Blinky Palermo: A look at art in geometry

Blinky Palermo was a German painter, environment and object artist .

A fairly famous artist in the art world, who today ranks 338th on the international art world rankings. 338th in the world is quite something, but especially strange considering that Blinky Palermo was still around 1000th place in 2005… actually, the artist, born in 1943, had his best years in the legendary 1960s and left us surprisingly shortly afterwards, in 1977, at the young age of only 33 (for unexplained reasons, in the Maldives).

If he hadn't left us so early, the following scenario would probably have occurred: The richest German citizens would not only have Sigmar Polke's and Gerhard Richter's (Polkes, Richters?) paintings hanging on their walls, but also Blinky Palermo's (Palermos?).

The lower class would announce their intention at the golf club to buy a Blinky Palermo soon… Since Blinky Palermo has been gone for almost four decades, the fashionable citizen is spared the rather embarrassingly verbal state symbol; for the art-loving citizen, many squares and many riddles remain:

The mystery surrounding Blinky Palermo

These few introductory sentences already raise questions – which make the artist Blinky Palermo seem even more enigmatic, although one thing about Blinky Palermo already seems enigmatic from the outset:

Why on earth would someone give themselves the stage name Blinky Palermo?

The stage name “Blinky Palermo” has exactly the Mafia connection it sounds like: The young man and artist Peter Heisterkamp bore a striking resemblance to an Italian Blinky Palermo, Frank “Blinky” Palermo, boxing promoter and well-known Mafioso.

This Peter Heisterkamp also walked around in a black leather jacket, sunglasses and (Beuys') Borsalino as his standard outfit – not terribly creative for an artist, but irresistible: For his friends around Gerhard Richter, Imi Knoebel, Anatol Herzfeld, Sigmar Polke, Peter Heisterkamp was simply known as Blinky Palermo.

This happened at the art academy, where Peter Heisterkamp was just Joseph Beuys . Like all artists who became famous during their lifetime, Beuys had an exceptionally good sense for art marketing , artist marketing , the "artist as a brand".

This topic also includes the artist's effect on people, including the "name acceptable to people", and that name is neither Peter Heisterkamp nor Andrej Warhola, completely free of any tendencies towards exclusion or marginalization.

If there have to be five syllables, then please make them memorable five syllables, whereby the actual artist name was “Palermo”, the nickname Blinky was initially only circulated among friends.

Riddle No. 2 is the sudden death of Palermo on February 17, 1977. The artist died on the Maldivian island of Kurumba during a holiday with his girlfriend, Babette Polter. The cause of Palermo's death was never clarified; you can choose between a car accident, heart failure, and "other mysterious circumstances."

Riddle 3: Why on earth would someone with the artist name Blinky Palermo climb around 700 places in the international art world rankings in the course of a decade, almost 30 years after his death?

Quite astonishing: barely listed in 2005, yet by 2015 it had climbed almost 700 places to the front page. This likely has to do with the booming real asset market, which paralleled the stock market's decline. The extent to which the "art market as a playground for speculators" and the "flight into tangible assets like art" each contributed to this can only be guessed at.

Palermo's squares, however, possess a characteristic that makes them ideal for both speculative art and status symbol art for the average citizen (who lives a typical household): they are suitable for living rooms and easy to transport. More about the drivers of Palermo's upward trend could only be gleaned from a comparison of all auction results , which, however, are not fully recorded (partly for tax reasons) – research complete; inexplicable posthumous popularity and price developments remain a mystery of the art market.

Perhaps Blinky Palermo's rise after four decades of incorporeality also has something to do with the fact that he was a master student of Joseph Beuys, and Beuys is currently very "in" again.

Perhaps this is a case in point, that the trash of the day before yesterday (please don't refer to Palermo's beautiful squares, as worse things regularly resurface there) becomes highly interesting again at the latest two generations later.

Perhaps someone somewhere has found a great many Palermo squares, much like the lucky philosopher who has just inherited an entire house – nay, an entire cosmos – full of wonderful origami art from his beloved uncle.

