sheet from Gerhard Richter’s Atlas 1989
While not, strictly speaking, an artist’s scrapbook, Richter’s monumental Atlas nevertheless borrows many of the form’s tropes.
For a start, as seen in this excerpt, it features cuttings in a way that formally recalls Höch’s Album, though Richter, who is working with a much longer twentieth century, is able to mobilise narrative rhymes and juxtapositions for very different ends. And again, in the wake of Hoch, Richter draws upon everyday print-media, with faded newspaper contrasting with more starkly black and white images, as Höch contrasted the latter with sepia ones. Then again, the spread is organised around a centre-fold (breached by the image of the stag), which references the scrapbook form, though this breach also speaks of the single-page form that each of Atlas’s ‘sheets’ (the official term for them) takes.
