This text is based on the book of the exhibition "Auf Leben und Tod - Do or Die"

Life in Death: The Portrait in Painting and Photography
Roland Krischel

In April 1842 Edgar Allan Poe published a short story that was later to become famous as “The Oval Portrait.” This Gothic novel in miniature took up just two pages in Graham’s Magazine. The first-person narrator, having been wounded by bandits, takes refuge for the night in an abandoned chateau in the Apennines. In a remote turret room he discovers, among numerous other “modern” paintings, the extraordinarily lifelike portrait of a young woman. A small volume in which the paintings are described has been left lying on the pillow and tells the story of this picture on canvas. It is a portrait painted by a famous artist of his young wife, who was as cheerful as she was beautiful. The suggestion is that it was painted in this very turret. For weeks she sat patiently to him, and as the portrait took on more and more life, this same life gradually left the sitter. After the final brushstrokes were applied, the painter himself stood “aghast” before the uncanny presence in the portrait, and turned to regard his beloved – “who was dead”.

By explicitly comparing the oval portrait to works by the American portraitist Thomas Sully, Poe clearly anchors his short story in the art-critical context of the time, around 1840. In stark contrast to the portrait he describes, portraits in medieval pictures, such as of donors in altarpieces (p. 71), were identified less, if at all, by physiognomic likeness, but rather by their position within the total composition, by the relative sizes of the (smaller) sitters and the (larger) saints, by the clothing, attitudes and gestures of the sitters, who were often portrayed praying, and not least by the addition of coats of arms. In the Renaissance the portrait as genre took on a new, autonomous significance, thanks partly to the collecting activities of humanist scholars. The Venetian Renaissance painter Titian devised portrait formats and formulae whose influence could be felt into the 19th century (p.112). Reactions to his famous self-portrait (in Berlin) can be found in works ranging from Ingres’s Portrait ofMonsieur Bertin to Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Romantic Movement, however, led to new notions of what a portrait should be. Thus in Poe’s story what we have is not a donor portrait, a state portrait or an official portrait, nor can we call it a wedding portrait (p. 82) or a postmortem portrait (p.118). At most we can discern echoes here (not least in the landscape) of the genre of the idealized female portrait (p. 92), so important in Renaissance Italy. In contrast to the classic portrait, Poe’s oval portrait was not created in response to a specific occasion. There is no corresponding event that would have firmly rooted the portrait in the life of the sitter. It serves not the sitter, in other words, but the portraitist and his art: l’art pour l’artiste. In a sense a path is being paved here for the self-sufficiency of the (often anonymous) photographic portrait (pp. 73, 80, 94/95, 96/97).

A Little POEtology of the Photographic Portrait
The Promethean aspiration of the painter, the lengthy process of creating the lady’s portrait and the tragic outcome of Poe’s story are reminiscent of Honoré de Balzac’s short story, written a good ten years earlier, entitled “Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu,” which ends with the destruction of the pictures and their painter. The threat to, indeed the elimination of, the sitter by the act of portraiture in its turn recalls Champfleury’s literary caricature of the collector and patron Alfred Bruyas, who, through the countless portraits of himself that he had commissioned, allegedly suffered a creeping loss of identity. Champfleury’s “Sensations de Josquin,” however, did not begin to appear until 1856, in other words, considerably later than Poe’s story.

