Blinky Palermo fled East Germany to become the star student of the most charismatic teacher at Dusseldorf’s Art Academy, Joseph Beuys. Like Beuys, Palermo used found materials, but the ones he chose seemed stripped of any symbolic resonance. Beginning in 1966, he made monochromes out of ordinary store-bought fabric in whatever colors were fashionable and available, sewing lengths together by machine and stretching them over a frame. From this most banal stuff—the basic material of West Germany’s economic miracle—he created pure color masses, simple declarations of goods as art.