Ten years ago, German artist Martin Kippenberger died of liver cancer, aged only 44. Despite a steady stream of shows in galleries and museums during his lifetime and a legion of admirers, Kippenberger agonised over his art world status. For although his work sold relatively well during the mid-80s, his market never rivalled those of German contemporaries such as Gerhard Richter and Gunther Förg. Museums were an equally frustrating topic. “Martin never had that breakthrough show that he wanted so much—because his struggle was to be seen as a great painter, not just as a cult figure, and for a true artist recognition comes through institutions,” says Max Hetzler, the veteran German dealer, who showed Kippenberger’s work starting in 1981. “Martin could be very cynical, very direct, totally outspoken, unbelievably demanding. So the institutions were afraid of him, because you never knew how the evening would end.”
Posthumously, however, Kippenberger has become a curatorial favourite. Chosen to represent Germany in the 2003 Venice Biennale, he had a major show at Tate Modern last year, which travelled to the K21 Kunstsammlung in Düsseldorf. Curators Ann Goldstein of MOCA
in Los Angeles and Ann Temkin of MoMA are currently planning a retrospective slated to start in Los Angeles in autumn 2008, travel to Manhattan the following February and then to Le Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in summer 2009.
From maverick to curatorial darling
What happened here? One might say that Kippenberger had to die in order for his art to stop being overshadowed by the “Kippi” myth, a myth stoked by his Paris Bar partying in Berlin, his outsized personality and his endless series of art world provocations. He once bought a Richter painting, for example, and made it into the top of a coffee table. “That work was seen as sour grapes over Richter’s success,” recalls Roland Augustine, who represented Kippenberger in 1990 via a gallery in Santa Monica, California, that he opened with Hetzler and Lawrence Luhring. “But Martin’s desire was to debunk the art world’s reverence for painting. Martin had an extraordinary intellect, conceptual rigour, and technical execution, but he was totally misunderstood.” Cologne gallerist Gisela Capitain, whose gallery oversees the artist’s estate, says, “Martin was not an angel—he had a complex psychological structure—but as an artist he was very precise, very professional in his decisions, totally focused. Yet because of his reputation people became scared to work with him.”
It has also taken time for curators and collectors to digest his torrid career. “During his lifetime, he had huge problems to be understood as an artist, because he produced so much art and changed his approach so often,” explains Capitain. “Now that he is dead, people have time to catch up with him—and he can’t surprise them anymore by going in some other direction.” This summer (1 June-4 August), her gallery marks the tenth anniversary of his death by reconstructing in Cologne one room of his last show, at Geneva’s Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain.
Gagosian enters the field
While Kippenberger’s star has risen steadily since his death, his market has evolved in several distinct stages. His work was only considered auction-worthy toward the very end of his life, and even then, it rarely sold for more than $10,000. After he died, auctioneers frequently misjudged the market; a disproportionately high number of works were bought in. That fallow period was followed by a slow buildup—a few pieces did well and his auction record slowly climbed in fits and starts to $20,000.
Then in 1999, seemingly out of the blue, an untitled self-portrait from 1988 sold at Christie’s to Geneva private dealer Marc Blondeau for $717,500, beating the high estimate ten times over. Yet while Kippenberger pieces sold better and more consistently afterwards, his auction results only broke $200,000 five times before 2004, when Gagosian Gallery—working closely with Capitain —mounted an exhibition featuring one massive Kippenberger work at its London gallery. Then in early 2005, another Kippenberger show opened at Gagosian’s Chelsea outpost, running simultaneously to two other exhibitions, one staged by collector Tim Nye and the other at Luhring Augustine.
For a time, Kippenberger mania reigned. Many pieces came to auction, and even more traded hands privately. Prices rocketed. Another 29 pieces broke the $200,000 mark at auction; his record now stands at $1,024,000, set in spring 2005 at Phillips de Pury for an untitled 1991 painting. Kippenberger had finally shattered the art-market barrier that hovers along the Atlantic Coast. “He was always a hero in Germany, but the German collectors never pay huge prices unless they are forced,” notes Phillips de Pury partner Michaela Neumeister, who had been promoting Kippenberger to collectors since 2000. “$100,000 is still a lot of money in Germany, so it was the Americans who pushed the prices up, and the peak of that gold-rush phase was when Gagosian got involved.” Charles Saatchi also joined the fray—his 2005 “Triumph of Painting I” show featured 11 Kippenbergers—and Saatchi’s interest had the usual knock-on effects among myriad me-too collectors.
