Sigmar Polke – sorry I missed you

When Sigmar Polke was preparing his retrospective for Tate Liverpool in 1995, I was sent to interview him for a magazine. Setting off early one dank winter morning for our appointment, I arrived in Cologne and took a taxi to the artist's studio, only to discover that the address I had been given was somehow incomplete. The taxi driver kept up a running commentary about how we would never find the artist, that the address on the scrap of paper I had given him did not exist, and that there was no such person as Polke, because the driver knew everyone of note in the city. We drove endlessly around a decrepit industrial zone, occasionally stopping at a telephone kiosk so I could call the artist (I had no mobile phone in those days), and to get more cash to feed the cabbie's endless need. Eventually I got through to the magazine in London, who had no more idea of the correct address than I did, and was told that the woman who had originally set up the meeting was away, "walking the Great Wall of China". It seemed hopeless.

After a lot of difficulty I got hold of another artist I knew in Cologne, who located the right address, and although Polke was still not answering his telephone I set off once more, ending up exactly where the first cab had taken me some hours earlier. I walked into the yard of an old factory, Polke's studio, and next to it stood an incongruous, suburban-looking bungalow where the artist had his office. Looking through the rippled glass door I saw paintings stacked in the gloom, and a great pile of mail avalanched from the letterbox on to the tiled floor. The artist, it seemed, had not been there for some time: unless it was a ruse, I wondered, and Polke was hiding somewhere round the back.

Stories of Polke's difficult behaviour were rife. He rarely gave interviews, and before I even embarked on my ill-fated trip I had heard a tale about some well-heeled collectors going to his studio, when Polke sneaked up behind one of them and pissed down the back of the man's coat. Photographs of Polke also showed him larking about, or appearing to gobble those red-and-white hallucinogenic toadstools that sometimes appeared in his paintings, as well as in Sir John Tenniel's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Polke once borrowed Tenniel's hookah-smoking caterpillar as a motif. He was also very fond of the parricidal Richard Dadd's paintings, with their fairy fellers and nefarious goings-on.

Back in the 1970s, Polke had taken inordinate quantities of drugs, though this was nothing unusual in the art world of that time, or indeed of this. Polke's paintings always hinted at excess, and a view of the world that was somewhat at a tangent to the rest of us. He was, I had been led to expect, unreliable. Looking back at a career lasting almost 50 years, Polke's art is a clutter-bag of images, techniques, reversals, jokes and morbid fantasies, using strange and sometimes poisonous radioactive and light-sensitive pigments, and other incongruous materials. He borrowed images from cheap advertising and from the horrors of the concentration camps. He painted plastic washing-up bowls, watchtowers, barbed wire and sleazy sunsets. His eye alighted on old engravings and woodcuts concerning alchemy and optics. He reworked images from Goya, Hogarth's "line of beauty", the tracks of sub-atomic particles and the barbarities of the French revolution. He made scrupulous copies of Delft tiles, scientific diagrams, macabre book illustrations to children's stories and garishly coloured cartoons. He painted sausages, potatoes, tart little abstractions, flamingos, herons, cars, horses and carts. He made paintings on decorative tea towels and cheap fabrics, and on translucent polyester scrim. Sometimes you could see the stretcher behind the painting, like the bones in an x-ray. He made back-lit magic lanterns, took peculiar photographs, made some little-known films and the occasional sculpture.

Polke collapsed distinctions between photography and painting, wild experiment and mucking about. He gave the impression of being a bibliophile and amateur scholar (perhaps he was), and his work could be as hilarious as it was dark and unsettling. He jokingly invoked higher beings, wrote brilliantly on his own art and just as perceptively on the art of the past. No wonder he had no time to see me. In a way I was relieved that he didn't turn up that day.

Once more on the street, there were no cabs to be found. Dogs barked behind corrugated-iron walls. It was getting dark and had begun to rain. I was lost, I hadn't eaten all day, and had no idea if I had enough cash left to get me back to the airport. I remember a long, random walk till I found a bus, and once at the airport gathered up what few coins I had left and ordered a beer, but it turned out to be the only one on the bar menu that was alcohol-free. I think I wept.

When I eventually got to meet Polke some years later, I found an elegant and sophisticated man in a well-cut suit who could have passed for a banker or a university chancellor, an artist laden with prestigious honours and celebrated internationally, and one whose influence could be traced in probably dozens of other subsequent artists – from Luc Tuymans to Julian Schnabel, from Chris Ofili to Neo Rauch. But Polke was also weirdly inimitable. Like his fellow east German and co-founder of the 1960s capitalist realism movement, Gerhard Richter, Polke's art is as much a minefield as a goldmine for other artists.

Polke died last Friday at the age of 69. He had been suffering from cancer. Although he eventually held two major Tate exhibitions – the second was at Tate Modern in 2003 – neither really captured the spirit, the recklessness and wayward intelligence and complexity of his art. Polke's paintings are much more than marooned and shipwrecked images, art historical salvage and technical pyrotechnics. His art may have begun as a European response to American pop art, but it went on to be much more. He both dismantled painting and reconfigured our idea of what it could be. He respected history and played the devil with it. Unpacking his art is going to take a long time.

The presence of Polke's art will become stronger once it is realised quite what has been lost, the import of what he did. Some weeks after my ill-fated trip a postcard arrived from Germany. On one side there was a photograph of Polke doing a comical Nazi goose-step. On the reverse was a single handwritten word. "Sorry," it said. I still have it somewhere.