MARTIN KIPPENBERGER — Jacqueline: The Paintings Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore, Metro Pictures, New York, 2000

Published three years after Kippenberger’s death, this catalogue documents the eight-painting Jacqueline series made in 1996, during the final year of his life, alongside the sculpture Modell Winnetou. The exhibition was held at Metro Pictures, New York, from 30 September to 4 November 2000, with an essay by Jan Avgikos.

The paintings began with David Douglas Duncan’s photographs of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s wife and widow, taken inside Picasso’s studio after his death. Kippenberger had returned repeatedly to Duncan’s images of Picasso: first through posters and printed matter, then in the large self-portraits of 1988 in which he adopted the older artist’s famously unheroic, underdressed pose. In 1996 he shifted his attention from Picasso to the person left behind.

The title supplies the method. Picasso could no longer paint Jacqueline, so Kippenberger positioned himself as an improbable successor, declaring that he was “taking over his job.” Working from blurred black-and-white photographs, he reconstructed Jacqueline in colour through Picasso-like pictorial languages. The gesture is neither straightforward homage nor parody. It allows Kippenberger to enter the mythology of modern painting while exposing the strange mechanisms through which artistic identity, influence and authority are inherited.

Jacqueline appears mourning, isolated and surrounded by the remains of Picasso’s studio. She is no longer simply the master’s model but the custodian of his absence. Kippenberger’s paintings move between portrait and disguised self-portrait, between Jacqueline’s bereavement and his own persistent identification with the role of the artist.

The publication belongs fully to that expanded Kippenberger universe. It is an exhibition record, but also part of a practice in which printed matter was central rather than supplementary. Photograph, source image, painting, biography and posthumous exhibition are placed into the same circulation.

19 × 23 cm. 33 pages. Softcover exhibition catalogue; colour and black-and-white illustrations. Condition: good vintage condition. Noticeable rubbing, scratches and handling marks to the covers, including an abrasion across the coloured bands; edge and spine wear, with minor corner softening. Internally complete and generally clean.

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