Without the art of Marcel Duchamp, that of Hans-Peter Feldmann would hardly have been conceivable. And without artists like Feldmann, Duchamp would not be so popular today. Footballer pictures as tableaux. Everyday pictures in "picture booklets", his magazine "Ohio" or even books as multiples. Michelangelo's "David", colorfully conceived as a sculptural hero, also for the sideboard. Recognizing what is perceptible was his art. Why create even more when there is already so much valid? Wilhelm Lehmbruck had already understood the "line of beauty" about which William Hogarth was still philosophizing searchingly. "Why should I still draw them?" says Feldmann.

This fatalistic nobility presupposes that there is a closed art business. Because only within a chic scene is anyone who lives normality considered foreign. Hans-Peter Feldmann was such a "normal person", a voyeur sitting in an ice cream parlour, a flâneur strolling through the neighbourhoods and a business entrepreneur. It has been enthroned above Düsseldorf's "Kö" in recent years. From there he surfed and found his pictures in net searches. He collected seascapes, images that the white-cube aesthetes in the Gelsenkirchen Baroque imagine, and opened the doors of the aseptic modern museums to them as "Feldmanns". He bought dusty portraits at auction, had his colleague give them a red dot as a clown nose and sold them to avant-garde collectors. He also once acquired a George Grosz from his phase in Cape Cod, which now hangs in an art temple. It was never signed. The invoice acted as a certificate. He was amused by the fact that he was able to make money out of what he had only recognized. He once demonstrated this in a performatively serious way at Art Cologne. Accompanied by his wife, he carried his motto through the hall corridors to the vernissage: "All expressions shine brightly / Earn with the beautiful word".

One of Feldmann's works found its echo in the series "Tatortreiniger"

He also emptied women's handbags and exhibited their contents. In 100, he pinned 000,2011 dollars in prize money in one-dollar notes to the wall of the New York Guggenheim, a gesture that still found its astonished and admiring echo years later in episode 28 of the film series "Crime Scene Cleaner".

But the most significant thing was the two stores that Feldmann ran together with his wife in Düsseldorf for decades. The waving queen and the cuckoo clock, the frame for the bosses' desks, reissued tin toys, kitsch. Exhibited as an "installation", all of this, like Alexander Calder's "Circus", turns into an emotional reminder that there is a play child in every non-alienated person. His infantile voyeurism and artistic entrepreneurship cannot be overstated.

He did not "create" anything in this respect, but leaves a lot. As it has only now become known, Hans-Peter Feldmann died on Tuesday of this week at the age of 82.