Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.

[Teapot]

Sigmar Polke German

1968, printed 1982

Not on view

One of the most expressive and idiosyncratic European artists to investigate photography in the late 1960s, Sigmar Polke had a deep, if short-lived, fascination with the medium and its metaphysics. This photograph is among the artist’s earliest and finest surviving works with the camera. His subjects are blanketed by stains, intentional processing errors, and crafty technical mistakes. These hallucinatory effects create an intriguing if challenging visual confection of order and chaos, description and destruction, realism and abstraction—all produced by the premeditated warfare that the artist waged on the print. The striking, often magical beauty of Polke's photographs derives not from any inherent descriptive qualities but rather from their murky and transcendent glimpse of the supernatural.