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 height as him. He painted copies of postcards, newspaper clippings, and his own photographs and experiences. He painted his room, his ice cream parlor, his drinking buddies, the backside of the lion monument on the street where he lived, a cop-killer, his work table, the Palazzo Pitti porter, the cobbler’s shop window, baked Florentines, bangers and mash, “the fixed stare unconsciously looking up at the ceiling,” a retired Nazi, Tuscany, “two glowing cigarettes,” a “Sicilian criminal,” “3 fireflies on their way home,” tourists on the bus, and his birthday cake that Gil had sent him from Hamburg in the form of a photograph. Eighty-four black-and-white paintings in three months, usually one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with his inviolable midday nap in between. They were left out to dry in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the hall. As he later put it, he painted like a musician who plays a gig every day.
He was excited about his (as he himself put it) megalomania: “My brain mass swings back and forth a little—it hums + you can hear the pure tones,” he wrote to his friend Herbert Meese in Essen. “I mean things come together in my head and are already ready—not to be modest, amazing ideas.... Everything is really going to blow up!”
His project was to paint a stack of paintings as tall as he was, but he stopped a few inches short. He left the empty canvases and his towel behind in Florence. He called the series Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze (One of You, a German in Florence).
Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze : When no one wanted to buy the series of black and white paintings in a uniform size (20” x 24”) from Florence, Martin gave them to his friend Michel Würthle in exchange for lifetime free food and drink for himself and a guest at the Paris Bar in Berlin.
© Lepkowski
“To assert yourself,” our father had written to Martin just before his tenth birthday, “means being able to influence your own life, to do some of what you want to do, what matters to you. To assert yourself also means, though, not blabbing along after whatever other people say.” Behaving well may not count for much: “It’s much more important to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.” Florence was the turning point for Martin. He had lived abroad for the first time and would often do so again, though never again for such a long time alone. For the first time, he had really thrown himself into painting, and after nine months he returned to Hamburg as an artist, with work to exhibit too: Adventure pictures in 6x audiovisual show, drawings, souvenirs. For the group show he organized in October 1977 with Achim Duchow and Jochen Krüger— On the Occasion of a Journey to Italy: There and Back —his first ever catalog was published: al Vostro servizio. Print run: one hundred copies.
“I am a seeker,” Martin was already saying back then, and “variety and experience” were what he sought. It was time to move on, even if he would return to Hamburg often to see friends old and new (such as Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner, who moved from Berlin to Hamburg just when Martin was going in the other direction) and to show his work in exhibitions in the Artist House, at Fettstrasse 7a, in the World Bookstore, or in Ascan Crone’s gallery. Now, though, he wanted to take the money he had inherited after our mother’s death and invest it in his future in Berlin. “He gave himself two years,” Jochen Krüger said, “to make his career.”
The Hamburg Academy of Fine Art later claimed him as a graduate. But “as an independent artist your diploma is: to be an independent artist. Slips of paper don’t mean anything,” Martin had once written to our mother. “I dont have an employer like other people, or a union—someone to represent my interests. I’m on my own.” In Florence he experienced for the first time what it means to be an independent artist.
[ 1 ] The Native American hero in several of Karl May’s enormously popular Western novels.
[ 2 ] The Blue Rider ( Der Blaue Reiter ) was a Munich group of expressionist artists including Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, and Paul Klee, active 1911–1914.
[ 3 ] Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a former Nazi and an influential businessman in postwar West Germany, was kidnapped by the far-left Red Army Faction (RAF) and later killed, at the height of the RAF’s 1977 terror campaign, known as German Autumn.
[ 4 ] In German (like French), there are two forms of the word “you”: the informal du , used among close friends and family or when speaking to children, and the formal Sie , used in public situations or with less intimate friends and colleagues. Among younger Germans, it is common to use du relatively quickly; here, MK maintains an old-fashioned, courtly tone.
CHAPTER THREE
BERLIN
Being young, being where it’s at.
—MK
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