If you have some bandwidth, check this out, especially if you are procrastinating putting together the print edition of your art journal.
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This is why politics and art do not mix…
From the London Telegraph Newspaper:
A leading German artist, befriended by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and commissioned to paint his official portrait, is at the centre of a scandal after being caught hosting a cocaine party with nine prostitutes. Joerg Immendorf, a controversial expressionist painter, was arrested last week after a police raid on his suite at Dusseldorf’s five-star Steigenberger hotel. They discovered the 58-year-old artist naked with the prostitutes, and 11 grams of cocaine in a Versace ashtray on the bedside table.
“The drug was ready for consumption. It was drawn up in ‘lines’ on a tray,” said Johannes Mocken, the Dusseldorf state prosecutor, who is preparing to bring charges against Immendorf. The police, who were apparently tipped off by a rival prostitute who had not been invited to the party, found a further 10.6 grams of the drug in Immendorf’s atelier nearby.
Mr Mocken said that Immendorf had confessed to holding similar parties at the hotel for more than two and a half years. “The pattern was the same,” he said. “Immendorf was always the only man present. He was always accompanied by several prostitutes and there was always cocaine, although the women deny he gave the drug to them.”
Lurid newspaper reports of the arrest have scandalised Germany, and put a question mark over Mr Schroder’s surprising decision to engage Immendorf to paint the portrait which will hang alongside those of other post-war chancellors in the Berlin Chancellery. Immendorf refused to comment on the police raid, but friends say he is “very frightened” of being victimised by the media.
The artist, a professor at Dusseldorf’s Academy of Arts, rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the Jungen Wilden (young wild ones) group of artists. A former Left-wing Maoist activist who also owned a well-known bar in Hamburg’s red-light district, he is best known for his painting Cafe Deutschland, which takes Germany’s post-war division as its main subject. He attracted widespread media coverage two years ago when he married one of his students, Oda Jaune, who is 30 years his junior.
Immendorf’s rebel image attracted the attention of Chancellor Schröder, who has made a habit of entertaining Left-wing artists, writers and intellectuals with supposedly “progressive” views since he was first elected five years ago. Earlier this year Mr Schröder and Immendorf appeared together in St Petersburg for the official opening of the city’s reconstructed 18th century “Amber Room” which was stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War.
The chancellor joined the artist to present the city with an avante-garde sculpture by Immendorf, which takes the form of a massively outsized human nose - a fact which reports of the artist’s alleged cocaine-sniffing habit have not failed to mention. Immendorf now faces the prospect of a minimum one-year jail term for possessing cocaine with an estimated value of more than £2,000. He also stands to lose his professorship.
His associations with Mr Schröder have provoked embarrassing questions about the sort of company the chancellor is fond of keeping. Mr Schröder’s office refused to comment on the raid on Immendorf’s party and home, and said no decision had been taken about whether the artist would retain the portrait commission.
I want to see a picture of the scorned hooker. But in lieu of that, here is a pic of one of Immendorf’s shitty-poo paintings
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