August 2016

The Easyjetting generation up all night in Berlin is too young to remember, but it was just three decades ago that another German city, one with Roman roots and a Dada heart, laid its claim as Europe’s center for contemporary art.

Museum Ludwig, designed by Peter Busmann and Godfrid Haberer, and Cologne Cathedral. Photo: Lee M.

We Call It Ludwig
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
Opens August 27

The Easyjetting generation up all night in Berlin is too young to remember, but it was just three decades ago that another German city, one with Roman roots and a Dada heart, laid its claim as Europe’s center for contemporary art. In the 1980s more than a hundred galleries sprung up in Cologne, most in the narrow streets of the city’s Belgian Quarter; Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter had moved to town, as had a young generation of indecorous painters, led by Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. Magazines like Spex and, later, Texte zur Kunst promoted the Cologne aesthetic; the Buchhandlung Walther König, not just a bookshop but a publishing house, became a broadcasting tower for Cologne’s ascendancy. And in 1986, a new museum opened to house the collection of the chocolate manufacturer Peter Ludwig and his wife Irene — at the time the biggest collectors of contemporary art in the world. When the art market crashed in the early 1990s, the great arts journalist Deborah Solomon traveled to Cologne and asked Richter to give his impression of the New York art scene. The answer the painter gave was “Kaput!”

With reunification, the tide started to go out. First the artists moved east to Berlin, then the dealers followed. Max Hetzler went first, in 1994; Sprüth Magers and Esther Schipper left too, as did the Texte zur Kunst team, though Galerie Buchholz is still around. But the Cologne legend endures. David Zwirner, who grew up above his father’s gallery in Cologne, recently mounted an excellent show on the city’s links with New York; the gallery Greene Naftali has concertedly exhibited Cologne artists such as Michael Krebber and Josef Strau. And the Museum Ludwig remains Germany’s most important institution for modern and contemporary art, though it has changed too. Its US-vs.-Germany orientation — conditioned partly by its founders’ initial collection of Pop art, the largest outside America — has wisely given way to a more international view, one encouraged by its current director, the thoughtful Yilmaz Dziewior.

So time for an anniversary show: an uncommonly reflexive one, actually. Most of the 25 figures invited to participate in “We Call It Ludwig” look directly at the institution that put Cologne on the map and then outlived its decade of preeminence. Along with a few Kölner celebrities — the grave Richter, the omnivorous Rosemarie Trockel, the peripatetic Candida Höfer — the show will also include American artists with a German hookup: for example, the conceptual photographer Christopher Williams, a longtime professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf up the road. Or else Andrea Fraser, whose 2001 performance Kunst muss hängen saw her deliver a word-for-word recapitulation of a drunken speech by Martin Kippenberger. (In German!) Most surprising is the inclusion of Hans Haacke’s Der Pralinenmeister (“The Chocolate Master”), a forensic dissection of Peter Ludwig’s business activities, employment dodges, tax abatements, and government liaisons. It is not exactly the hagiography you might expect from a museum anniversary show, but then Cologne never gets tired of self-scrutiny.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Moon of the Pleasure Quarters, no. 24 of the series One Hundred Views of the Moon. 1886.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Moon of the Pleasure Quarters, no. 24 of the series One Hundred Views of the Moon. 1886.

 
Della Robbia
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Opens August 9

For a century, the Florentine family dominated Renaissance sculpture with their opalescent white figures and refined colorful reliefs. Much mimicked though never paralleled, the Della Robbia technique of glazing terracotta (a proprietary affair) has been lost since the 15th century — but survives in the masterpieces of this show, which includes numerous rare loans from Italy.

 
Hans Jakob Oeri
Kunsthaus Zürich
Opens August 12

A fitting counterpart to the Francis Picabia show that opened here in June, this first-ever retrospective aims to reassess a once celebrated Swiss neoclassicist who now looks decidedly kitsch. Oeri trained under Jacques-Louis David and spent eight years in Russia, where he veered from his master’s rigor and painted bleeding-heart portraits and romantic watercolors.

 
Bernard Larsson
Museum für Fotografie, Berlin
Opens August 19

An exhibition to puncture the Neverland fantasies of Berlin in summer. The Swedish-German photographer’s black-and-white pictures present the city as a bifurcated conflict zone, with concrete slabs and barbed wire running down its core. Larsson’s work of the 1960s documents the unease of both sides of the city, a reminder of those tenuous times when JFK, in solidarity, asserted himself as a donut.

 
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: One Hundred Aspects of the Moon
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Opens August 20

“When I have sad thoughts,” wrote the 10th-century poet Lady Ise, “even the moon’s face, embroidered on my sleeve, is wet with tears.” The same lunar proclivity is on view in this rare exhibition of a full suite of ukiyo-e prints by Yoshitoshi, the last great figure in Japanese printmaking. Almost every one of the hundred boldly colored image of soldiers, scholars, geisha, or monks features a solid, undifferentiated white circle of moon: a modern burst in a medium soon to fall into desuetude.

Bernard Larsson. Mocking the Persian Imperial Couple. 1967. © bpk, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the photographer.
Bernard Larsson. Mocking the Persian Imperial Couple. 1967. ©
bpk, Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the photographer.

 
Jessica Stockholder
Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York
Opens August 25

For her third solo at her longtime gallery, the Chicago-based Stockholder continues to play with mass and perception through her choreographed assemblage of protean, manmade objects. Stockholder’s colorful repurposing of the found and manufactured finds meaning in the Frankensteinian relationship of part to whole.

 
Richard Deacon
Museum Folkwang, Essen
Opens August 26

Deacon showed his monumental retrospective at the Tate two years ago, but now we have a quiet review of the Welsh sculptor’s works on paper, almost none of which have been shown before. The drawings and prints show the nuanced vision of a singular man, as opposed to the self-described fabricator, whose intricate large-scale creations have required the efforts of glassblowers, woodworkers, and Glasgow shipbuilders.

 
Cristof Yvoré
FRAC PACA, Marseille
Opens August 27

A welcome hometown celebration for the hushed, rigorous art of this painter from the south of France, who died three years ago, aged just 46. Yvoré was better known in Belgium, where his small-scale still lives were appreciated alongside those of Luc Tuymans, Michaël Borremans, and the other figurative painters of Antwerp’s Zeno X Gallery.

 
Richard Learoyd
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Opens August 30

The first US retrospective for a British photographer whose studio is actually a giant, walk-in camera obscura. Learoyd makes his exactingly detailed, often Gothic portraits and still lifes — each one is unique, since there aren’t any negatives — by placing photo- sensitive paper in one room and his subjects next door, then opening the lens between them.