The latter’s temporal propinquity to the spectacular public announcement of the daguerreotype on August 19, 1839, is worth noting. Just a few months later, in January 1840, no less a person than the future author of “The Oval Portrait,” in a very short but extremely far-sighted article in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger entitled “The Daguerreotype,” introduced the new process to an American readership as “the most important, and perhaps the most extraordinary triumph ofmodern science.” Certain passages reveal that Poe was not merely passing on second-hand knowledge, but had personally informed himself about the practical technique, if not also the history, of the daguerreotype. At the heart of his article is the statement that the processwas “infinitely more accurate in its representation than any painting by human hands.” Three things are worth noting about this crisp formulation: firstly, the deliberate and expressly emphatic use of the term “infinitely,” with all its philosophical repercussions, which we cannot discuss here; secondly, the indirect characterization of photography as acheiropoieton (a picture that has not been created by human hands, such as the Turin Shroud or the Sudarium of Veronica); and, thirdly, the comparison with painting, stated in the form of the paragone, the classical rivalry of the arts. I shall return to the last point, the declared object of our exhibition, later. First, though, I should like to issue a reminder that in the 20th century the concept of photographs as acheiropoietoi gained considerable weight. We might think not only of Susan Sontag’s oft-quoted thought experiment on the alleged relic status of a (fictitious) photographic portrait of Shakespeare, but also of the earlier thoughts of André Bazin on the “synthesis of relic and photograph in the Turin Shroud.” This idea took on a literary form in Michel Tournier’s 1978 short story “Les suaires de Véronique,” and its scientific form thanks to Nicholas Allen, who in the 1990s attempted in a number of studies to show that the Turin Shroud was indeed a photograph produced in the high Middle Ages, some time between 1260 and 1320.

Even though “The Oval Portrait” deals at first sight with the power and hubris of the painter, closer inspection reveals various details pointing to a hidden discourse that relates to the new medium of photography: for example the dark room (the narrator is cut off from the world by closing the window shutters) as the scene of the action, or the significance of the (artificial) light (he moves the candelabrum, which brings the picture into, and then out of, view). Particularly revealing is the metaphor used in the first version of the story, dating from April 1842, to describe the psychological state of the narrator, namely “galvanic battery,” a device that (as Poe certainly knew) was used in the daguerreotype process to prepare the copper plate or, to be more precise, to apply the silver layer by means of electrolysis. It would not be an isolated case for a 19th-century man of letters to criticize one medium in the guise of another. The theoretical vacuum that existed following the photographic “big bang” might have been reason enough for a corresponding displacement in Poe’s story. In his article of January 1840 he had himself pointed out that: “The results of the invention cannot, even remotely, be seen [...].” Poe may, therefore, have seen a certain logic in regarding the implications of the new technique (which he immediately understood to be self-evidently art) indirectly, by choosing to protect himself from the gaze of the dreadfully beautiful Medusa’s head through the reflecting shield of the familiar art of painting. (Tellingly his first-person narrator immediately closes his eyes, as if by reflex, on his first fleeting sight of the shockingly lifelike portrait.)

If we interpret “The Oval Portrait” as an early confrontation with the repercussions of the daguerreotype process, and in particular of its implications for portraiture, we immediately recognize a number of ideas that played a fundamental role in the later art-critical or art-theoretical discussion of photography and its relationship to other visual arts.

The first thing to mention in this connection is the specific use of the Romantic doppelganger motif. The portrait is so lifelike that it comes across not so much as a particularly successful likeness of the sitter, but rather usurps the latter’s place in life. This is made possible by a vampiric process, in which the life spirits of the sitter pass into her portrait. This idea corresponds on the one hand to numerous ethnological reports, above all from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concerning non- European peoples’ fear of photography. The “theft of the shadow” or of the soul, and consequently the penetration of the medium into the body of the person photographed, are even countered by specific defensive gestures, such as covering the mouth. On the other hand Poe’s particular variation on the doppelganger theme brings out at a very early stage the idea of the replica-like link between photograph and reality, the “umbilical cord” between the picture and the depicted subject, in other words the idea of indexicality.What Henry Fox Talbot described as “magic,” Poe in his article of January 1840 already calls “most miraculous beauty.” The key term in this article, repeated several times, is “truth.” Compared with an ordinary work of art, the “photogenic drawing,” according to Poe, “discloses [...] a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”

It is precisely this aspect of photography, which was both particularly admired but also felt to be eerie, that prompts an association with death.WhenMoritz Thausing said in 1866 that photography had “something cadaverous” about it, what he meant was still the absence of a soul (compared, for example, with the handmade copperplate engraving). In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, written in 1890, Oscar Wilde turned the tables, for here the picture has more soul than its sitter. It is worth noting that Wilde repeated Poe’s displacement gesture. The demonic portrait of Dorian may be painted (a brilliant version of this was created in 1943–44 by the American painter Ivan Le Lorraine Albright as a prop for Albert Lewin’s film adaptation), but the supernatural link between picture and person depicted points clearly, here too, to the indexicality of photography. The outcome of this novel resembles that of Poe’s short story: Painter and sitter are dead; only the portrait continues its radiant life. In the 20th century André Bazin and Roland Barthes would talk of an “embalming” (for example, of time) by photography or the photographer, as the case may be. “Life in Death” was the first title of Poe’s short story. This corresponds to the idea developed by Barthes of human photography as the living image, unnaturally present, of a dead person. Siegfried Kracauer even regarded the photograph as a ghost that destroyed rather than preserved. A further, philologically well-founded conceit relating to the concept of the “lethal photograph” is due to Daniel Arasse, who made an analogy between the camera and the guillotine.

Painting and Its Double
In his story Poe places special emphasis on the rivalry between the two brides of the artist: his newly wedded young wife on the one hand and painting with all its existing rights on the other. Strangely out of tune with the compliance of the artist’s wife is her “wild eye,” an expression Poe uses in the first version of the story. If we interpret this motif correctly Poe’s story turns out to be not just a vague reflection on a new medium, but a precise allegory of the competition between painting and its young rival with the wild (not to say evil) eye, namely photography. If the younger rival is the loser in this duel, this is not least a result of Poe’s displacement of his media critique from photography to painting, the latter bearing less its own, perfectly familiar theoretical burden than that (at the time far lighter) of her younger rival.

By a strange ellipsis, namely the concealment of the actual theme, Poe has the figures oscillate between perpetrator and victim, victor and vanquished. One is reminded of the way a daguerreotype oscillates between negative and positive, depending on the angle of the incident light. So did Poe fear the end of painting, or even wish for the death of photography? It is not easy to answer this question. In fact, it is wrongly formulated. In his article on the daguerreotype process, he hinted that he knew about its history, and mentioned the key concept, namely the camera obscura. At the latest since the early 17th century, mobile camera obscuras were used to fix a projected image on translucent drawing paper. David Hockney, and following him, various other authors have recently emphatically reminded us of the importance of such optical aids for the OldMasters. In view of the close media-historical entanglement of painting and photography, Poe may well have been of the opinion that the death of one could also mean the end of the other. After all, his first-person narrator is in an abandoned chateau where he meets not only no young artist’s wife, but no artist either.

The fact that the electrified lyrical narrator thinks of the “galvanic battery” (see above), the fact that the story is particularly short (corresponding to the exposure time of a daguerreotype), along with Poe’s enthusiastic article in Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, suggest a spontaneous identification on the part of the author with the new medium. This increases the significance of a further detail: The narrator is very precise in his description of the soft focus of the feminine contours, which, in the oval portrait, imperceptibly merge with the deep shade of the background. This passage has a metapoetic quality insofar as it reflects the deliberately “soft” literary focus on the actual theme. Over and beyond the implicit comparison between soft focus in literature and the visual arts, there is another element here, an interesting one in our context. For alongside the link between femininity and sfumato, which has continued into the world of today’s advertising, we already have a hint of the role of soft focus in the early discussions concerning the status of photography. At the latest during the photographic movement known as “pictorialism” it was to become an important argument for the status of photography as art, and in more recent photography it also plays a major role (pp. 99, 100). In Poe’s short story it is not only indexicality that is already (indirectly) examined, but in parallel we see the incipient demand for an aesthetic view (and aesthetic composition!) of photography, and going hand in hand with this, an awareness of its cultural, social and economic coding.

Times of Exposure
The shortness of Poe’s story forms a nice contrast with its theme of duration. The length of time needed to create a portrait was a talking point long before the invention of photography. When in 1548, during the negotiations for a marriage with Francesco Gonzaga, a portrait of the fifteen-year-old Archduchess Katharina, a niece of Emperor Charles V, was sent toMantua, a courtier hurriedly added a note of apology from Innsbruck: The young lady, it said, looked more serious in Titian’s portrait than she did in real life, doubtless because the long sessions of sitting to the artist had cast her into a meditative mood. Whether the sitter herself could have confirmed this explanation seems questionable at the very least. Particularly in the case of high-ranking or important personalities, the great portrait painters of the 16th century used mostly only to make drawings or colored sketches, at most cursory studies in oils, of the sitter’s head, which were then, in the absence of the client, transferred to the actual panel or canvas and completed according to the prevailing conventions of art. The clothing, so important as an indication of rank and status, could be studied separately, for example draped over a dummy. It was a relatively new idea in Poe’s time that particular authenticity could be bestowed on the image of a sitter by a direct transfer on to canvas during the act of portraiture. When Paul Cézanne, in the autumn of 1899, painted a proto- Cubist portrait of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had to sit to him for three and a half hours every morning for this purpose, the artist is said to have urged him to sit as still “as an apple.” Cézanne is purported to have set up extremely shaky supports for his models, which threatened to topple over at the slightest movement. An endeavor to immobilize life is evident here. If one thinks of the French term for the genre that we call “still life” (obviously hinted at by Cézanne’s reference to the apple), namely “nature morte,” the relevance is clear. One is reminded of the idea of “lethal photography” (see above). And indeed, Cézanne’s preparations are reminiscent of procedures to which the portrait- victims of the early daguerreotype process were required to submit, such as having their head screwed into a frame. It is only against this historical background that certain portrait strategies employed by Andy Warhol become recognizable as such. With his “screen tests,” which lasted between three and five minutes, and which he originally called “film portraits” or “stillies” (in contrast to “movies”),Warhol not only created, so to speak, “living pictures.” He also used filmic means to artificially extend, to the length required by a daguerreotype, what by then had long since become much shorter exposure times in photography. EvidentlyWarhol was trying, as he later did by using a Polaroid camera, to drag out for as long as possible the impersonal, automatic and thus uncoded moment of portrait production. Ideally, the “reproduction” character of the portrait would be increased as a result. This procedure became a genuine test of endurance for his friend and patron Henry Geldzahler, to whom he devoted a ninety-nine-minute silent-film portrait in 1964. Only after filming was finished did Geldzahler realize the degree to which he had embarrassingly revealed himself under the steady gaze of the stationary 16mm camera with which Warhol had left him alone: “I went through my entire history of gestures. Viewing the film later on, they gave me away completely […].” In a certain sense the result can be seen as the “sudarium” of Henry Geldzahler. A photographic portrait of Andy Warhol (p. 85) by Christopher Makos responds to this sadistic portrait technique, which reaches fromWarhol via Cézanne right back to Poe, by giving the artist a “crown of thorns,” thus turning the perpetrator into the victim. While in his 1840 article “The Daguerreotype” Poe had still talked of an exposure time of between ten and thirty minutes, depending on the weather and time of day, the very next year sitting times could be reduced from fifteen to five minutes. This shortness of the exposure time lends the punchline of Poe’s story, slowly emerging as it does (like the image on the silvercoated copper plate used in the daguerreotype process), its grim humor: If the young bride had married into a French or an American city instead of a chateau in the Apennines, and if the art-obsessed husband had been a photographer rather than a painter, “none of this would have happened,” because with an exposure time of five minutes, it is impossible to portray anyone to death. Italy may be the cradle of art, but from the point of view of the new age of photography, and from the distance of the New World, it very much embodied “Old Europe.”

Photography and Its Double
Edgar Allan Poe could of course have had no inkling of the importance the landscapes and townscapes of Italy had or were to have for the pre- and early history of photography, particularly with respect to its interaction with painting. With his important (albeit not uncontroversial) 1981 exhibition “Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography,” Peter Galassi delved into the question of why photography was not invented earlier, for after all the camera obscura had long been in use, and the chemical prerequisites for the new process had been known since 1727 at the latest. He sought the answer not in the history of science, but in the history of seeing, by attempting to show that certain seemingly constituent features of photography (such as its “cropped” character and its directness, but also the fundamental endeavor to create a two-dimensional image of the three-dimensional world) were already emerging in the landscape oil sketch at the start of the 19th century. His catalogue illustrations open with views by a number of French and English painters of Rome, the Roman Campagna and Naples. The fact that landscape (traditionally, and especially vis-à-vis history painting, a genre of lowly status) was able to serve as a field of experimentation in early photography was demonstrated by Wolfgang Ullrich’s concentrating on soft focus, which as a stylistic element was transferred from landscape to portrait photography (and to other subjects as well). The forms of reciprocal influence between the media of painting and photography that were possible at a very early stage can be seen in the work of Camille Corot, whose early Roman landscape studies dating from the late 1820s were claimed by Galassi to be photographs avant la lettre, and who, thirty years later (again in Rome in some cases) experimented more intensively than anyone else with cliché-verre, a hybrid of etching and photography. At the same time famous French artists working in every conceivable style, for example Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet, were now using photography as a motif reservoir and compositional aid. The much adduced example of the photograph taken by the photographer (and trained painter!) Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, which Courbet used as the model for his female nude in his famous Atelier (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), was, incidentally, discovered by the artist in the home of Alfred Bruyas.

The interaction between painting and photography, which subsequently developed in an ever more complex web, cannot be gone into in any detail here. Painters such as Edgar Degas, Franz von Stuck, Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Francis Bacon, Arshile Gorky and Larry Rivers used, as their models for portraits and other depictions of human beings, photographs that they had found, commissioned or taken themselves. Conversely, the American painter Edward Hopper, for example, had such a lasting influence on photography (and film) that a number of exhibitions have been devoted to this very subject. Man Ray (as a “one-man movement”), décollagistes, Photorealists and Pop artists plumbed the theoretical and practical limits or overlaps between photography and painting, while in the late 20th and early 21st centuries too, the paragone between painting and photography has continued. The photographer Thomas Struth, for example, no longer treats painting as subject, but as (historical) object, whereas Gerhard Richter declares photography once more to be the ground of painting, in both senses. Photographs processed by artists can also be found, for example, among the works of Daniele Buetti (p. 65) andMicha Brendel (p. 87). A new, hitherto almost undreamed-of convergence with painting has emerged since the late 1980s with the development of digital photography (p. 83). Pixels are movable in a way comparable to oil paints; it is striking that the relevant icons in graphics-editing programs are still based on the old, analogue instrumentarium of painters and craftsmen.

In parallel with these developments, a considerable body of theory has arisen since the late 1960s, which has even been viewed by authors such as Douglas Crimp as the discovery of photography as opposed to its mere invention in the 19th century. The feedback between theory and practice is appearing at ever shorter intervals, and in an ever more direct fashion; artists such as Victor Burgin, Jeff Wall and Wiebke Leister embody in personal union the linkage between photographic practice and the history and/or theory of art. The battle zone is now extending to architecture and sculpture: Not only digital coding, which embraces everything, including the human genome (pp. 80, 101, 102/103), but also the rapid culmination of attempts to perfect 3D technologies, are opening up new, still barely visible horizons to a multilateral paragone.

Comparability of the Non-contemporaneous?
Like its predecessor “Hotel California” and unlike, for example, the show “Painting on Photography: Photography on Painting” (Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, 2005), the exhibition “Do or Die” operates with a temporal distance between the media, in that it builds on an encounter between two collections. At the heart of the collection of paintings built up by Ferdinand Franz Wallraf are works from the late Middle Ages (pp. 53, 71) and the Early Modern period (pp. 57, 69, 88, 118). Later acquisitions have extended the present- day collection of the museum into the early 20th century; among the newest paintings in the exhibition is Wilhelm Leibl’s Girl at the Window, which dates from 1899 (p. 98). The photographs in the Lutz Teutloff Collection date from the 1960s to the present. When the collector himself cites 1968 as a symbolic date, the connotations are explicitly political (see Interview pp. 45–49).While this was a period that witnessed heavy theorizing and the appearance of Photography with a capital “P,” these developments played no significant role as a collecting criterion, at least not consciously.What we should note at this juncture is the humanist, Enlightened impetus as the most important common feature shared by the collectors Wallraf and Teutloff.

