Tal Sterngast. Twelve Paintings

This reverie on 12 masterpieces from Berlin's celebrated Staatliche Museen unites the art of the past with the questions of the present. Each chapter in this book by German photographer and art critic Tal Sterngast is dedicated to one painting from Berlin's Gemäldegalerie collection of European paintings from the 13th to 18th centuries. In Sterngast's idiosyncratic selection, painting becomes a medium for the formulation of modern subjectivity. What are the paradoxes within which art is made by women? How does the primordial drive to destroy works of art affect contemporary art discourse? Where did painting's struggle against the picture begin? Why does the Wild Man from early German Renaissance still haunt us? And why does it matter whether Johannes Vermeer used an optical device for his paintings?