Painted in 1961 the year East German authorities begin the construction of the Berlin Wall permanently closing off access to the West for the next 28 years. As the picture can suggest the red wall has just fallen like a large concrete hand sign comes swinging down from above, hitting ground at angle speed and with a deafening sound strikes out the western front. The music stops. Exit the music conductor Walking Against a Red Wall. His arms crossed firmly above his waist. An emerald green tailcoat worn tightly like the straps on a straitjacket. A mixture of hope and stupor. With a clenched jaw he looks away leaving behind the music score, his conductor’s baton firmly held in his hands.

William Theophilus Brown (American, 1919-2012) William Theophilus Brown was born in Moline, Illinois, and came from a long line of intellectuals who socialized with authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David

Thoreau. He studied piano at Yale and graduated in 1941, at which time he was drafted into World War II. Following his discharge, he studied painting at the University of California, Berkeley and moved between the artistic centers of New York City and Paris. During these travels, Brown met a large number of accomplished artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti, and Willem de Kooning. His growing success, as well

as his continued relationships with other talented artists, all contributed to Brown becoming recognized as a prominent member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

The Bay Area Figurative Movement consisted of San Francisco Bay Area artists who abandoned working in the predominant style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of combining abstract and figurative painting during the 1950s and 1960s. This re-introduction of figurative subject matter, such as landscapes, still lifes, portraiture, and nudes, diversified the formal concerns of Abstract Expressionism. The tension that developed between abstraction and figuration opened a range of new possibilities, which is notable for the variety of subjects and techniques the artists pursued.

In Review, four German chancellors—Gerhard Schröder, Helmut Schmidt, Angela Merkel, and Helmut Kohl—sit in front of American artist Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950–51), an abstract expressionist painting that is a centerpiece of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Andreas Gursky’s photograph recasts the painting behind glass and under the gaze of both viewers and the German heads of state. Mimicking Newman’s vertical zip, Gursky’s window features a mullion that splits the field of vision. By adding provocative observers and window details, Gursky presents an open-ended reflection on the values of Western art and political traditions. During the Cold War, abstract expressionism was covertly utilized by the U.S. government to symbolize creative prosperity nurtured by American freedoms, as opposed to the Soviet Union’s socialist realism, which was fostered under communist ideologies. Made last year, Review calls for viewers to consider global powers in a time of extreme precariousness, when propaganda wars hardly seem outlandish.