Deadly Obituary

Jörg Immendorff, who died on Monday aged 61, was Germany's best-known and most provocative artist, a close friend of the former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and, in 2003, the central figure in a sex scandal involving prostitutes and cocaine-fuelled orgies at a luxury hotel.

In what became known as the Orgy of the Year, Immendorff was discovered naked having his nipples licked by a retinue of seven young filles de joie, while 11 grams of cocaine lay ready for consumption on a Versace ashtray nearby.

Notwithstanding his exotic private life - he had also been a luminary of Dusseldorf's sadomasochistic scene - Immendorff was regarded by many critics as an original and vigorous artist of great complexity.
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His early work in the 1960s reflected the political upheavals of the times, but he later emerged as one of the leading figures of the new German Expressionism.

In 2005 Immendorff's work was hung at the Saatchi Gallery in London as part of an exhibition - The Triumph of Painting - that ranked among the top five British shows of that year. Charles Saatchi was a long-standing and enthusiastic collector of Immendorff's paintings.

After coming to prominence as a member of the German art movement Jungen Wilden (the Young Wild Ones), Immendorff became a figure of national acclaim, whose pictures sold for more than £100,000 apiece. His best-known work includes the Café Deutschland series of 16 large paintings in which he addressed the conflict between East and West Germany.

His huge colourful canvases, depicting fictitious settings such as discothèques and cafés, were heavily laden with political iconography and imagery. "In my paintings, symbols associated with National Socialist Germany function as kinds of clichés in so far as they stand for universal evils," he explained in 2003.

"The factors that led to [Hitler's] rise to power and the destruction he subsequently wrought remain permanent dangers. Such images must be painted. To make them taboo would be regressive.

"The smoking swastika indicates that the matter is far from closed, be it in Germany or the malicious terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Evil takes root and flourishes when art and freedom of expression are censored."

Last January Immendorff ran into heavy critical flak for his official retirement portrait of his friend, the outgoing German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, which was completed on the ailing artist's instructions by his students.

The result was an odd icon-like image painted in gold, with a melting black eagle, symbol of the German state, in the foreground. Also in the picture is Immendorff himself, represented as a broken man, a reference to his increasing physical frailty.

"There are statues of Elvis Presley that look like this," sneered one critic. "Siberian oligarchs and Californian rappers have a need - alongside their collection of Rolex watches - to immortalise themselves in this manner."

Schroeder had apparently given the commission to Immendorff as a way of letting the painter atone for his public humiliation in August 2003.

Caught in a £1,100-a-night suite at the Steigenberger Park Hotel, Dusseldorf, with seven naked young call-girls and several lines of cocaine, Immendorff was being hustled away by police while still more prostitutes were arriving.

As well as the drugs found on the scene, a further 10 grams of cocaine were found at Immendorff's atelier nearby.

At his trial the following year, Immendorff admitted cocaine possession, and having organised 27 similar orgies between February 2001 and the date of his arrest. In the light of his confession and his terminal illness, he was put on probation and heavily fined.

Jörg Immendorff was born on June 14 1945 near Lüneberg, the Saxon town twinned with Scunthorpe where Himmler committed suicide. Immendorff studied in Dusseldorf under Joseph Beuys, the influential modern artist whose principal media were animal fat and felt, before being expelled for Maoist activism.

Immendorff rejected traditional painting in 1966 by scrawling the words "Stop Painting" across one of his pictures, and made the natural progression into the art establishment, spending 12 years teaching and later holding guest professorships all over Europe.

He also created stage designs, including some for the Salzburg Festival, exhibited as a sculptor, owned a sex bar near the Reeperbahn in Hamburg's red-light district, and helped to design André Heller's avant-garde amusement park Luna Luna in 1987.

In 1996 Immendorff became a professor at the art academy in Dusseldorf from which he had been dismissed as a student in the 1960s. The following year he was awarded the richest art prize in the world, from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico.

His sculptures include a large bronze of the German film star Hans Albers and a spectacular piece of iron, 25 metres high, in the shape of an oak tree trunk, erected at Riesa, near Dresden, in 1999. Although named "Elbquelle" by Immendorff himself, locals know it as "Rostige Eiche" ("rusty oak").

In 1998 he was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. When he could no longer paint with his left hand, he switched to the right.

For the last year, unable to hold a paintbrush, he had been confined to a wheelchair and directed his assistants to paint by following his instructions.

Jörg Immendorff married, in 2000, Oda Jaune, a former student more than 30 years his junior; their daughter was born the following year. Both survive him.