An Intentionally Incomplete Inventory of Pictures: Richter's Bilderverzeichnis

Photograph of a painting destroyed by Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter Archiv via Spiegel

Since I first started looking into them, I've wanted to know why Gerhard Richter destroyed some of his paintings. Because, of course, some of them weren't "destroyed" destroyed, but just painted over, with their previous state being technically defined as a momentary completion, not a work in process. There are only a few like that in the Catalogue Raisonné, though; most of the works listed as "Destroyed" are presumably actually destroyed.

But at least they all got Catalogue Raisonné numbers. Ulrike Knöfel wrote about a different category of destroyed Richters, largely undiscussed and unseen, which were destroyed before the artist began his catalogue raisonné, and which thus, with maybe one exception, don't have a CR number, and are thus excluded from Richter's declared oeuvre. Even if they were authentically created by Richter, and shown in exhibitions, and offered for sale.

As Dietmar Elger points out in his biography of Richter, A Life In Painting, Richter actually conceives of the Catalogue Raisonné as a work of art in itself, one which, like Atlas, is still in process.

I recently met with Dr. Elger during a trip to New York, and we spoke about these dynamics of creation, destruction, recognition, and archiving as they play out in Richter's practice. Elger runs the Gerhard Richter Archiv at the Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and maintains the Catalogue Raisonné, so he has a seat at the table for much of this history. After a brief fanboy prelude, in which he signed my book [and my copy of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres catalogue raisonne which he was also involved in], we got to talking. [We met for information, not as an actual interview, so I didn't take notes or record our conversation, and I won't directly attribute quotes, but just try to capture my recollections.]

Painting Truth To Power

Ooh, that is interesting. By covering themselves in paint, members of Occupy Frankfurt effectively inverted the crowd control technique where police use dye cannons to disperse protesters--and to tag them for easier identification and roundup later. Nice to see that painting's only detained, not dead. I wonder if this kind of painting project happens every May?

Police spraying protesters in Kampala, Uganda, May 10, 2011 [image james akena/reuters via cfr.org]

Occupy Frankfurt protestor and German riot police photographed by Kai Pfaffenbach for Reuters [via boingboing]
Previously: May 16th: Police Action Painting

Color The Tom Sachs Way

While everyone else is cavorting on Tom Sachs Mars, I'm home, watching this rather entertainingly deadpan documentary short about the approved color palette in Sachs' studio. I imagine it to be a highlight of the new assistant orientation seminar.

COLOR. By Tom Sachs [and film by Van Neistat [youtube]

'Where Their Fakeness Is Self-Evident And Salable'

While trying not to steal his thunder, let me just post the awesomely vivid ending to LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's review of Williams + Tsien's unavoidably flawed Philadelphia museum building now housing the art-centered educational institution known as The Barnes Foundation:

Imagine if the Barnes trustees, in the name of improved access to a supremely great but historically cloistered collection, had declared they were going to produce replicas of its paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and Van Gogh and hang those in a new building on the parkway.

The howls of protest would have been loud and immediate. The idea wouldn't have lasted five minutes.

And yet the notion persists that re-creating buildings is somehow more reasonable or at least less obvious and that new rooms can be made to impersonate old ones without much aesthetic risk. That copies of paintings belong in gift shops and on refrigerators, where their fakeness is self-evident and salable, while copies of buildings can go blithely along pretending to be real. That architecture somehow is different.

Memo from Philadelphia: It's not. [Emphasis added for awesomeness.]

Meanwhile, I love that this fakeness all happens next door to the Rodin Museum, which is full of copies, thereby blithely refuting Hawthorne's analogy without making it any less valid.

Architecture review: A poor replica of Barnes Foundation museum [latimes]

Will Work Off Jpegs: Destroyed Richter Paintings

Destroyed Richter Painting #03

First off, a huge thanks to everyone who came to the opening of Richteriana Saturday, and a high five to Magda, Postmasters and the artists in the show. It really does look great, and interesting, and provocative. If you can, you should definitely see it in person.

Destroyed Richter Painting #04

Which is actually one reason I debated not posting images of the Destroyed Richter Paintings paintings I put into the show. One of the real drivers of making the paintings was to approximate the experience of standing in front of paintings that could now only be seen through photos. Or transparencies. Or JPGs. And to measure what the difference is between these different modes of mediated perception.

Destroyed Richter Painting #02

I did not have access to the actual dimensions of Richter's original works, but I worked hard to deduce the size as well as to approximate the image, so as to make the feeling of seeing a picture in person as authentic [sic] as possible, even while acknowledging that Richter made such an experience impossible.

Destroyed Richter Painting #05

But looking at jpgs of paintings [of jpgs of paintings of photos] obviously falls short of this idealized encounter. As so much of our art encounter/consumption does. It's a distinction that most people miss or gloss over, but which is not lost on Tyler Green, who recently addressed the subject of critics reviewing shows they haven't seen by tweeting, "I never 'work' off JPEG."