In any case, the late fame of the square artist offers much hope. Depending on one's personal degree of optimism/pessimism, or affinity/aversion to Blinky Palermo squares or squares in general (in art, in paintings), the prospect that buying works by unknown artists might pay off sometime in the future is either encouraging – or, from a more cynical perspective, it tempts one to assume/prospect that crazy investors from foreign cultures will one day shell out a million for the "deer above the sofa" .

Palermo would have liked concept number 2, including its realization, for his own paintings anyway, but with his characteristic cynicism, certainly also for the deer. As a free-spirited aesthete with intellectual aspirations, he had little patience for that part of the art world dictated “laws of the market.”

The laws of the market are only for the greedy, not for people with standards: What makes it onto the market is what sells best; what sells best is what appeals to the most people; the more generic, characterless, and boring a product is, the better the chances that it will appeal to many – until a deer displaces squares and more.

What is special about Blinky Palermo's art

As you have probably gathered from the previous hints, Blinky Palermo painted squares:

• Orange squares
• Real vanilla ice cream squares
• Black box squares
• German colors squares
• Turquoise-reddish-brown-yellow-orange-pink-blue-gold-green squares
• Few squares
• Squares for red-green colorblind people
• Small box-on-the-wall squares
• Beautiful old kitchen floor squares
• Striped squares
• Yellow-orange-blue-orange-orange-blue-yellow-blue squares

Here you can see the replica of Blinky Palermo's installation Punts Cardinals (Cardinal Directions) in Barcelona, ​​in a warehouse at Carrer Torres Amat 5, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition about the artist at Macba.

And then comes a triangle, a blue triangle , and becomes the quintessence of all squares… The wonderful rest of Blinky Palermo's complete works (who, of course, did a great deal more than square-and-triangle art) are left for you to discover: There are wall objects , wooden shapes wrapped with canvas or adhesive tape, fabric pictures made of colorful nettle strips, murals and metal pictures, and entire series of many small pictures.

With ample room for analysis, many art experts are still exploring the not fully realized talent and potential of this "mythical figure of post-war art ," the "James Dean of the art scene ." Others do not draw such far-reaching conclusions from Palermo's early death and counter the art market's mystification machine by arguing that it is merely an attempt to glorify an "interior designer with lofty ideas .

For the next few days, “Palermo’s paintings, overlaid with many theoretical analyses, seem far too fragile for so much strenuous theory”; it is best to judge for yourself.

We'll discuss the specific "Blue Triangle" later; now it's time to take a look at geometry in art:

Geometry as a motif in art: A surprisingly late appearance

A gallery of squares culminating in a blue triangle… the artist’s creativity doesn’t seem to be exactly boundless, at least when it comes to finding motifs.

Those just beginning to engage with art often struggle to even accept geometric motifs as art. Of course, geometric forms can be part of a painting—Cubism has given us plenty of examples of that—but simple squares are no longer a depiction of life as a painting should be, but rather nothing more than a mathematical sketch.

Art connoisseurs simply smile at this; of course, geometry be art, just as cake and light and layers of glued paper can be art. And yet, geometry is a surprisingly late emergence in art, and the free choice of motifs in art history is anything but a given.

The first artists sketched existential hunting experiences on cave walls around 40,000 years ago. Theoretically, they had free choice of subject matter, but practically and factually, this was not the case, because there were typical motifs that most artists were unable to depict due to being consumed.

Around 37,000 years later, the first early civilizations emerged, and with them, the free choice of motifs in art came to an end, definitively and for a long time. Art became part of the complex ritual acts with which early societies sought to ward off the dangers of life.

Only strictly regulated artistic practice was considered suitable, for example, to prevent the sky from falling on the heads of our early ancestors, to ensure the ship returned safely to port, and to bring the child safely from the mother's womb.

This remained the case in the Middle Ages because the world had not yet become much safer, more controllable, or more transparent. However, the world had grown considerably larger, the hunter-gatherers had settled down, and they had immediately begun to fight over the best habitats.

This made belonging to a particular group a survival-ensuring characteristic, leading to the development of societies with strict hierarchies – in which not only were the motifs prescribed, but also it was strictly regulated who was allowed to paint these motifs.

