Markus Lüpertz

Lüpertz was born in Reichenberg in the Reichsgau Sudetenland of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (now Liberec in the Czech Republic) in 1941. His family moved to Rheydt in the Rhineland, in West Germany, when he was seven years old, in 1948. He was dismissed for an alleged lack of talent from an early apprenticeship as a painter of wine bottle labels. His second teacher, a commercial artist, went bankrupt. Lüpertz studied at the Werkkunstschule of Krefeld, from 1956 to 1961, with Laurens Goosens. his studies, he worked also in mining underground, road construction, and spent a semester at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. His short presence at the Academy ended as a "huge fiasco", and a "physical conflict that escalated a lot" led to his exmatriculation. "As an unloved, as an outcast, I have been expelled from this house," Lüpertz remembered in retrospect, this "embarrassing defeat" of his stude…