Tag: Gerhard Richter

Never Look Away (Werk Ohne Autor)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

What is art? Why do artists make art? These questions lie behind Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s latest film, like his earlier The Lives Of Others (2006) a German story exploring that country’s history and identity. It clocks in at over three hours, but don’t let that put you off because it needs that time to cover the considerable ground it does. Never Look Away spans the bombing of Dresden by the Allies in WW2, the liquidation of people considered by the Nazis inferior and therefore unfit to live and the very different worlds of post-war art schools in first East and later West Germany. This means it also spans two generations: those who were adults during the war, and those who were children at that time and became adults in post-war Germany.

Six year old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) wants to be an artist. He is taken to Dresden by his Aunt Elizabeth (Saskia Rosenthal from Lore, Cate Shortland, 2012) to see an exhibition of Degenerate Art mounted by the Nazis. He is fascinated. She tells him she rather likes the works displayed, but warns him not to tell anyone else. Later, he finds her playing the piano nude. She extols the mysteries of art to be found in life and exhorts him to “never look away”. She’s both creatively gifted and mentally ill. Being taken away in an ambulance to be incarcerated in a hospital she again issues that same exhortation. She will never leave the hospital system, thanks to Nazi doctors who have the power of life or death over their patients.

During the war, one night Kurt watches tin foil dropped by bombers around his home “to jam radio communication” before they drop bombs on Dresden in the distance, razing it to the ground.

After the war, Kurt – now a young man (Tom Schilling) – works painting signs until his boss, impressed by Kurt’s artistic skill, has him apply to Dresden art school where he falls in love with Ellie Seeband (Paula Beer) whose gynaecologist father (Sebastian Koch from The Lives Of Others) regards him as inferior stock and tries to destroy the couple’s relationship. After a promising career as a Socialist Realist painter of murals, Kurt with Ellie in tow defects from East to West Berlin a couple of months before the Berlin Wall is built. Kurt becomes a student at that hotbed of modern art Düsseldorf Kunstakademie and later a famous artist.

It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it’s difficult to give away much more without spoilers. The whole is based on the life of internationally renowned artist Gerhard Richter, who has read the script by the writer-director and made one or two suggestions which were incorporated. However, Richter has subsequently disowned the film (despite not having viewed it). Kurt’s tutor at the Kunstakademie is based on equally celebrated artist Joseph Beuys. Von Donnersmarck describes the piece as a work of fiction, although a great deal of the material appears to be historically accurate with names changed.


This is masterful storytelling with top-notch performances. More importantly, it seems to pick at the soul of a nation (Germany). There’s a lot of very nasty material festering beneath the surface and as you watch certain elements really start to get to you. Having watched it twice, this writer can attest to its being even more powerful on a second viewing: lots of little details elude you first time round as you grapple with the shocking overall story only to make themselves known second time around as you have a chance to take in the detail.

Never Look Away garnered two well deserved Oscar nominations earlier this year, for Best Foreign Film and Best Cinematography (it was shot by Caleb Deschanel whose impressive credits include The Black Stallion, Carroll Ballard, 1979). Alongside The Lives Of Others, which dealt with the Stasi (the East German secret police), it feels as if von Donnersmarck is building a panorama of German history through a series of historically grounded narratives of which this is only the second.

Finally, the German title Werk Ohne Autor translates literally as Work Without Author in reference to the artist’s claim that the photographs which form the basis of paintings “are just photographs”. This film suggests there’s a lot more to these apparently random images than that. Possibly the most effective slice of narrative storytelling we’ll see in the cinema this year. Supremely powerful, dirtylicious stuff.

Never Look Away is out in the UK on Friday, July 5th. On VoD on Monday, October 28th.

Never Look Away is in our list of Top 10 dirtiest films of 2019.

The Price Of Everything

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

On one level, Nathaniel Kahn’s latest is a filmmaker’s dream. Kahn, who made the compelling documentary My Architect (2003) about his father Louis Kahn, had an idea for something about art and money and persuaded his backers to let him just go out and start shooting. And he got some great material. The Price Of Everything is mostly vox pops, although that’s augmented with footage of the subjects doing what they do – artists working in their studios, dealers checking proofs of catalogues, buyers showing us artworks in their homes – and the odd bit of historical footage such as of 1973’s infamous Robert Scull sale.

New York taxi driver Scull was both a brilliant publicist of events and an avid collector of modern art by then unknown artists. His sale at New York’s Sotheby Parke-Bernet of some 50 of his paintings saw them sell for up to 50 times the price he’d originally paid. It established the idea that artworks could be traded for considerable profit, enraging the artists who made no money whatsoever from such sales. Although, as Scull points out in archive footage to painter Robert Rauschenberg, the new prices set the bar for future sales of such artists’ works which would benefit them too in the long run.

Celebrated artist Jeff Koons, whose ‘Rabbit’ casts an inflatable silver-coloured rabbit in solid steel, is here revealed as as much a player of the art market as a maker of art. Like a Renaissance artist employing a vast team of over 100 artisans, his studio produces a steady stream of work designed to sell to collectors at the highest prices. The contradiction doesn’t seem to worry him, but it leaves a nasty taste if you think art is something more than commercial product.

At the other end of the scale, abstract painter Larry Poons was praised in the late sixties for his widely collected Op Art dot paintings. But when he abandoned that painting style for something looser, his newer works failed to sell like his favoured ones. The market is shown to elevate its chosen art practitioners such as Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose 2012 painting Drown catapulted her into the ranks of top selling artists when it fetched around five times its estimate at auction in 2016.

Alongside the artists, the film parades a veritable circus of dealers, buyers and others. Sotheby’s Amy Cappellazzo protests that contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter (seen in the film, but not that much) is happy to take money from private buyers, but would rather his works went to galleries where the wider public can see them. This assumes neither collectors nor museums have hidden them away in storage.

Elsewhere, collector Stefan Edlis proudly shows off works in his collection as well as his battered, ‘J’-stamped passport that came with him when he escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager. He clearly believes art is meant to be seen and in 2015 rather than secreting them out of sight somewhere as their collection increased, he and co-collector wife Gael Neeson donated some 42 works to the Art Institute Of Chicago where the public could see and enjoy them.

This (and much more besides) may be fascinating stuff, but the problem is that Kahn doesn’t seem to know what to do with it once he’s shot it. The resultant mishmash of watchable character studies lacks any real central thesis to pull it together. If you can get past the obscene sums of money moving from collectors to dealers, some of the people pictured come across well and others less so.

I had the feeling that the prices paid for the art works had little to do with their intrinsic (non-monetary) value. Kahn seems to recognise that most artists do what they do out of compulsion, not to make money. However, the only contemporary artists seen here are those who have been rewarded handsomely in financial terms at one time or another. The Price Of Everything is ultimately about capitalism and trading much more than the artists, who mostly appear incidental to the selling process and all too often separated from their work once it’s sold.

The Price Of Everything is out in the UK on Friday, November 16th. Watch the film trailer below: