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Kippenberger eBook

The Artist and His Families

By Susanne Kippenberger. Translated by Damion Searls.

Over the course of his 20-year career, Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997) cast himself alternately as hard-drinking carouser and confrontational art-world jester, thrusting these personae to the forefront of his prodigious creativity. He was also very much a player in the international art world of the 1970s right up until his death in 1997, commissioning work from artists such as Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, and acting as unofficial ringleader to a generation of German artists. Written by the artist's sister, Susanne Kippenberger, this first English-language biography draws both from personal memories of their shared childhood and exhaustive interviews with Kippenberger's extended family of friends and colleagues in the art world. Kippenberger gives insight into the psychology and drive behind this playful and provocative artist. This is the eBook edition of Kippenberger, originally published in print form in January 2012.

In “Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families," Susanne Kippenberger, the youngest of his four sisters, offers a tender, reasonably clear-eyed, oddly gripping account of her only brother’s headlong plunge through life. A journalist for a Berlin newspaper, she writes in a brisk, personable style that has been sensitively translated by Damion Searls, who has also done justice to Martin Kippenberger’s penchants for non sequiturs, malapropisms and skewed aphorisms (“Never give up before it’s too late”). She tries to keep the pros and cons of Kippenberger’s outsize personality in view, citing some of the most egregious examples of his art and behavior, but her sympathies are never in doubt.

- Roberta Smith, reviewing Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families in The New York Times Book Review