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Artist and professor Guenter Fruhtrunk later apologized to his students for designing the logo for Aldi, the discount German supermarket chain that now has 7,000 stores on three continents.
Back then, as it is now, it was regarded as unseemly for artists to be serving the interests of capitalism or to make art into bulk commodities – and Aldi is the epitome of that.
Born in Munich, Fruhtrunk (1923-82) was a highly regarded abstract artist who worked with world renowned artists like Fernand Leger and Hans Arp and he created Aldi‘s distinctive blue and white striped logo in 1970.
And he wasn‘t alone in working for industry. Hungarian-born op-art founder Victor Vasarely, for example, was commissioned to redesign carmaker Renault’s famous diamond logo in 1972.
But the relationship between art and money goes back much further than the 20th century, as an opulent exhibition at the Ludwiggalerie in Oberhausen, Germany seeks to examine.
With around 300 exhibits from artists including Albrecht Duerer to Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter, “Let’s Buy It! Art and Shopping” shows the power of money and merchandise in art.
And so we find out that Germany‘s Duerer (1471-1528) was a consummate businessman as well as an artist, carefully making sure his popular prints had a range of prices to suit all purses.
With his printing press he was able to copy his works en masse, making a fortune as demand for pictures grew in the early modern period.
Art and speculation – lots of investors spend eye-watering sums on art these days, and not to enjoy it – is also not a new phenomenon.
Possibly the first ever bubble in art history occurred in the Netherlands of the 17th century and it involved pictures of tulips.
The country was gripped by “tulip mania” in the 1630s and as sellers sold bulbs rather than exotic flowers themselves they had pictures galore painted of them so people could get an idea of what they were buying.
But in 1637 the market crashed, writes Christine Vogt, the curator and director of the Ludwiggalerie in her exhibition catalogue.
The show isn’t organized by chronology but rather by topics such as “Art and Market,” “Art For All” and “Art and Merchandise.”
Copies and fakes have plagued artists from Duerer’s time; though Warhol made his Marilyn Monroe screen print available for unlimited reprints it has still been copied.
It is Warhol and his pop art pictures of Campbell’s soup tins who bring the relationship between art and merchandise especially into focus as he turns everyday objects into art.
Artists like Don Eddy in the US and Gudrun Kemsa in Germany have painted shop windows, immortalizing luxury goods.
The exhibition sometimes makes connections that are rather audacious. Such as the juxtaposition of a 1630 still-life of a fruit bowl as an expression of luxury and Wolf Vostell’s 1968 “B 52 Lipstick Bomber” which uses real lipsticks.
But no one illustrates the relationship between art and the market better than German artist Gerhard Richter.
Back in 1972 the Ludwiggalerie, then the Oberhausen Municipal Gallery, bought Richter’s painting of Brigitte Bardot and her mother shopping for 28,000 D-mark.
Today Richter is the most expensive artist in Germany and his pictures regularly fetch millions, while Oberhausen is a relatively poor city in western Germany.
Karl Marx and his “Das Kapital” are often lovingly quoted by artists.
German media professor Christin Lahr has been transferring a cent every day to the German Finance Ministry’s account for years and he copies running quotes from the book onto the forms.
But closely bound though the world’s of
finance and art may be, Vogt points out, 95
percent of artists still can’t live off their work.
