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Udo Kier shot Andy Warhol’s “Frankenstein” saga in the Roman film studio “Cinecittà” in the early 1970s. In 1973 he initially moved back to his hometown of Cologne. “I walked through the galleries like Warhol with a plastic bag and got to know artists like Blinky Palermo, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Rosemarie Trockel,” he said in an interview.
He lived in a former local transport substation in the unhip district of Ostheim together with the artists Michael Buthe and Marcel Odenbach, who experimented with avant-garde videos early on. In the documentary “Arteholic” Kier talks about this era: “There was a pear tree in front of my window. When I wasn’t feeling so well, for example after Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s death, I sat at the window and looked at the pear tree.”
Udo Kier hangs out with the young Rainer Werner Fassbinder in Cologne’s Thieboldsgasse on Neumarkt. The late director Walther Bockmayer, founder of the queer theater bar “Filmdose” in the university district, cast him as a pop star in his film “Victor”. Kier later moves permanently to the US West Coast.
The man in the background
With the news of Kier’s death on November 23rd, his life partner Delbert McBride, who confirmed his death, is now in the focus of the international media. Since McBride mostly stayed in the background, there was initially some confusion about the US historian of the same name, Delbert “Del” McBride, who never had anything to do with Kier.
The “real” McBride comes from the industrial city of Pittsburgh and discovered his passion for fine art early on. After studying at Carnegie Mellon University, inspired by Picasso, among others, he moved to Los Angeles, where he took his first steps in the local art scene. The African American describes his painting as an “exploration of light and dark”, often characterized by layers of motifs flowing into one another that only become unraveled for the viewer afterwards.
Kier and McBride later settled in the Palm Springs area – a connection between film avant-garde and fine art that was formative for both. Kier repeatedly supported his partner, including at the exhibition “Going Solo” at the Shawn Savage Gallery in Palm Springs, which showed around 60 of McBride’s works.
Relationship beyond the spotlight
It was a relationship beyond the limelight. It is not yet known how long the two were together.
A circumstance that fits well with Kier’s general approach to “private” and “public”. He repeatedly rejected the label “gay icon.” Art and roles are bigger than categories, he always emphasized. This attitude was also reflected in their life together: two artists who gave each other space without publicly staging the relationship.
With Kier’s death, Delbert McBride comes into greater focus – not as an appendage of an unusual star, but as an artist in his own right who made an important, often underestimated contribution to Kier’s later phase of life. A US art critic notes that his works seem like visual reverberations of a shared life.
The exhibition was running at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in the second half of 2024 “Udo is Love. Time is sin – A journey into the incredible life of Udo Kier”, which discussed Kier’s diverse connection to fine art in numerous exhibits. McBride’s works played no role here.