William Wegman – Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Videotapes

The German and English editions of the catalogue respectively bear the titles William Wegman Malerei, Zeichnung, Fotografie, Video and William Wegman. Paintings, Drawings, Photographs. They were produced for a group of ten European and American art museums that included Kunstmuseum Luzern, Centre Pompidou, London’s ICA, and Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. The curatorship, concept and supervision of (...) the catalog and the relative retrospective in 1990 of the work of William Wegman was entrusted to Martin Kunz, ex- director of Kunstmuseum Luzern and the founding director and curator of the New York Kunsthalle. (The Kunsthalle was in the near vicinity of Wegman’s studio, and Martin Kunz was able to visit it frequently, and thus to follow the course of the development of the artist’s work.) Two publishing companies were involved: Du Mont and Abrams, of which the later, along with Martin Kunz, developed the concept for the graphic and editorial layout of the two editions of the book. The printing presented on the occasion of the exhibition at Centre Pompidou bore a different cover, but the content remained the same. The exhibition visited the ten museums in the period from 1990 (the year of its first presentation, at Kunstmuseum Luzern) to 1992: Kunstmuseum Luzern; ICA, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; ICA, Boston; Whitney Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Houston; Ringling Museum, Sarasota; Neuberger Museum at the State University of New York, Purchase, N.Y. At the end of the tour, the show had been seen by more than one hundred thousand visitors at the Whitney Museum alone, and thirty thousand catalogues had been sold. The success of the show was so great as to lead several times to its renewed presentation, and it presented Wegman’s work (this was his first retrospective at an American museum) in the light of all the various fields in which he operated, inclusive of painting. The success of the catalogue was further confirmed by the decision of the part of Du Mont and Abrams to issue a hardback version as well, for exclusive distribution in bookstores.