Wants: multimodal oontz

A fortnightly meditation on something for sale

Paul Röder Painting from the collection of Florian Schneider. Available from Julien’s (est. $1,000 - $2,000)

Next month, a small Californian auction house is selling almost 500 objects from the estate of Florian Schneider, the doge of German synth-pop and founding member of Kraftwerk. The most interesting part of the sale are several paintings of industrial scenes from the 20th century: impressionistic land, lake and cityscapes with lower halves punctuated by tubular chimneys and skies enveloped in smogs of various hues.

This particular example is panoramic in aspect with a distinctly rhythmic geometry. Gazing into the picture you hear the syncopated clacking of railcars; the steady hiss of steam from numberless chimneys; the periodic scrunch of shovels driven into coal piles. Layered on top of each other, these sounds might begin to resemble the opening of a Kraftwerk song.

Of Paul Röder, the artist, little is known today. He was born, the son of another painter, in what is now Wuppertal, a small town outside Dusseldorf, in December 1897. He married, was widowed and married again. He lived in various parts of Germany before dying in Marktoberdorf (a town where he shares a name with a very short street) in 1962 – eight years before Kraftwerk’s first concert. Today, Röder’s paintings occasionally come up for sale at regional auction houses, rarely finding their way past low three-figure prices.

“We are not artists nor musicians. We are workers,” Kraftwerk are quoted as saying. It’s unclear how Schneider acquired this painting, but we might speculate as to why. His images of factories and processing plants, gathered two centuries after the industrial revolution but at the dawn of the computer age, betray an interest in the still-rapidly modernising shape of work: the increasing regularity of its rhythms and fungibility of its components; automation extending and erasing the human. His songs know their kinship with these scenes: systematic, quantised and – seemingly, at least – infinitely repeatable.

To collect is to bring together objects and imply, in the grammar of their togetherness, a view of the world or a process of refining it. In his collection of industrial landscapes, Schneider found chugging, pulsing analogues for his own artistic practice. In possessing them he, reanimated each individual image as part of a more connected, more productive history.

Appearing in this sale – alongside synthesisers, iridescent suits and flyers for early concerts that introduced the world to Kraftwerk’s sonic amalgamations of man and machine – Röder’s painting is given a second or third life; and a new job.

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Paul Röder’s Industrial Scene oil painting is part of the forthcoming Florian Schneider Collection Auction at Julien’s in Nashville, beginning 19 November.