CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/5/2011
Gerhard Richter: Panorama is reviewed in the November 4 issue of The New York Times, in the first edition of the Paper Gallery column, which highlights exceptional art books. Also featured is Bruce Davidson: Subway. An excerpt is reproduced below.
"Stool in Profile," by Gerhard Richter.Dana Jennings writes, "THE publication of “
Panorama, a book tied to a retrospective of the German artist
Gerhard Richter at the
Tate Modern in London, is a perfect occasion for starting this column. After London, the exhibition will travel to Berlin and later to Paris. Most of us, I suspect, won’t be able to catch up with Mr. Richter overseas. But the book based on the show — a paper gallery, if you will — can be gazed at and grazed on from the plush comfort of couch or recliner.
Not every book here is linked to an exhibition, but each reflects the consistent focus and visual serendipity of any good museum or gallery show, without the viewer’s fretting over getting a parking space or having to box out to grab a spot before her favorite
de Kooning.
As for the books themselves, each one here blossoms from crucial cultural moments of the 20th century. “Guts and Glory” revives the decades in which pro football became the country’s most riveting spectator sport. “Drawing Power” is an early chapter in the history of American mass media.
Subway seizes on those dark years when New York was a city of fear. “Groundwaters” revels in the revelation that essential art wasn’t restricted to museum, gallery and academy. And
Gerhard Richter: Panorama subtly wrestles with what it meant to be a significant artist in postwar Europe.
Cultural baggage aside, art — drawn, painted, photographed — succeeds or fails based on its ability to seduce the viewer. Feel free to be seduced."
BRUCE DAVIDSON
Subway
SUBHUMAN The critic Geoff Dyer once wrote: “The best photographers are to be listened to as well as looked at.” And Subway shimmies and shimmers in urban cacophony: The screeeeech of train brakes, the fluorescent 3-in-the-morning hum on an empty platform, the spray-can hiss of graffiti artists. Mr. Davidson entered this underworld in 1980 — “Subway” first came out in 1986 — and his graffiti-bleeding visions by way of Bosch have only gained in power.
The opening spread of Gerhard Richter: Panorama, published by D.A.P. | TATE.
GERHARD RICHTER
Panorama
Edited by Mark Godfrey and Nicholas Serota
20TH-CENTURY GHOSTS Gerhard Richteris considered Germany’s essential postwar artist, and Panorama covers the more than 50 years of his career. The grand sweep of his work is all here, from eerie hyper-realism to bold abstraction, much of it painted in an infinite and textured palette of grays. It’s as if the smoke and ash from all the wars that shaped the 20th century had found their way into his work, into his very psyche."
