Siegfried GohrBegegnungen

Siegfried Gohr looks back on 50 years of encounters in the art world, in which he was active as a museum director (1978–1985 Kunsthalle Köln, thereafter until 1991 Museum Ludwig Köln) as well as professor of art studies and media history in Karlsruhe (1993–2004) and of art history in Düsseldorf (2006–2014). The great survey exhibition “Bilderstreit” of 1989 in the Kölner Messehallen, which he curated together with Johannes Gachnang, has become legendary. In our volume he guides readers anecdotally through his fields of interest – beginning with the account of a seminar trip to the USA as a young art student, including a visit to Quappi Beckmann, followed by his stays in Paris, where the international scene of museums, dealers and collectors cast its spell over him – an interest that also brought him into contact with the great collector Peter Ludwig well into the 1990s. His recollections of encounters, and time and again of friendships, with artists occupy a prominent place: he devotes individual chapters to Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Cragg, Günther Förg, Renato Guttuso, Antonius Höckelmann, Jörg Immendorff, Konrad Klapheck, Per Kirkeby, Markus Lüpertz, A. R. Penck, and Sigmar Polke. His manifold connections have placed him in the front rank of post-war art writers; alongside countless catalogue contributions, his publications include monographs on Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Markus Lüpertz as well as the editorship of the catalogues raisonnés of Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Max Beckmann and Jörg Immendorff. Siegfried Gohr writes in his preliminary note: “These recollections concern a vanished world that was still marked by optimism and a spirit of enterprise in the Rhineland. At that time people felt themselves to be at the centre of a cultural change that found visible expression not least in the new museum buildings. When, in the 1980s, there was talk of a new ‘obscurity,’ few can have suspected that this situation would still be capable of considerable intensification, right up to the present day.” The new, one might conclude from this, has a solid basis only if it is founded on historical knowledge – if it stands, as it were, on the shoulders of the old.

With individual chapters on: Quappi Beckmann, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Anthony Cragg, Günther Förg, Johannes Gachnang, Renato Guttuso, Wolfgang Hahn, Antonius Höckelmann, Jörg Immendorff, Fred Jahn, Knud W. Jensen, Konrad Klapheck, Per Kirkeby, Peter and Irene Ludwig, Markus Lüpertz, Elisabeth Nay-Scheibler, A. R. Penck, Sigmar Polke, Wolfgang Rihm, Isabelle Rouault, Johannes Wasmuth