Cay Sophie Rabinowitz
08/01/2005
The only thing cold about contemporary German photography is the images themselves. Art aficionados around the world are abuzz over the exacting aesthetic and six-figure prices associated with these modern European masters, creating a juxtaposition with the work of the artists, which is generally known—and loved—for its understated and restrained style. Not only is their work in demand at auctions and in galleries, but they have also been featured in recent important museum exhibitions.
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| Top: ANDREAS GURSKY'S Schiphol shows the artist’s technique of using the camera lens to demonstrate how a setting can structure, support and organize society. Bottom: Thomas Struth’s San Zaccaria, like his other later works, depicts subjects in a monumental environment. (Photography courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) |
The Bechers presented their black-and-white studies of banal industrial architecture, such as cooling towers, A-frame houses or coal mine tippers, frontally, devoid of any detail that could be construed as personal or idiosyncratic. Objectivity became their hallmark. In their systematic archeological compilations of identifiable objects, the Bechers photographed even the most common item, situation, place or event. Their work can only be compared in scope and influence to that of Richter, who had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2002.
Richter seems more interested in negotiating the dialectical relationship between painting and photography. The artist’s ongoing masterwork, Atlas, is an encyclopedic compendium of recorded observations, including snapshots, portraits, newspaper clippings and photographic records of every kind. Richter has produced explicit images of persons and events that refer directly to social and political realities, such as Uncle Rudi, which shows his relative dressed in Nazi regalia, and October 18, 1977, a series based on press photos of six German terrorists. Richter has transformed his photographic source materials into paintings that reveal, or at least reconsider, the dark circumstances surrounding German history.
In a November 2004 sale at Phillips de Pury, several works drew premium prices. Richter’s Self Portrait Standing Three Times 17.3.1991 (in six parts), was estimated at $80,000 to $120,000 and sold for $265,600. Works by the Bechers sold for comparatively less. Their highest price was for Tipples from Small Mines in East Pennsylvania (set of 15), a historically pivotal work from 1974 to 1978, that sold for $102,200.
| VALUE JUDGMENT The subjects of Germany’s contemporary master photographers have been described as impersonal, monotonous, even banal. But their images are anything but to a new generation of art and photography connoisseurs. Work from the likes of Richter, the Bechers and their students are commanding six-figure prices at auction. But experts caution investment-minded aficionados that the market may already have peaked for these prints, and that auction prices tend to be overinflated. |
In a manner less romantic and self-absorbed than Richter’s, the so-called Becher students—Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky—learned to approach photography as a critical medium. The three of them are now the most celebrated German photographers. They make photographs of isolated subjects to implicitly challenge the conventional and institutional use of images. According to Artprice.com and the Art Newspaper, the three have broken records in salesrooms and galleries in the past 10 years. The annual growth rate for Gursky topped 3,000 percent in 1999, but many art professionals agree that prices for Gursky’s work have already peaked; some works come up for auction too often, and his most sought-after works rarely get sold. Still, Gursky achieved a year-over-year growth rate of 16 percent in 2003. Artprice.com explains that while Struth’s Pantheon, Rome sold for a record $367,850 in October 2003 at Sotheby’s in London, many of his works are selling for much less than a year or two ago. Boats at Wushan, Yangtse Gorge/China, with a hammer price of $52,500 in May 2002, sold for $32,220 in February 2003.
Struth initially developed a series of street scenes in black and white, much in the style of the Bechers. But where his teachers meticulously positioned one of their industrial structures, Struth centrally placed a void into the image. He directs the gaze into a vanishing point down the empty street, path or alley of an anonymous urban neighborhood. Later, he turned his attention to human subjects amassed in monumental surroundings of museums, public squares and churches.
Ruff’s work is most reminiscent of the Bechers’ somber monotony. As
a student, Ruff made color portraits of his friends and fellow students, each
framed like a passport photo, against a plain background. These enigmatic
portraits resolutely refuse to provide any insights into the psychology of the
sitters, who wear unremarkable clothes, with a neutral expression. Likewise,
Ruff’s precisely detailed pictures of ordinary interiors and buildings offer few
signs of human life.
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| THOMAS RUFF'S Porträt (T. Stricker) and Porträt (A. Ruff) refuse to show insight into human life. (Photography courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.) |
When Lisa Spellman, owner of New York’s 303 Gallery, introduced Gursky and Ruff to the New York market in the early 1990s, their work commanded about $2,000 for a single photograph. By the late 1990s, their works fetched $10,000 to $20,000. New York dealer Sara Meltzer remembers when spending $28,000 on a Struth was an astronomical sum. She adds, “There was much discussion about whether something produced as an edition could hold its value.” Now, with prints selling for $150,000 to $300,000, these artists, their dealers and collectors have made contemporary photography a highly competitive market. Many serious collectors who concentrated on German photography in the early days are no longer as interested now that prices are inflated. But Meltzer also admits that they never expected the turnover to be so great.
In November 2001, Christie’s set an auction record for Gursky when an immense panorama of a Parisian apartment block, Paris, Montparnasse, sold for $600,000 to Korean art advisor June Lee. In February 2002, Lee paid $619,000 for Untitled V, a veritable still-life of shoes on display. Since then prices have fallen. “They were crazy, and the market has peaked out,” explains Gerard Goodrow, Christie’s director of Contemporary Art. “The Montparnasse image did so well because it was the only one available; the others are in museums.”
At the November 2004 Phillips de Pury sale, two Gursky works performed impressively. Athens (diptych) sold for $299,200 and Union Rave for $232,000. Struth’s Kunsthistorisches Museum III, Wien and Stanze di Raffaello II, Roma sold for $136,800 and $153,600, respectively. Even considering the ebbs and flows of the art market, a collector who would have stumbled upon one of these works 10 years ago could boast an investment that far outpaces the S&P 500. In 1995, one of Struth’s most sought-after images, Galleria dell’Accademia, sold for $14,000 at Christie’s. Two years ago, another print of the same image sold for a triple-estimate $342,000 at Sotheby’s.
Cay Sophie Rabinowitz is senior U.S. editor of Parkett, an international contemporary art publication.
Additional Information
A Collector's Advisory.