Ideas such as free choice of profession only emerged with the Enlightenment; only with the accompanying development of a “modern art” or “art of modernity” is the artist free to draw from the entire world of motifs that populate his mind.

One of the first to paint geometric shapes – and thus present one of the earliest examples of abstract art not limited to objects – was the Russian avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935).

His “Blue Triangle” from the 1915 work “Suprematism (Black Rectangle, Blue Triangle)” is said to prove to be very viable…

Malevich (Kazimir Severinovich Malevich) also painted squares, or rather, he painted THE square, “The Black Square” on a white background, also from 1915, now considered a milestone of modern painting and revered as an “icon of modernism” .

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was fascinated by squares in several ways: The synesthete Kandinsky saw certain shapes in specific colors—circle = blue, triangle = yellow, square = red. But he also heard the shapes; circles, triangles, and squares each had a different sound for him (“paint your band”). And he smelled them—blue, yellow, red, each quite distinct (“shake your scent”).

(Although practicing art must have been truly strenuous for him), “painting squares” a very special kind of freedom for Kandinsky. Kandinsky was 13 years older than Malevich and had actually been painting squares very early on, like this “Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles” .

Kandinsky would have liked to experiment much more in the field of abstract painting, but due to the war he had to return to conservative Russia and was reduced to his beginnings there.

Outside the Russian provinces, a different spirit prevailed. In 1911, Marc and Kandinsky founded the "Blue Rider" , whose artists operated more freely. Between 1911 and 1914, some of the most famous works of abstract and more abstract art were created.

During this time, Wassily Kandinsky painted the first ever abstract picture: “First abstract watercolor (study for Composition VII)” from 1913 or 1910 (possibly predated).

Kandinsky's "abstract pause" lasted until 1921, when he had seen and experienced enough restrictions on artistic freedom by the new rulers in the new Soviet Union, left the country for Berlin, and was allowed to paint squares again…

Piet Mondrian also painted squares at the exact same time, the first ones in Paris. He moved there specifically to "paint squares" in December 1911, at the advanced age of almost 40.

This was triggered by his first encounter with the new art of Cubism at an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in October/November 1911, where Mondrian's works were shown alongside works by Paul Cézanne , Georges Braque , Pablo Picasso , André Derain , Raoul Dufy and other modern artists.

Everyone is familiar with Mondrian's black, white, blue, yellow, and red squares, but Mondrian could also create much more complex images, often by inserting squares:

• “Evolution (Triptych)”, 1911
• “The Grey Tree”, 1911/12
• “Still Life with Ginger Pot II”, 1912
• “Composition with Grid 8: Chess Composition with Dark Colors”, 1919
• “New York City I”, 1942
• “Broadway Boogie Woogie”, 1942/43

Mark Rothko (see Mark Rothko: Early Career ), Barnett Newman (e.g., No. 4 of his six Onements), and Clyfford Still also painted squares. These abstract expressionists were a world war behind with their squares and painted them as precursors of "Color Field Painting , "Action Painting," began in the late 1940s .

As I said, back then everyone was painting squares, and because everyone was painting squares, Blinky Palermo painted squares too. Of course, his own unique squares, with their own unique charm and their own unique possibilities for interpretation. But Blinky Palermo was one of those people who do their research before acting; he knew many, if not all, of the squares painted by his predecessors in the course of the development of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism.

One can therefore assume (and most art historians do exactly that) that Malevich's, Kandinsky's, Mondrian's, Rothko's, Newman's, Still's and many other painted, cast, carved squares have found their way into Blinky Palermo's square art.

The squares of artists from Malevich to Blinky Palermo in turn influenced subsequent artists, e.g. the famous abstract painter Mary Heilmann , an American contemporary of Blinky Palermo, who, unlike him, is still among us today.

She initially took Mondrian as her model: “Manhattan Shuffle” , 1986, before entering into dialogue with Blinky Palermo (as a tribute to his 70th birthday) in the 2013 exhibition “Mary, Blinky, Yay!”.

Blinky Palermo's squares each likely had their own meaning. There are many squares, so generations of art historians can ponder, square by square, what the specific meaning and purpose of geometric art was and is.

