Marcel Broodthaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde (1980).Engaging with both formal and historical paradigms, Buchloh situates himself productively between the force fields of formal theory and historical narrative, embracing the discrepancies and contradictions between them and within individual artistic trajectories.ĬontentsFormalism and Historicity (1977)
Although these essays are less monographic than those in Buchloh's earlier collection, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, two essays in this volume are devoted to Marcel Broodthaers, whose work remains central to Buchloh's theoretical concerns. He discusses conflicts resulting from historical repetitions (such as the monochrome and collage/montage aesthetics in the 1910s, 1950s, and 1980s), the emergence of crucial neo-avantgarde typologies, and the resuscitation of obsolete genres (including the portrait and landscape, revived by 1980s photography). Written over the course of three decades and now collected in one volume, they trace a history of crucial artistic transitions, iterations, and paradigmatic shifts in the twentieth century, considering both the evolution and emergence of artistic forms and the specific historical moment in which they occurred.īuchloh's subject matter ranges through various moments in the history of twentieth-century American and European art, from the moment of the retour à l'ordre of 1915 to developments in the Soviet Union in the 1920s to the beginnings of Conceptual art in the late 1960s to the appropriation artists of the 1980s. These influential essays by the noted critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh have had a significant impact on the theory and practice of art history.
Richly illustrated in color, dense with insights that represent half a lifetime of engagement with Richter's work, this book will stand as the definitive, essential examination of a major contemporary artist.Įssays spanning three decades by one of the most rigorous art thinkers of our time grapple with formal and historical paradigms in twentieth century art.
In a series of essays that proceeds chronologically, Buchloh begins with Elbe (1957), seeing it as a foundational moment in Richter's confrontation with Socialist Realism, and goes on to consider such works as Octo(1988), the series of representational photo-based paintings of Baader-Meinhof members Richter's glass works and the late group of Birkenau Paintings (2014). What emerges from Buchloh's detailed analysis of Richter's key works is a far more complex set of painterly strategies than has been previously assumed, strategies that have inverted and relativized all the principles of the modernist and even the postmodernist painterly aesthetic. 1932) is shown by Buchloh to be a unique and singular artist, outside and beyond every other formation contemporaneous with his own development and evolution. A painter in an age that disdains painting, a German confronting the impossibility of representing the historical trauma inflicted by his country upon the world between 19, a European artist in dialogue with his American counterparts, Richter (b.
Buchloh maps the unfolding of Richter's ever more complex and contradictory lifework. In this first full-scale monograph in English on the German painter Gerhard Richter, the distinguished art historian Benjamin H. The first full-scale monographic study in English of one of the most important artists of the second half of the twentieth century.