Showing posts with label Robert Storr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Storr. Show all posts

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Gerhard Richter's "September"



Everything that could be said today is being said today, and I won’t add words, or many of them.

In May, we were in the bookshop of the Contemporary Art Museum in Chicago, and I found Robert Storr’s September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. I don’t agree with everything Storr, the dean of the School of Art at Yale University, has to say about 9/11 in the book -- too much of the East Coast liberal in him, and too much of the Midwest conservative in me. But I was taken with Richter’s painting. I had had a post over at High Calling Focus earlier this year about a Richter work at the St. Louis Art Museum, but I wasn’t aware of this work.

It’s small, approximately 20 by 30 inches. And while it doesn’t have the clarity of so many photographs, and the tragedy, horror and pain reflected on so many human faces that day, for me it represents much about what happened that day, what happened to all of us. 


Painting: September by Gerhard Richter (2005), The Museum of Modern Art, New York