Lucky Luke and his Friend

Comprised of two vibrant interacting canvases, Sigmar Polke’s Lucky Luke and his Friend (1971-1975) is a magnificent, joyous and colourful creative play of multiple pictorial mechanisms combined in a way that explores the relationship between an image and its shadow or mirror. It is one of a sequence of works made in the mid-1970s in which Polke invoked Pop art, kitsch and the cult of the American West as well as more esoteric themes. Using techniques that range from spray-stencilling to exuberant abstract brushwork, it is full of shadow images, positive and negative forms and motifs drawn from other works by Polke, all echoing and repeating across both canvases. The left-hand panel, in a metallic mirage of sprayed and dripping colour, features an amorphous crowd and a sharpshooter taken from a comic-book. The right centres on the shadow of the Belgian cartoon cowboy Lucky Luke, depicted in Polke’s trademark ‘raster’ dots against a ground of gestural brushstrokes and fluorescent sprays of aerosol. One of Polke’s most spectacular paintings of this period, Lucky Luke and his Friend was exhibited in almost every important exhibition of the artist’s work during his lifetime, and played a central role in his first major retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1976.

Reluctant to have his deliberately eclectic and ever-evolving oeuvre organised and fixed within the retrospective context, Polke chose to install his Düsseldorf exhibition in a new way. He fenced off the main gallery with a high wooden gate behind which many of his works were displayed still wrapped for transport, with others ‘freed’ from their stretchers and scattered across the floor. Amid this display Lucky Luke and his Friend held a position of special prominence. The right-hand panel (with Lucky Luke) was laid on the floor behind the gate. The left-hand panel, with its crowd and gunman, was hung separately at the centre of the fencing. The canvas was surrounded by pages from the newspaper Bild, and, above it, the provocative words Kunst macht frei (‘Art makes you free’) in bold capital letters. Echoing the gruesome irony of the phrase Arbeit macht frei that had adorned the gates of Nazi concentration camps, this was also a sincere statement on Polke’s part. Like Lucky Luke and his Friend, it was, as Bice Curiger has written, ultimately a celebration of art as a necessary ‘locus of re-evaluation, [and] source of agitation’ (‘The Man with the Magnifying Glass’, in Sigmar Polke, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1992, p. 58).

The character Lucky Luke, created by Belgian cartoonist Morris in 1946, is famous for being able to shoot faster than his own shadow. An image on the back of the Lucky Luke books shows him in the act, firing a bullet through his shadow which has not yet reached for its holster. It is this shadow’s silhouette that Polke depicts in the present work, aglow in a purple halo and a haze of blue and yellow raster-dots. The implication here is that Luke has, for the first time, been outdrawn by his ‘friend’: another shadowy, stencilled image of man firing a pistol from the left-hand canvas, this time taken from a Rip Kirby cartoon. The action of one picture thus appears to be affecting the result in another, in a manner similar to the ‘telepathic’ connection that Polke had first suggested in his 1968 diptych Telepathische Sitzung I, Max Klinger-Sigmar Polke (Telepathic seance I). The relationship between the two is further reinforced by several images, both positive and negative, of the gunman’s face around Lucky Luke. Despite their echoing elements, the two paintings contrast with one another: the darker, busier left-hand panel evokes the psychological weight of such things as violence and the masses, while the lighter, more open right-hand panel, with its numerous floating images, is suggestive of levitation and flights of fancy.

The anonymous crowd surrounding the gunman can also be seen in works by Polke such as Menschkin (1972, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Wir Kleinbürger (We Petty Bourgeois): Menschenschlange (Human Snake) (1972-1974⁄76, Glenstone, Potomac). The Lucky Luke panel includes spray-painted bottle silhouettes and an image of a leaping figure and leopard-skin rug from Polke’s Tibersprung I and Tibersprung II paintings (1971). As in Lucky Luke and his Friend, these were interrelated mirror-works. They in turn related to two texts written on Polke’s hanging Tibertucher (Tiber Cloths) (1969), which imagined a moment of creative inspiration for the composer Hector Berlioz in the River Tiber, and the parallel experience of the river itself. They read: ‘Berlioz had been trying in vain to find a melody for a text. Suddenly he found himself humming the melody he was looking for as he surfaced again after diving headfirst into the Tiber’; ‘The Tiber had been trying in vain to find a headfirst dive for its text. Suddenly, it was humming the melody as the surface Berliozed after swimming’ (quoted in op. cit.).

This near-magical conception of the integral relationship between two entities, actions or events is one that fascinated Polke and underpins much of his work. It was a reciprocity that lay, he believed, at the heart of all creativity and of our interaction with art. Friedrich Nietzsche had warned in the late nineteenth century that when one looks into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. For Polke, the relationship between a picture and the viewer worked in much the same way. Following the logic of particle physics, which had seemingly established that the behaviour of a wave or particle is actually determined by where, when and whether or not it is observed, Polke believed that a picture could be altered just by its being looked at. This notion of continual flux finds majestic expression in Lucky Luke and his Friend.