John Baldessari: The Städel Paintings

In 1970, California-based conceptual artist John Baldessari (b. 1931) destroyed all the paintings he’d produced from 1953 to 1966, paving the way for an independent and unmistakable pictorial style that lay between painting and photography, text and image. The last member of the American postwar avant-garde, Baldessari is known for creating collages featuring found photography and appropriated images—often pieced together to suggest a narrative or riddle, but typically in a way that reveals...