, otherwise I won’t go.” He asked for good red wine and a couple of nights at Hotel Cipriani for a wedding present. Elfie said that the trip was very relaxed, with a lot of strolling around, pasta twice a day, bellinis at Harry’s Bar, sitting in cafés, and going out dancing, taking pictures the whole time.
In Venice, Martin did what he always did: took a cliché and simply piled another one on top of it. He sat like a gigolo in the gondolas; he went to Piazza San Marco, “where every stone has already been photographed to oblivion,” and had his picture taken there with bird food crumbled on his head and in his pockets so that the pigeons were swarming all over him. “Then, after doing the dullest things, I went and made drawings that suddenly resulted in something of my own.”
St. Mark’s Square, Venice
© Elfie Semotan
On the Raffel tablecloth, he would draw himself and his wife as a pair of artists: he with a pen in his hand, she with her camera in front of her. He liked having Elfie take his picture. For a magazine she once posed him in a big floral Issey Miyake evening gown (he later painted a picture with that motif). Another time, she asked him if she could pose the young models in front of his canvases—“sure,” he said, but in the end he wanted to be in one of the pictures, too, so after the official photos were done he slipped out of his pants and shoes and stood between the boy and the boyish girl, in his white socks and totally unfashionable briefs. (That motif turned into a poster for his show at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen, but the posters were pulped before the opening because they might suggest child abuse. The invitations were withdrawn, too, for the same reason: they showed him with Helena, in a photograph taken
by Elfie.)
He liked having his picture taken, Elfie said, but he wanted to be shown “the way he wanted to be shown.” At first, his “exaggerated way of posing” annoyed her. But just as he got her to cook things that she normally never would have cooked (fish sticks), he got her to take pictures in ways she never would have done otherwise.
In the countless pictures of himself he had people take or make over the years—which played no small part in his fame—he always looks different and yet always like himself. “Martin knew right away what was important in any situation,” Johannes Wohnseifer said. “He was an unbelievably visual person who thought in pictures.” Martin was shocked only when he saw a picture that Elfie had taken of him when he wasn’t striking a pose: an extreme close-up of his face, showing two deep wrinkles in his forehead. Did she really think he looked good like that? he asked. Yes, she insisted.
Martin spent most of his time in Jennersdorf, not in Vienna, where his wife had her career and August was going to school. Elfie continued to live her life and traveled around the world to photo shoots and fashion shows, while Martin spent most of his time in seclusion, working in the country. Every now and then, they would meet up at one place or the other, travel together, and work together.
His new place couldn’t have been farther from home: in the southwestern-most tip of Austria, at the three-way border with Hungary and Slovenia. And it also couldn’t have been closer to home: he had ended up in St. Martin, as the village and its chapel were called. He often passed the chapel, which was easy to see from a distance, alone on its hill. Saint Martin himself had been born not far from there, in Hungary.
Martin’s move to the Burgenland was a liberation. He was glad to have escaped the German art scene, and also Sankt Georgen. Once again—for the last time—he could build a little world of his own, occupy a place, stir it up, take it over, make friends and enemies, play tricks, and make fun of people, including Helmut Lang, whom he wanted to compete with as a fashion designer named Hans Kurz ( kurz means “short” in German; lang means “long”).
Martin and Elfie Semotan
© Esther Oehlen
He had found a nest where he could really lay his eggs; his last year would turn out to be one of his most fruitful and successful. He had also finished his masterpiece, the Kafka installation. Zdenek Felix, the curator of Truth Is Work , who devoted a big solo show in Deichtorehallen Hamburg to Martin after Martin’s death, believed “he could have still discovered a lot of things . . . But he’d said what was most important. He’d done what he’d wanted to do.”
Martin worked on countless projects in this period. He had finally been invited to documenta, for which he was preparing a subway station that was to be set up in the middle of the Fulda River until German security regulations had thwarted that plan. Kasper König had invited him to the major sculpture exhibition in Münster, running parallel to documenta, and Martin wanted to show a subway vent there. He found a place to set it up across from a bust of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, the classic German poet whose Rüschhaus we had seen on weekend trips as children. He was also preparing a subway entrance for the Leipzig Fair and a transportable crumpled subway entrance for Metro Pictures in New York.
Uli Strothjohann was building the Spiderman Studio for Martin, which he would exhibit for the first time in Nice; Martin showed Forgotten Problems of Furnishing Villa Hügel at Esslingen’s Villa Merkel; he had shows with Eleni Koroneou in Athens ( Made in Syros ), Gisela Capitain in Cologne, Mikael Andersen in Copenhagen, and Bleich-Rossi in Graz; he put out a CD of his Greatest Hits ; he worked on lithographs in Copenhagen; and he received the first prizes of his career, the Konrad von Soest Prize in Münster, the Arthur Köpcke Prize in Copenhagen, and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize in Berlin.
