Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Table
Gerhard Richter German
Not on view
The artist identified Table (Tisch) as the first painting he made in the West after his arrival from East Germany, having destroyed others he painted previously. Based on a photograph from the Italian design magazine Domus, the "ready-made" image references the use of mass-culture objects by American artist Robert Rauschenberg. Yet the painting also highlights the gesture of erasure, as if to figuratively delete Richter’s skills as a state-sanctioned Socialist Realist painter. The obliterating motion signals a new future, a tabula rasa, while the work also looks back, in its sly nod to the Cubist painters’ punning on the French words table and tableau (painting).
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