The profane and very intense fight unleashed by “Bilderstreit” (Picture fight) has focused not so much on the chosen artworks as on the market dynamics and power positions in the current art business, with even a majority of Cologne art dealers actually signing a joint declaration protesting what they called a “market-politics selection” of artists and works in the show. Furthermore, several artists objected more or less sharply—Anselm Kiefer and Donald Judd indeed very vehemently—to the inclusion of their pieces. And finally, with very few exceptions, almost every West German art critic has

Gustav Kluge claims that he is not interested in painting. This may sound like an exaggeration, particularly coming from an artist who has mastered the language of that discipline so profoundly. Yet Kluge’s goal is not located in painting per se. As both a painter and an enemy of painting, Kluge uncompromisingly inquires whether his chosen medium is necessary or useless. His angular, unsparing depictions of the crippled, the tormented, the hopeless monsters—outsiders excluded from the triumphant march of evolution—exist on the other side of the easily digestible world of advertising images.

With