Leon Black, Dan Loeb Show Up for the Met’s Gerhard Richter Show

(Bloomberg) -- “Painting After All” is the title of the Gerhard Richter show that opened at the Met Breuer Monday night.

“Purell Before All” is a fitting description of the coronavirus-conscious hordes that came out to see it, especially artist Julie Mehretu, who passed around a bottle of hand sanitizer at the dinner table.

Guests were careful about physical contact as they perused works by the 88-year-old German artist in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's final show in the Breuer Building, the former home of the Whitney Museum. The Frick Collection will temporarily move into that space while it renovates its building.

Tony James, Tom Hill, Blair Effron, John Pritzker, Daniel Brodsky, David Winter and Jim Breyer were among those declining to shake hands, offering elbows instead. Still, brushing up against their business suits was not the same as an encounter with Glenn Fuhrman's Dapper Dan Gucci tracksuit jacket.

Arriving early meant that Dan Loeb had the galleries almost to himself, which is one way to limit exposure to germs. Izzy Englander and Michael Stipe weren't far behind.

Leon Black and his wife Debra arrived at peak traffic, when those already in the galleries included Dean Baquet, a pregnant Chloe Sevigny -- who said she was moved by the portraits of Richter's children -- and Alice Tisch.

Richter's 1962 “Table (Tisch)” opens the show, a painting with portions that look erased “as if to figuratively delete Richter's skills as a state-sanctioned Socialist Realist painter,” according to the wall label. Richter made it after leaving East Germany for the West, shifting from Socialist Realism to Capitalist Realism.

For Richter, it was an art movement. For the guests, the phrase “Capitalist Realism” is at the core of current political debates.

Of Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders, Blackstone's James wondered on the eve of Super Tuesday if “he's the right person to be president of the United States.” James was a supporter of Pete Buttigieg, who dropped out Sunday.

“Pete was great, and he was very nice, he called me Friday and he called me today,” James said. “I can't complain about the personal attention.”

(Disclaimer: Michael Bloomberg is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News.)

The show, which opens Wednesday and runs through July 5, culminates with Richter's 2014 Birkenau series. That work presents four documentary photographs of the death camp, paintings of the photographs and digital reproductions of the paintings. Richter started out with a figurative approach but the final images are abstract.

“He thinks that all paintings are pictures,” said Robert Storr, who curated the Museum of Modern Art's 2002 Richter retrospective. “He thinks all abstractions are actually images of some kind, and therefore they are on par with other things that represent something. They are both made with paint, they both lie.”

That approach helped break a divide that had started in the 1950s between abstract and figurative painters.

Of her own paintings, currently on view at the New Museum, Jordan Casteel said, “You can find it all within: Figuration is the mode in which people approach my work, but there's abstraction within it.”

One of Casteel's paintings in the New Museum show has been promised to the Met as a gift by Hill -- a promising sign for the Met's future in presenting and collecting contemporary art.

That future is back at the Met, when it rebuilds its modern wing, museum Director Max Hollein said during a dinner in the Met's Engelhard Court.

Even so, Hollein said that the match of Richter with the 1960s-era Breuer building was “a perfect union.”

That might not be the case when the Frick temporarily moves in its Old Masters paintings and European sculptures.

“We can't fight the space, we have to accept it,” Frick Collection Director Ian Wardropper said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill, Peter Eichenbaum

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