MEMORIES OF PAINT

“Gerhard Richter: Painting After All” is a swan song. Not for Richter, who at 88 years old is still producing new work and is widely considered one of the most significant living artists, but for the Met Breuer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s short-lived Madison Avenue satellite space. The Met famously brokered an eight-year lease on the Marcel Breuer-designed monolith with the Whitney Museum of American Art, its long-time occupant, in 2011. In 2016, after extensive renovation, the museum moved in with an exhibition of incomplete works made across some 500 years. Exhibitions devoted to modern and contemporary art and design—sectors of the art-historical canon the Met wished to be more readily associated with—followed. But now, as of 2020, the Met has decided to vacate the space several years early. “Painting After All” is the last show the institution will stage in the Breuer building--an exclamation point, rather than a period, at the end of the sentence.

“Painting After All” is the first survey