The American magazine “the New Yorker” has just published a story about the German film Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, whose new Film “the factory, without author” is based on the life story of painter Gerhard Richter. The portrait of the photographer Hendrik Kerstens, to the left of the “New Yorker” to make, reminded in turn of a painting and has been shared in social media in many cases. Professor Wyss, of what you, as an art historian, if you look at this subject?

Jörg Thomann

editor in the Department “life,” the Frankfurt General Sunday newspaper.

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The image is deliberately designed as the black-and-white and reminiscent of portrait photographs of the 19th century. Century, known by the French photographer Nadar, in which the people sat even on a chair. It was still a necessity so that you do not wobbled at the longer exposure times. The photo has, in this respect, but is also a reference to Gerhard Richter, as well as judge a iron has a distance to the Medium, and the Medium, to some extent, as a Medium, cited. He makes the Photographic visible by alienated the photography easy antiquierend.

you can understand this photo is so ironic?

. I can see it in the played tensing of the facial features: Since someone wants to look evil, but you notice immediately that it is. The imperious could Occur at any time move in a Smile. What is striking, of course, is this hair wreath. The head in halo is a rhetoric of deification: When Zeus is angry, then his radiate head of Curls as a sun. It looked that way, when August the Strong was carrying Fixed his sun mask: a face that was framed by a halo.

You may also consider the voluminous allonge wigs from the times of Louis XIV Is such an extraordinary hairstyle is an expression of Power or, at least, of power of consciousness?

It’s all about the Fashionable. He takes in a style, which we also recognize in Richter’s paintings, the polyphony of the associations. It also reminds us of the überzüchtet-elegant figures in a Thomas Gainsborough of the 18th century. Century. Since the weeping willow in the Background and the pond with the Rousseau’s missing here, of course, the monument. However, the Wig-a Gainsborough-reverence-like for me. Very important but the dog, of course.

It is likely to be Donnersmarck’s own dog, a Whippet, the bears according to “New York” is the name of Tsarevich.

The dog is from the point of view of the art historian, the attribute of the Intellectual. It goes back to the humanist iconography Tradition, to see in the dog, the philosophical animal, the melancholy sniffer that captures the scent of the truth. It’s an iron will, however, also to recognize of contrast: a character head, jovial-corpulent, the other ascetic and delicate.

Melancholic, the animal, in fact, what’s apparent attitude is perhaps to me for a dog is quite unusual. I have the not at all art history Association that you want to help with upward stretched legs, as a father, a small holding a child, the man to relieve himself in the outdoors.