Some Questions

In a conversation with Anna (my landlady) last night, I started thinking a bit more about Richter's work. I realized that he might be playing a bit with the iconic aspect of some portraits (Einstein, Kafka, Wilde and Mahler come to mind) - those that are almost immediately recognizable, and others, placed alongside them, that are much less so. Many of the individuals he included were not household names, that is. They might well have been, however, to more localized groups; I wondered, for example, how many Europeans (or Americans of a certain class, even) would know John Dos Passos.

Also, we wondered together about whether it would be immediately apparent that, in our case, the portraits were all of women and non-white men. In Richter's case, Lisa (and others) as we were standing there noticed almost immediately that there were no women (that there were no men "of color" was not as immediately remarked on, I think). So, I think our proposed set would be an interesting litmus test of how transparent are such portraits that link a kind of face to a concept (crime, weakness, culture, power, etc.), how ready we are to simply accept a face for ideas. That is, Anna and I wondered, how readily might someone say of our set of 49 Tafeln "Where are the white men?" in the same way she asked "Where are the women?" of Richter's set?