Landschaften

In German, "Landschaften" means landscapes.  Gerhard Richter, whose art has been profoundly shaped by history--he's 93--has freighted his with meaning beyond the merely scenic.  I've been a big fan since seeing his 2002 retrospective at MoMA and Never Look Away, a mesmerizing film based on his life that he disavowed for being "too biographical" after watching only the trailer.

Although I'd been to many of the locations Richter depicts in his show at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, none looked familiar except the Sphinx. 

Great Sphinx of Gizeh (1965)

I'm not sure I would have appreciated these paintings as much as I did without having read Jason Farago's review in the Times.  It literally gave me goosebumps, something criticism hasn't done very often since Pauline Kael died.

[Richter] wanted to paint the sea, the sky, the mountain, even while knowing it was impossible to do so without automatically painting the social meaning of the sea, the sky, the mountain. The blurred landscape — teasing us with the pleasures of the pastoral, and then letting it melt before our eyes — was nothing less than a moral argument for how to look and how to think when every route seemed barred. You had to do it ambivalently, self-critically, and while risking irrelevance or cliché. But it could be done.

"Seascape" (1975)

"Vesuvius" (1976)

Germany's history in the 20th century required a new way of "looking and thinking," that's for sure.  Hitler temporarily whitewashed his genocidal agenda for world domination by hosting the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch. The Third Reich removed anti-Semitic signage before the games began and even fielded a Jew on the home ice hockey team who agreed to play only if the Nazis spared his family  The Alps' white purity served as both metaphor and camouflage.

"Garmisch" (1981)

Here's the painting where Richter's new way of looking and thinking  hit me like a ton of bricks.  "Buche" is German for beech tree, and a forest of beech trees is "Buchenwald."  

Beech Tree (1987)

More Farago, the paragraph that propelled me to leave a mash note in the Comments section of the Times:

Today we are cursed, even more than when Richter painted the works in this extraordinary show, to live in a time of extreme image hyperplasia. Computationally produced pictures (there is nothing “artificially intelligent” about them) are now inundating every pipe and orifice of our personal and political lives. The image produced by prompting a large language model glitches as it propagates. It has no roots, no referents. And as these A.I. models produce imagery at a crazed clip, they are hollowing out the very basis of depiction — worming through the last little faith we once had in images to reveal us the world as it is.

Yet it's sometimes difficult for a casual viewer like me to distinguish between Richter's landscapes

"Venice" (1986)

. . . and his abstractions.

"Window" (1985)

(detail)

Two other works in the show had titles nodding to the church.  I'm still chewing on them although God knows I've always been skeptical of religion.

Cathedral Corner II (1988)

Obviousness is the hallmark of the art on the High Line.  Not that there's anything wrong with that. Onur celebrates environmentalists searching for new solutions in "Beacons," a large mural at W 21st Street

. . . and Derek Fordjour explores Black archetypes of "spectacle and commerce" such as "Seduction"

. . . and "Resilience."

I've always envied people who live in London Terrace and not just because it houses an Olympic-size swimming pool.  

I never noticed the street entrance to Mercado Little Spain before.  It's so much more appealing than the down escalator from the mall at Hudson Yards that Tom and I used after checking out Luna Luna.  We enjoyed a terrific tapas meal.

Flags representing all 48 World Cup competitors hang from the Vessel.

By the time I reached "The Light That Shines Through the Universe" by Tuan Andrew Nguyen on the High Line extension, we were back in Richter territory, perhaps because the Vietnames/American artist was born into historical circumstances just as complicated. His first solo show at the New Museum several years ago really struck a chord given my fascination with his native country. While the Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan inspired this stand-alone commission, he tweaks it by incorporating melted and polished ordnance gathered in the wake of America's military assault on North Vietnam, thus transforming the reconstituted figure with outstretched arms into a hopeful symbol.

Sculptor Charles Ray has given residents and office workers near Manhattan West something to ponder:  dressing Adam and Eve, the forebears of Christian humanity, in modern attire and casting them in stainless steel.  Is it just me or does Eve look suspiciously like Steve?

 

The West 31st entrance to Moynihan Station, just down the block, was new to me.  Look up and you'll see "The Hive" by Elmgreen & Dragset.