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| Passion Investments: Art |
Exposed to Brilliance
Cay Sophie Rabinowitz
08/01/2005
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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.
 |  | | 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.) |
Two early protagonists of this cool and
heady school are Gerhard Richter and husband and wife Bernd and Hilla Becher.
Richter was born in 1933 in Dresden, where he worked until just months before
the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. He then joined the Bechers, who had been
producing and teaching photography in Dusseldorf since the mid-1950s.
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. |
Reserved Celebration
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.
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