Paris

1971

Not on view

Returned to lender

This work of art was on loan to the museum and has since been returned to its lender.

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.

Artwork Details

Overview

Exhibition History

Title: Paris
Artist: Sigmar Polke (German, Olésnica (Oels) 1941–2010 Cologne)
Date: 1971
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: Image: 9 1/2 × 7 1/8 in. (24.1 × 18.1 cm)
Framed: 14 × 12 in. (35.6 × 30.5 cm)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Promised Gift of Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, in celebration of the Museum’s 150th Anniversary
Curatorial Department: Photographs