Eine Dame mit Straußen 2000 / 2009

A MASTER OF ALL STYLES

The multi-talented Wolfgang Joop had clear role models: the ice-cold beauty of Tamara de Lempicka’s paintings that reflect the 1930s and their ideals of beauty and the expressive, slightly heinous drawings by Egon Schiele. Both artists followed their own paths against the current of society, not submitting themselves to the tastes of the times and therefore creating an individual visual world concentrated on peoples and their bodies. Based on these artists and the many other experiences in his eventful and always independent life as a designer, actor, and author, Wolfgang Joop has developed a type of fashion drawing completely his own, in which “pose and personal demeanor become one.”

For him, art and fashion are most impressive when the objects have the spark of an old master, whom he studied extensively, and possess “an aura of unintentionalness; or the intention to be completely self-satisfied.” The French call this l’art pour l’art. Wolfgang Joop’s sketches are art for art’s sake. “My sketches should look as though they emerged effortlessly. They explain my sense of time, my concept of beauty, with the most minimalist and yet self-assuredly effective means.”

Horst Klöver