In their respective structures the two collections, like all great collections, have been determined by a variety of circumstances, ranging from the personal predilections of the collector via the history of taste to the particular works of art that are/were available. It is clear that Teutloff prefers photography as “legitimate art,” that is, deliberately staged photography as opposed to documentary, let alone amateur, photography. Even the works of Robert Lebeck (p. 70), Adam Nadel (pp. 55, 104) or Stanley Greene (p. 99), which originated as reportage, evince an extraordinarily high degree of pictorial and compositional awareness. It is as though the collector were following the dictum of Bazon Brock, according to which “everything that is not an unambiguously and deliberately photographic form of action” is tantamount to a faking or falsification of reality. In view of the structure of our exhibition, it is self-evident that attention is not centered on the influences of photography on painting (which would apply only to 19th-century works in the case of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum), but on the inverse influence: The direct juxtaposition of paintings and photographs will, it is hoped, enable us to test whether, and if so how, old pictorial formulae, picture-rhetorical strategies, and compositional and pathos formulae have been taken up by photographers. Sometimes the reference of photography to painting is evident, even though the Wallraf collection does not always include the precise painting that was known to the photographer or that he or she had in his or her mind’s eye (pp. 54/55, 56/57, 72/73, 82/83, 88/89, 92/93, 116/117). In other cases the references suggest themselves strongly (pp. 62/63, 84/85, 90/91, 118/119) or are at least plausible (pp. 74/75, 114/115). Recourse to religious and secular iconography is roughly equally balanced, although we should note that among the artist (self-)portraits in photographs there is a predilection for pictures of the suffering Christ as models (pp. 84/85, 88/89, 90/91). Often within the photographic work we see a consciously staged, mostly ironic tension between old form and new content (pp. 59, 62, 73, 83, 93, 116). In certain instances formal or thematic breaks with tradition are striking (pp. 61, 79, 101, 102/103). They lay a trail to themes such as “body awareness” or “sexual identity,” to which, with the exception of the political body, the Old Masters would not have been able to devote any attention (in the sense of aisthesis, meaning “perception”). In contrast to the present catalogue, which, being a book, favors a dialectical confrontation in the style of a diptych, the exhibition often creates garlands of argumentation among a number of paintings and photographs. Almost casually, or on the side, so to speak, revealing dialogues within the medium of photography also often emerge in the process, some of which this publication has managed to preserve (pp. 78/79, 120/121).

Body and Clothing, Skin and Space
Lutz Teutloff himself gives the “body” as the main thematic criterion for the selection of “his” works (see Interview). In this connection the unspoken question arises of the dignity of the human being and his or her depiction in photographs: Heroicization (pp. 61, 62), genetic manipulation (p. 83), unexpected or unwelcome breaches with the discourses of youth, beauty (p. 68) and old age (pp.113, 115), exposure (p. 79), breach of taboo (p.120) and (black) humor (p.121) constitute the multifaceted answer. In addition, closer inspection of the collection reveals a further, comprehensive theme directly related to the body: that of clothing and fashion, of the “dresscode” and of “self-fashioning,” in the literal sense. One is tempted to link the conspicuously prominent place of this theme in Teutloff’s collection to the life of the collector, in particular to his experiences in the textile industry.We see the first and last shirts (pp. 59, 119), wedding and funeral aesthetics (pp. 77, 93), the construction of sexuality through clothing (p. 59), fashion as body styling (p. 93) and the reflection on fashion old and new along with its marketing strategies (pp. 65, 73, 89).

