Markus Lupertz was born in Liberec, Bohemia on April 25, 1941. His family fled Czechoslovakia in 1948 and settled in the town of Rheydt in the Rhineland where his father was a businessman. Even as a child he wanted to be an artist, from the first drawings of cowboys that he made. From 1956 to 1961 his life resembled a collage: studying at the Werkkunstschule in Krefeld; living at a monastery south of Bonn where he painted crucifixes for nine months in 1959; spending a year working days as a coal miner, where he studied at night at Krefeld and at Dusseldorf's Kunstakademie. Then he worked on a road crew and hung out in Paris. In 1961 he became a full-time artist, out on his own.

Up until this time Lupertz's wor...