Object Notes

Cosima von Bonin rarely acts alone, enlisting various participants in her social circle and beyond to complete aspects of her work. The final product is a kind of collaboration, and the artist is the overseer.

Resplendently perfect, The New Beetle demonstrates the artist's painstaking process - it takes him years to complete a work.

Splattered ink stains sheet music from German composer Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen. It is believed that Strauss composed the piece to mourn the bombing of the Munich Opera House in 1945 and the Nazi destruction of German culture.

Karel Funk’s meticulously painted portraits both embrace and defy notions of portraiture. Traditionally, a portrait articulates the visual facts that define a specific individual. In Funk’s hands, this model is inverted, and the “portrait” becomes a vehicle for questioning the specificity of identity.

In the Equilibres series Peter Fischli and David Weiss cast everyday objects as players in a succession of elaborate, dynamic, and sometimes humorous scenes. Each object, many on the verge of collapse, is depicted in a fleeting moment of precarious balance.

This etching is part of The Miseries and Misfortunes of War series, a collection of etchings created by Jacques Callot during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), a religious conflict that involved the

In this etching, Eugène Béjot explores one of the new vistas created by Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the second half of the 19th century.