Instead of “Blue Flower of Romanticism”, “Blue Triangle for Freedom”

The mysterious “Blue Triangle” of Palermo, which will now be examined in more detail, reveals a deep and beautiful meaning:

Its blue color likely derived from Yves Klein (1928–1962), whose blue will overwhelm you if you enter "Yves Klein" + "blue" into an image search engine. The triangle could also be a reference to Sigmar Polke's triangle from 1969, in which "Higher beings commanded: paint the upper right corner black!"

This triangle has now come a little closer to artistic eternity because the British artist Jonathan Monk revisited it in 2007 in the text-image “Higher beings commanded: paint the upper right corner black!”

The “Blue Triangle Full of Art History” also recalls the black rectangle with a blue triangle mentioned above. With this, Kazimir Malevich founded his own style of modern art in 1915, related to Futurism and Constructivism , and given the modest name Suprematism (from the Latin supremus = the highest).

This style produced art in Russia until the beginning of the 1930s.

Blinky Palermo's "Blue Triangle" dates from 1969 and carries with it its ticket to eternity. The artwork is both an installation and a mural, and consists of:

• the stencil for painting the triangle
• three framed paper works with instructions for installation (e.g.: “Using the stencil, paint a blue triangle above a door.”, or “Then give away the original sheet”) and for the blue paint (poster dark blue no. 35?)
• the blue triangle itself, somewhere above a door
• and finally a “triangular edition” of 50 editions in a folder.

The last time the “Blue Triangle” probably made a major appearance was at Blinky Palermo’s 70th birthday celebration at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt in November 2013: The stencil was placed above a door lintel in the exhibition rooms in the garden halls by employees of the Städel Museum and painted with the aforementioned blue paint “Plaka dark blue No. 35”.

In addition to the newly created “Blue Triangle”, the Städel Museum’s birthday exhibition featured a selection of Palermo’s minimalist prints from the 1960s and 1970s; the 2013 “Blue Triangle” has found its permanent place in the collection of important contemporary art in the garden halls .

Behind the Blue Triangle lies the beautiful basic idea that anyone who can paint a "Palermo Triangle" above a door themselves becomes an artist. Thus, "art as an idea ," the first German conceptual art intended by Palermo both as a memorial to freedom (of art) and as institutional critique against the already then all-powerful art market

With this in mind, we wish for many more “blue triangles” above the closed doors of this world…

Blinky Palermo, short short biography

• June 2, 1943 Blinky Palermo is born as Peter Schwarze in Leipzig
• In 1943, Peter Schwarze became Peter Heisterkamp through adoption
• In 1952 the family moved to the West, specifically to Münster (Westphalia)
• Blinky Palermo graduated from high school in 1959
• 1961 School of Applied Arts in Münster, graphic arts and sculpture courses
• 1962 Studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Bruno Goller (surrealist portraits)
• 1964 Transfer to Joseph Beuys' class, adoption of the artist name Palermo
• June 4, 1965 Marriage Palermo + Ingrid Denneborg
• In 1966, Palermo was appointed by Beuys as his master pupil; he completed his studies
• 1967 Palermo works as a bartender at the trendy Düsseldorf bar Creamcheese, separation from Ingrid Denneborg
• June 10, 1969 Marriage Palermo + Kristin Hanigk
• 1969 Moved to Mönchengladbach, work opportunity in a former carpentry workshop, shared studio with Imi Knoebel and Ulrich Rückriem
• 1970 Study trip to New York with friend and fellow artist Gerhard Richter
• 1973 Studio in New York
• 1974 Road trip to the USA, including a visit to the “Rothko Chapel” in Houston and the “Las Vegas Piece” by Walter De Maria, together with Imi Knoebel
• February 1975: During a visit to Germany, separation from Kristin Hanigk; in New York, relationship with the painter Robin Bruch
• 1976 Return to Düsseldorf, acquaintance with Babette Polter, move into Gerhard Richter's former studio
• February 17, 1977: Palermo's unexpected death during a holiday on the Maldivian island of Kurumba

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