Of the numerous nudes in Lutz Teutloff’s collection, very few are actually naked. Often it is the tattooed skin that, as a non- Euclidean surface for the inscription of social and cultural codes, forms the apparel of the sitter (pp. 66, 79, 113). “Ce qu’il y a de plus profond dans l’homme, c’est la peau” (The most profound thing about people is their skin): This aphorism, which may be due originally to Jean Cocteau, but was used in 1925 by André Gide and in 1932 by Paul Valéry, is back on a roll at the start of the new millennium. Recently (2005–06) it even provided the title for an exhibition and colloquium at the Musée des Beaux- Arts in Valenciennes. In the Teutloff Collection the “skin” phenomenon is positively “conjugated” through all its voices and moods: Sitters apply makeup to their skin (p. 95) or, stretching it to the utmost, pull it out toward the beholder (p. 61). Artists duplicate the skin (p. 59) or subject it to pseudo-dermatological studies (p. 111). As the “battlefield” for passions and addictions, the skin evinces scarifications (p.89), traces of devastation (p.68) or of love-play (p. 74).

A key work in many respects is the portrait of the student Andrea Kummer by Herlinde Koelbl (p. 66). The body of the sitter, which bears witness to a variety of artificial changes (from hairdying via tattooing to piercing) is reflected on the one hand, like Titian’s Venus (p. 92), in a mirror, and on the other in pictures of the Madonna, Christ and the seemingly crucified Jim Morrison. As pictures-within-a-picture, these devotionalia surround the “illustrated woman” like a second, somewhat larger skin, or maybe (see the wrinkled black wallpaper) a skin that she has sloughed. The room, of which the mirror gives us an almost allaround view, thus becomes an integral part of the portrait. We cannot avoid a comparison with the similarly eloquent room in which François Boucher portrayed Marie-Louise O’Murphy (p. 75), which, however, does not seek to be interpreted portraitlike as it is, but so to speak in the continuous form, as the matrix of a sexual encounter actual or imaginary.

Alongside the otherwise comparatively neutral backgrounds of the paintings on display, the particular, and particularly varied, significance of the rooms in the Teutloff Collection photographs is striking. Sometimes the decorated body, as with Koelbl, continues in a sense into the room (p. 113), whereas in other instances, by contrast, the room in the background serves as a foil for the forms of the body (p. 52).While St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Lebeck’s photograph (p. 70) and the tent in Nadel’s (p. 55) represent historical spaces, Hans Op de Beeck (p. 77) and Aziz + Cucher (p. 101) create allegorical spaces. Gerd Bonfert (p. 105), in turn, in a picture that contains almost no space, succeeds by dint of the allusion to Ariadne’s thread in evoking a complete (metaphysical) labyrinth.

One recurrent motif in the photographs on display is the window. Even for Leon Battista Alberti, this was the metaphor of the picture. Whereas in the works of Larry Towell (p. 52), Greene (p. 99) and Bill Jacobson (p. 100) it marks primarily the temporal boundary between the photographed present on the one hand and the future or the past on the other, it refers elsewhere (pp. 55, 68, 111, 115) to the membrane between inside and outside, the individual and society.

In no way would I want this brief tour d’horizon to be misunderstood as an attempt at classification. Every individual work in the Teutloff Collection is (like every individual work in the Wallraf collection) a microcosm in itself and forms at the same time part of the worldview of an individual artist. Unlike our “Hotel California” exhibition, which was dominated by large complexes of works (Desiree Dolron, ThomasWrede), it seemed advisable here to provide some space for brief, individual interpretations, in the List of Works (pp. 122–56), of the exhibits selected for the catalogue.

