Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Recent years have seen artists cast as global shamans. Their opinions have been sought about anything from politics to fashion, because artists were assumed to know a great deal about everything, making their opinions the best ones to have—so good that they might even shape the opinions of others who held lesser opinions. This perception doesn’t align with my experience, where the best artists tend to be absolute freaks with a cherished set of narrow interests. I might love their work, but I’m not certain I would ever take their advice.
One superfreak was the genius Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), whose obsession with the painting Time (Old Women) (1810-12) by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) is currently the subject of the exhibition “Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed” at the Prado. Curated by Gloria Moure, the show brings together more than forty works by Polke, including paintings, photographs and drawings.
Also in the show is the Goya. This comes from the collection of the Musée de Lille, making it one of the few masterpieces by the artist that the Prado, which has 1,200 works by Polke, doesn’t own. Time presages the mysterious Black Paintings that Goya began to make in 1820. Like them, it is rich with conspiracy. In it, a decrepit aristocrat is shown her visage by an elderly servant, while behind her, Chronos prepares to strike her down with a broom. On the back of the mirror is written “Qué tal?” or “How’s it goin’?”
Polke’s first encounter with the work came in 1982 and the show argues its “echoes could be found throughout the whole corpus of Polke’s work, influencing motifs, techniques and compositional criteria,” per the press release. The first room after the painting itself shows Polke’s analysis of the X-rays that reveal many strange alternate permutations of the work, which initially depicted Jesus and a coterie of angels descending to murder the old woman. Laid out under a vitrine in rough photocopies, Polke seems to propose that each hypothetical section of the work, under its layers, might be its own painting.
SEE ALSO: Observer’s Guide to the Must-See Gallery Shows Now On in New York
Polke was a sort of anti-Andy Warhol, looking to inject density back into the world of painting in a world of overwhelming influence and technology, and the exhibition makes a strong case for Time‘s guidance in that mission. His Black Man (1982) towers over its room, made with transparencies, the dread he inspires clearly inspired by Chronos. A more direct influence might be This is how you sit correctly (after Goya and Max Ernst) (1982), which borrows from Plate 26 of Goya’s Los Caprichos, in which a woman wears a chair on her head, a play on words related to the Spanish version of the phrase “taking one’s seat.” Polke arranges them so their flowing clothes and tall headdresses resemble those of the Old Women.
There was no aspect of this painting that did not inspire him. There’s even a room of works Polke made that were inspired by Goya’s curlicue signature. Were these commentaries on the difficulties of being a great artist? It’s hard to say. What’s wonderful about Polke’s obsession is how it only deepens the mysteries of the original painting, spreading them like a virus.
“Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed” is on view at the Museo Nacional del Prado through March 16.
