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Lot Essay
"Therein lies a moment of pause or questioning. Because the viewers are reflected in their activity, they have to wonder what they themselves are doing at the moment". (T. Struth, quoted in “Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh”, Directions: Thomas Struth Museum Photographs, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 1992, unpaged)
Known for his keen observation of people and how they interact with a given space, Thomas Struth’s photographic practice continually mines the documentary mode as it relates to the history of art. Tokyo National Museum is an especially evocative work that fits into the artist’s most notable series, the Museum Photographs. Created as a means of connecting the viewer of the photograph with the subjects depicted, works such as this allow the audience to realize that they too are part of the crowd captured on film. “The photos illuminate the connection and should lead the viewers away from regarding the works as mere fetish objects and initiate their own understanding or intervention in historical relationships,” Struth noted, “Therein lies a moment of pause or questioning. Because the viewers are reflected in their activity, they have to wonder what they themselves are doing at the moment” (T. Struth, quoted in “Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh”, Directions: Thomas Struth Museum Photographs, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 1992, unpaged). By problematizing the act of looking and highlighting the disconnect between touchstones of art history shown existing in a room full of tourists, children, and everyday people, Struth sets up a conversation about how we exist with art and how museums, until recently regarded as solely cultural trusts, are more often sites of spectacle and commodity.
One of his most highly-regarded series, the initial grouping of Museum Photographs was taken in a short span of time between 1989 and 1990. After this, the artist turned his attention to other projects with only a few forays back into his previous subject for the remainder of the decade. In 1999, however, Struth visited the National Museum of Art in Tokyo to see Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People on loan from the Louvre. Raised above the crowd in a darkened room, the painting was fully lit so that it had all the impact of a movie screen. Taken by this unconventional display tactic, Struth came back the following day to make a photograph that positions a crowd of onlookers viewing this revolutionary French painting from the shadows. Sparking his interest once more, Tokyo National Museum became the first in a trio of Museum Photographs that included Alte Pinakothek, Self-Portrait (2000) and National Gallery 2 (2001). Together, they act as an afterword on Struth’s work within the institutions and serve as a fitting formal endpoint for the series.
Struth studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the 1970s, and like his instructors and their proteges (known as the Düsseldorf School and including artists like Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer), he often favored a more depersonalized depiction of people and society. The Bechers themselves were known for their black-and-white images of industrial buildings like water towers in postwar Germany, and Struth followed this architectural tact for some time as he made photographs of various streets throughout Europe. The Museum Photographs broke this trend as the artist realized the possibility of depicting a contemporary scene (the museum audience) in the same frame as a historical subject (the painting they are viewing). By doing so, he conflated ideas of traditional portrait painting and contemporary photography, noting that, “there arose the idea to bring these two things, with the medium of reproduction, the currently appropriate medium, to the same level; to make a reproduction of a painted image and at the same time to produce a new image in which real persons of today are shown” (Ibid.). Tokyo National Museum emphasizes this juxtaposition even more as it extracts Delacroix’s painting from its original environment and creates something more anachronistic and telling of our present day.
Known for his keen observation of people and how they interact with a given space, Thomas Struth’s photographic practice continually mines the documentary mode as it relates to the history of art. Tokyo National Museum is an especially evocative work that fits into the artist’s most notable series, the Museum Photographs. Created as a means of connecting the viewer of the photograph with the subjects depicted, works such as this allow the audience to realize that they too are part of the crowd captured on film. “The photos illuminate the connection and should lead the viewers away from regarding the works as mere fetish objects and initiate their own understanding or intervention in historical relationships,” Struth noted, “Therein lies a moment of pause or questioning. Because the viewers are reflected in their activity, they have to wonder what they themselves are doing at the moment” (T. Struth, quoted in “Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh”, Directions: Thomas Struth Museum Photographs, exh. cat., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., 1992, unpaged). By problematizing the act of looking and highlighting the disconnect between touchstones of art history shown existing in a room full of tourists, children, and everyday people, Struth sets up a conversation about how we exist with art and how museums, until recently regarded as solely cultural trusts, are more often sites of spectacle and commodity.
One of his most highly-regarded series, the initial grouping of Museum Photographs was taken in a short span of time between 1989 and 1990. After this, the artist turned his attention to other projects with only a few forays back into his previous subject for the remainder of the decade. In 1999, however, Struth visited the National Museum of Art in Tokyo to see Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People on loan from the Louvre. Raised above the crowd in a darkened room, the painting was fully lit so that it had all the impact of a movie screen. Taken by this unconventional display tactic, Struth came back the following day to make a photograph that positions a crowd of onlookers viewing this revolutionary French painting from the shadows. Sparking his interest once more, Tokyo National Museum became the first in a trio of Museum Photographs that included Alte Pinakothek, Self-Portrait (2000) and National Gallery 2 (2001). Together, they act as an afterword on Struth’s work within the institutions and serve as a fitting formal endpoint for the series.
Struth studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the 1970s, and like his instructors and their proteges (known as the Düsseldorf School and including artists like Andreas Gursky and Candida Höfer), he often favored a more depersonalized depiction of people and society. The Bechers themselves were known for their black-and-white images of industrial buildings like water towers in postwar Germany, and Struth followed this architectural tact for some time as he made photographs of various streets throughout Europe. The Museum Photographs broke this trend as the artist realized the possibility of depicting a contemporary scene (the museum audience) in the same frame as a historical subject (the painting they are viewing). By doing so, he conflated ideas of traditional portrait painting and contemporary photography, noting that, “there arose the idea to bring these two things, with the medium of reproduction, the currently appropriate medium, to the same level; to make a reproduction of a painted image and at the same time to produce a new image in which real persons of today are shown” (Ibid.). Tokyo National Museum emphasizes this juxtaposition even more as it extracts Delacroix’s painting from its original environment and creates something more anachronistic and telling of our present day.