The Exhibition as House of Leaves
The temporal distance between the paintings and photographs displayed together ranges from about 80 years (pp. 112f.) to 560 (pp. 52f.). In each case it is at least several generations, indeed usually several epochs. Alongside the differences in size between painting and photograph (in one case dramatic: pp. 62f.), which are not immediately apparent in the present catalogue, account must of course be taken, when viewing and interpreting our compilation of works, of the “distance” between the media. It is well known that painting and photography have not only quite different histories and theories (albeit overlapping or intersecting here and there), but also divergent production and distribution conditions. In order on the one hand to allow a direct comparative view, and on the other to avoid the merest suspicion of a naive, ahistorical one-to-one comparison between painting and photography, it seemed sensible to take certain precautions in the preparations for the exhibition. As the condition humaine, the representation of existentially fundamental situations such as the beginning and end of life, bliss and suffering, confidence and despair, forms the dominant theme of the Teutloff Photo + Video Collection, it seemed natural to lay out the exhibition circuit in approximation to the rhythm of human life as marked by becoming and departing, by growth and decline (see p. 39), whereby when leaving the last of the nine rooms one returns to the first, and thus, so to speak, attains rebirth.

1. Pregnancy – Birth – Childhood (pp. 52–59)
2. Youth (pp. 60–67)
3. Beauty (pp. 68–75)
4. Couples (pp. 76–83)
5. Suffering and Pain (pp. 84–91)
6. Reflection (pp. 92–99)
7. ”House of Leaves” (pp.100–107)
8. Old Age (pp.108–15)
9. Death (pp.116–21)

The heart of the exhibition ground plan is the “House of the Red Door” (ad rufam ianuam, formerly Obenmarspforten 38), first documented in 1205, excavated from 1990 to 1998 and partly preserved in the exhibition area of the Wallraf-Richartz- Museum. As the plan shows, the structure in which this archeological zone is housed is not parallel but diagonal to the exterior walls of the museum building. Insofar as the exhibition architecture is, for this once, oriented to the House of the Red Door, it gives the impression of being “unhinged” vis-à-vis the permanent museum architecture. As a building within a building, the House of the Red Door forms Hall 7 of the exhibition. Its superscription and theme, “House of Leaves,” refers to the eponymous cult book published in 2000 byMark Z. Danielewski. This horror novel, which uses all manner of unconventional typography, and is open, as it were, to the reader as a “walk-in” volume, is an early example of the “spatial turn.” It focuses on a house, which is larger inside than out. On different levels of reality and discourse, the polyphonic book develops a literally abyssal image of human existence, not without reflecting on the media possibilities of its representation, from the written word via photography to film, in a truly ambiguous manner. The scope of the author’s cultural-historical reception and processing of subject matter is extensive. The expeditions into the vast labyrinth of the house are reminiscent of Dante’s journey through Hell, and because of their typographical unfolding of space, they even anticipate the latest discoveries of the Dante scholar Theodore Cachey, who compares the funnel-shaped space of the Inferno, as narrated, to the verse architecture of the narrative space on paper, which is constructed on geometric principles. The efforts, connected with the expeditions into the intestines of the House of Leaves (p. 101), to make a film record of the uncanny are directly reminiscent of the spirit photography of the 19th century. Not only the mirror-image arrangement of the chief protagonists of the novel (a tattooist and a photographer) but also the omnipresent theme of space, open up multifarious references to the subject of and the exhibits in our exhibition. Its architecture takes up the title and the central image of the novel, and thus extends it into a real, albeit largely ephemeral exhibition space, which is likewise “bigger inside than out.” The actual exhibition rooms are extended by “virtual” rooms (represented purely by lines) “in” which the (actually directly juxtaposed) paintings and photographs nevertheless meet on various planes (see pp. 42/43). On these (thus perspectively anatomized) exhibition walls, temporal intervals come across as spatial, small pictures as large ones, and vice versa. This playful disconcertment creates a perceptual situation that continually underlines the media-determined differences between the pictures on display, and at the same time enhances the “experience” character of the exhibition. Not least, this spatial conception is of course a meta-staged mise-en-abîme, a reflection on the paradigmatic role of the museum as a space of perception and memory. Our homage to House of Leaves closes the circle of argument, for after all Mark Z. Danielewski is in many respects a legitimate successor of Edgar Allan Poe. There are explicit allusions to Poe in Danielewski’s novel, although it must be noted that this allusion also refers to the author’s sister, Anne Danielewski, who created the album Haunted as a musical counterpart to House of Leaves—under the pseudonym “Poe.”