Anyone looking for material to include in a time capsule of the 1980s will want to con sider the catalogue of the Sigmar Polke retro spective. This show, comprising some one hundred works by the contemporary Ger man painter, was organized by the San Fran cisco Museum of Modern Art, where it opened last November before traveling to Washington, D.C. Both the show and its deluxe four-color catalogue were the brain child of John Caldwell, curator of painting and sculpture at SFMOMA, and together they epitomize certain trends in the art world of the last decade.[1]
Of the catalogue’s six essays, only one, Katharina Schmidt’s on Polke’s drawings, makes any serious attempt to analyze and evaluate the artist’s work—that is, to do what catalogue essays are supposed to do. The others are mere exercises in public relations, some of them highly extravagant.
None is more extravagant than the one by the show’s curator. Mr. Caldwell’s essay, the keynote of the catalogue, is a classic of its kind, an abject surrender to the standard cliches about “great” artists. Chief among these are the notions that Polke’s artistic achievement is so radical, so profound as to break decisively with the continuum of modern art history; that his work is free from any of the established conventions of artistic language or style; and that his achievement has written the final chapter to the very tradition of art history from which he osten sibly stands aloof.
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