Born on June 14 in the north German town of Bleckede, he first gained attention in the 1970s with a series of works called "Cafe Deutschland" dealing with the division of Germany. The new paintings are uncharacteristically subdued and in a way universal--advancing certain large philosophical views about human life. In tone and imagery, they could be taken to illustrate a famous melancholy thought of Hegel's: "When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then has a form of life grown old.... The Owl of Minerva takes flight only with the falling of the dusk." Owls, one of them indeed painted gray in gray, appear in at least two of the paintings; and though this may seem too slender a basis for an interpretation, the overall iconography seems largely pessimistic. Symbols from Immendorff's lexicon reappear here, drawn in grisaille, often in gray cartouches. Consider Enormous, 1999. It shows a man, presumably the artist himself, walking resolutely out of the picture, pulling a medieval maze behind him. Man, rope, and labyrinth are diminutive relative to a large black iris, with which they share the picture's space. The man has a globe rather than a head, and the globe itself is ringed with fig ures copied from a famous 1596 etching by the Dutch artist Jacob de Gheyn. Gheyn's globe is a recurring motif here and is in fact the subject of one of the paintings. It's an allegory of history as a cycle: Fortune leads to Prosperity, giving way to Pride, which generates Envy and leads to War, then Poverty, then Humility, and finally Peace. The cycle then begins again--scarcely an activist's philosophy of history. A Tower of Babel--with the Lidl block at its base--spirals up to a maze that crowns it. In one painting the tower shares space with an ominously veiled wagon, in another with a dead tree. An artist's palette hangs on a broken limb; a forked branch holds a maulstick. A nude with a single crutch, appropriated from Hans Baldung Grien, silhouetted in gray, looms over a veiled maze. Some of the paintings--those with the large flowers--have the feeling of vanitas. There is one sign of hope: a caterpillar. In two paintings the caterpillar carries a brush. The world's a muddle, but painting will show the w ay out--if there is a way out.

One of Germany's foremost modern artists, the 61-year-old had been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease which attacks and destroys nerve cells in the brain. He died in the early hours of Monday at his home in Dusseldorf, his wife, Oda Jaune-Immendorff, said. A charismatic figure, Immendorff was known for his flamboyant lifestyle as well as oil his paintings, prints and sculptures that mixed surrealism with an element of satire. In August 2004, he was fined and given an 11-month suspended prison sentence after pleading guilty to offences relating to a widely publicized "cocaine orgy" at a Dusseldorf hotel.