Richter actually showed most or all of the paintings depicted here between 1964-67, so in a way, there's an aspect of going back in time, to encounter Richter and his work at the beginning of his Western career. A time when the context of the work wasn't hype and adulation and skyrocketing prices, but bafflement, resistance, and indignation. There are early photo paintings that survive only because someone bought them or kept them; so these works, which were once good enough to be exhibited or put on sale, were rejected by the market before they were ultimately rejected by the artist himself.

Destroyed Richter Painting #01

The one exception/mystery is Grau. This is one of the 70+ paintings that did make it into the catalogue raisonne, but which are now listed as destroyed. And if there's a surviving image of the three destroyed grey monochromes [CR395-1-3], I couldn't find it. So all that's known publicly is the dimensions, and the unusual support [wood panel]. But that's part of the beauty of the grey paintings, I thought, that you could think you could credibly extrapolate an actual painting from such minimal information. And seeing it in person really makes me miss Richter's version--and to wonder what happened to it.

Editing A Life In Painting

Richter's studio, 1965, as seen in Elger's A Life In Painting. Note the lady in the bikini on the left, which

Jasper Johns is well known for destroying his early work, thereby managing and reordering the story of his art by altering its history. But he is by no means alone. Gerhard Richter does it, too. And by turning his image archive and even the list of his paintings into works of art in their own right, Richter might have Johns beat.

Here is an excerpt from Dietmar Elger's 2009 Richter bio/history, A Life In Painting, which I hadn't noticed until recently:

In fact, Richter destroyed most of his early [i.e., pre-1962, as well as early photo paintings] works. They are known now only through reproductions in his well-organized archive. There was never, however, a radical break of the sort suggested by his self-organized catalogue raisonne (Werkverzeichnis, or "work list," as he terms it). This catalog is one of Richter's ongoing projects--a work in itself--and has long been a subject of controversy. Catalogues raisonnes are ordinarily assembled by scholars, who strive to document every authentic work by a given artist, and are organized chronologically. For Richter, the point is less to establish authenticity than to establish a trajectory within the artwork that he deems acceptable. His catalog does not include all of his work, nor is it consistently chronological. The artist has always excluded his earliest work; while some critics would like to believe that it documents the first paintings that incorporate media images as source material, this is simply not the case. [pp. 44-5.]

Count me as one of those critics, or viewers. I knew he'd painted works before then, but I had no idea, for example, that Tisch, which is listed in Richter's definitive-seeming numbering scheme as CR-1, was actually painted after several other paintings in his catalogue raisonne. It's No. 1 because looking back from the late 1960s, Richter had figured it was a good place to start.

Pasadena Style Brillo Box Redux

Will you look at that, another one of Irving Blum's Pasadena-style Brillo Boxes is coming up for auction in the morning at Christie's, with an estimate of $400-600,000. [The last Blum Pasadena Brillo box I wrote about sold for $782,000 in 2010.]

These Blum boxes are always/both listed as "acquired from the artist," but they are actually part of an extra batch of at least 16 boxes which artist/curator/editor John Coplans had made as extras for the 100 boxes Warhol authorized for Coplans' 1970 retrospective at the Pasadena Museum. The actual 100 were donated to the museum, but the overages were dispersed among Warhol's friends, curators, dealers, and collectors in Los Angeles.

Oddly, the pair Coplans got from Warhol, which he donated to Oberlin College, are classified as "reserve boxes" for the exhibition; their somehow lesser status means they have never been published or exhibited outside the college.

Meanwhile, other of the 16+ which go through dealer or collectors' hands are classified as regular, ol' cash-n-carry Brillo Boxes.

Still no word on the whereabouts of the 10 to 33 Kellogg's Corn Flakes boxes that went missing from LACMA, from the 100 Warhol authorized and donated to that museum at the same time.

Jasper Johns' First Flag

Flag, 1954-55, collection and image: MoMA

When, after a couple of weeks of poking around, I didn't stumble, Banacek-style, onto the Jasper Johns Flag painting from Short Circuit, and then flip it for my 5%, reunite it with Rauschenberg's combine, and get on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section again [ahem], I did kind of wonder what the end game of this search might be.

At some point might the result just be an acknowledgement that the flag is lost, fate unknown? And if so, does it just remain an entertaining art mystery, but a footnote to the "real," relevant history of Johns' and Rauschenberg's work and all that flowed from it?

Fortunately, I don't think that's what happens here. No matter if it never resurfaces, the Short Circuit flag deserves a place in art history as the first Flag Johns showed, by almost three years. It is also almost certainly the first Flag Johns made. Which is tricky, because that distinction is commonly given to THE Flag, at MoMA. But I think I have figured out that that is chronologically impossible. Johns may have started MoMA's Flag before Short Circuit's, but he certainly didn't finish it first.

Here's the deal:

The date for MoMA's Flag has always been in flux, but it has almost always been considered or assumed to be the first one he ever made. The disappearance from public view of the Short Circuit flag after 1962 greatly facilitated this conclusion.