Less well-known than Saatchi, but more integral to this particular phenomenon was Manhattan dealer and collector Michael Black. Tracking down Kippenbergers all over the globe and promoting the artist with new collectors like hedge-fund maven Daniel Loeb—who is rumoured to have amassed dozens of Kippenberger pieces—Black amped up the artist’s market. Neumeister recalls getting an excited telephone call from Black one weekend morning; he was in Innsbruck, Austria, trying to locate pieces Kippenberger had executed with local woodcarvers there while detoxing in the Alpine air. “I was attracted by the rawness and the integrity of the work,” Black explains. “And so often I would go into studios and see Kippenberger books all over the shelves.” That’s no surprise: While alive, Kippenberger had a huge network of artist friends such as Rosemarie Trockel, Albert Oehlen and Christopher Wool; since dying, he has become a tragic hero among younger artists. In this sense, Kippenberger fits the classic profile for a mid-career market surge: the “artist’s artists” only “discovered” once collectors realise it makes no sense to own work by young phenoms but not by the artists who inspired them.
Misjudging the market
Eventually, however, the frenzy waned. Black says he’s less active in Kippenberger, explaining that too few good works are available, and lesser ones abound. Indeed, Kippenberger was a prolific artist who believed all his art should be disseminated—to make transparent his process of artistic production—so mediocre work was scattered worldwide and the hot market flushed it out. Capitain says many “so called ‘friends’” consigned sub-par Kippenberger works for sale, and blames the auction houses for handling the sudden influx badly. “A lot of these were not Class A pieces, and the auction-house experts selected poorly,” she says. “And they never listen when you tell them the estimates are too high.
The mediocre works did not do so well, especially the ephemera.” Many pieces went unsold or underperformed against their estimate, and Kippenberger’s market cooled considerably.
Over-saturation hardly helped, as the collectors who had suddenly “loved” Kippenberger moved to the next artist on their checklist. “Once everyone who buys that way has one or two pieces, things cool down,” Neumeister notes. “It becomes a more rational market.” London private dealer Nicolai Frahm adds that the difficulty of Kippenberger's work made a slowdown even more inevitable. “I see a similarity to what happened with Mike Kelley’s market,” he observes. “They’re both really important artists, but the markets stalled because so many of the pieces are not art you can live with or easily understand. Also, when Kippenberger got hot, people had no idea what they were buying. They were raving about acquiring mediocre pieces.”
Accentuating this quality issue, Kippenberger’s greatest works were concentrated in three German collections—those of publisher Benedikt Taschen, academic and photographer Wilhelm Schürmann, and the legendary Grässlin art-collecting dynasty. And these people were hardly flipping his best works for quick money. “You seldom see his masterpieces at auction, because those are slipped into the market quietly,” says Ben Frija, owner of Copenhagen’s Galleri K, who first collected Kippenberger in the early 90s. “People always think ‘auction, auction, auction’—but I suspect there are major Kippenbergers being discreetly sold now at huge prices.” Roland Augustine confirms that suspicion: In the last 18 months, he says, Luhring Augustine has sold two Kippenbergers for more than $1m each. Recently Augustine, Luhring and dealer Per Skarstedt launched 1018 Gallery in Manhattan, which opened with a show of Kippenberger’s “Preis” paintings (a series that plays off the fact that the word for “price” and “prize” are the same in German, until 17 July). “We’re taking a serious position in Martin’s market, which means our focus is on placing the work, just as we would with a living artist,” Augustine explains. “I really believe that in the next few years, one of his self-portraits will sell for $5m. The main problem is that the people who own the great ones are not disposed to sell them.”
Others who follow Kippenberger’s legacy closely agree that there’s still much room for positive developments, catalysed by the coming retrospective that curators Goldstein and Temkin are assembling. “Ann Goldstein knew him, and she liked him,” recalls Hetzler, noting that Goldstein started following the artist more than 15 years ago when he lived in Venice, California. “Trying to do a Kippenberger show without Martin’s involvement is very difficult, of course, but I think she can catch his spirit.”