A regular explosion of work came out of his studio. Valeria Heisenberg recalled that “when he was in Frankfurt, he desperately wanted to step back from the whole machinery he had been resorting to. Everyone wanted more of his drunken lampposts, but he wanted to paint portraits, like a classical painter.” In her experience, Heisenberg went on, “A lot of artists talk that way but don’t dare do it, because of the pressures of the art market. Martin could do it, because of all the variety and fissures in his work.” At the end of his life, he fulfilled that dream of his, too.
When he described to Jutta Koether the funeral he imagined for himself, he said he hoped that his coffin would be floating in a sea of tears. “And everyone will love me for what I did at the end. Everything else was nice, sure, but people forget that too, they’re busy thinking about themselves.... The last thing has to be a real bombshell.” And so it was. Jacqueline: The Pictures Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore and the Medusa self-portraits were his most intense and moving series.
Shortly before his own death, Martin painted portraits of Picasso’s sad widow from photographs taken after Picasso’s death. “Picasso has died, so she’s sad,” Martin told the curator Daniel Baumann. “And so I took over his job. The last photographs there are of Jacqueline Picasso are black and white and blurry; I tried to transpose them into color and turn them into Picassos. To complete the work, so to speak.” David Douglas Duncan had taken the photographs of Picasso’s widow two years after Picasso’s death, when she was still numb with grief but was being brought back into the world of the living by a couple she was friends with. In Martin’s paintings, Jacqueline bears a certain similarity to Martin himself, perhaps also to our mother, and to Elfie. When the paintings were finished, he wanted to show them immediately in Samia Saouma’s Paris gallery, across from the Picasso Museum, during Fashion Week, which Elfie always spent in Paris.
THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA
The Kafka installation was also shown in 1996 for the first time since its premiere in Rotterdam two years earlier. Annesofie Becker and Willie Flindt, the curators who included it in the Copenhagen exhibition Memento Metropolis , ended up giving Martin the greatest gift that any curator ever gave him: they hung a reproduction of Théodore Géricault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa at the entrance to the exhibition because they saw an astonishing similarity between the two works, despite their obvious differences. “Both cases deal with a catastrophic situation, and in both cases it is unclear whether salvation is the actual disaster.”
The painting is based on a real event. In 1816, the French frigate Medusa ran aground off the coast of Senegal. The officers boarded the life rafts and left the soldiers to fend for themselves; for thirteen days, a hundred and fifty soldiers crowded onto or hung off the edge of a small, hastily built raft, some of them up to their hips in water. Only fifteen people survived the murder, mutiny, and cannibalism on the raft. The case led to a storm of political outrage; two of the survivors wrote an article, which inspired Géricault’s painting. More than twenty-three by sixteen feet in size, it is now in the Louvre and considered the first great political painting after the French Revolution. The painting is very true-to-life: Géricault, who himself would die at only thirty-three, made studies of dying patients, corpses, and body parts in hospitals and morgues, brought the head of a dead thief into his studio, and used some of his friends as models.
Martin was electrified and immediately latched onto the connection. He had information about the painting and the historical case sent to him and had Elfie take his picture in the poses of the various people on the raft in Géricault’s painting. During the photo session—where Martin was afraid of only one thing, which was that the pictures might come out too perfect—there was a moment, Elfie said,
that I will never forget. It was unbelievable. I felt like I was seeing something, another place, in Martin, he was completely in another world, and I saw a drama, a life drama. Martin could play a part very well, but this was different, this was what he wanted to express. He had totally opened up and let everything out, everything that had hurt him in his life, and in the thought that it could all be over. That’s what he got to through the Medusa project. Everything came out of him—it was everyth
ing he was.
In his Jennersdorf studio, he painted and drew himself in those same poses: caught between hope and despair—dying, already dead, and longing to be saved and reach home. He painted himself as he was and as he saw himself, not like the men in Géricault’s painting, who were much more muscular. His body comes across as rather shapeless, his hands are swollen, almost gouty. One painting shows him shirtless in bed, in the Thinker pose with his chin resting on his hand; another shows him lying on his back, eyes closed, dead. In one painting he looks like a drowning man, in another he is waving a handkerchief, in one he is lying on a gynecological chair covered with a sheet.
Martin and Gisela Capitain in the Jennersdorf studio
© Jörg Schlick
Margarete Heck was there when the pictures were being made. She was a curator at the time at the Wolfsburg Museum and was spending three weeks on vacation in Jennersdorf with her sister. Elfie was working in New York at the time, but Martin didn’t want to go to America again: “He was through with that after Los Angeles.” So Margarete and her sister saw Martin every day. “He forced us to come see him in the studio every afternoon,” and he showed them what he’d painted; he wanted to hear what they thought. Margarete Heck—not an art historian, but a sociologist whose dissertation was on the art trade—said that the Medusa pictures
really jumped out at me—they were so intense, so personal, they had something so physical about them, real bodily experience. During those three weeks I had the feeling that there was always something new there, it was like a rushing river, the next picture went farther than the last, as though he had looked inside himself and pulled everything out, piece by piece—and then another painting! And then another drawing! It was like he had totally free access to his inner nature, like everything had opened up. Even though the theme was so difficult and heavy, his way of working was so free, totally without a struggle.
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