Carl Heidenreich, *Untitled*, c. 1958–65. Mixed media on Japanese paper and hardboard. Collection of Patricia Recendez.

There remains scant information about Carl Heidenreich’s riveting and eventful life. For those interested, it can be a daunting endeavor to put a narrative to the copious archive of painted works he left behind. In an effort to reinvigorate the conversation around Heidenreich work, and especially the spectacular works-on-paper from his last decade of prolific invention and experimentation, the Carl Heidenreich Foundation is thrilled to announce the upcoming publication of a new resource for scholars and the public. The new publication, titled Karl/Carl: Three Takes on Heidenreich, advances the existing scholarship on Heidenreich’s work by examining his late works of the 1950s–60s through the lens of his years in exile and his immigration to the United States. The volume will be out in print this upcoming year.

The publication will be the first volume focusing on Heidenreich’s career since Gabriele Saure’s 2004 monograph Carl Heidenreich, produced to accompany an exhibition of his paintings alongside Hans Hofmann’s at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and the Goethe-Institut in New York. Saure assembled the first comprehensive study of Heidenreich’s life, tracing the development of his style from his years at Hofmann’s School of Fine Art in Munich to his glancing interaction with the Bauhaus in Weimar and his introduction to Heinrich Blücher and revolutionary politics in Munich, Berlin, and Potsdam.

Karl/Carl: Three Takes on Heidenreich builds on Saure’s research to consider Heidenreich’s late abstractions within the larger historical context of the shifting geopolitical context of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, of postwar immigration, and of the establishment of a German émigré community in Manhattan around the two poles of Hannah Arendt and Oskar Maria Graf.

Assembled under three section headings (Essays, Antecedents, and Recollections), the book includes new scholarship by emerging voices in art history Kathryn Barulich, Jackie Valle, and the Carl Heidenreich Foundation’s director Christopher Squier. These essays are presented alongside earlier texts commenting on Heidenreich’s work, notably Hannah Arendt’s introduction to a 1964 exhibition at the Karmeliterkloster in Frankfurt, and the memories and accounts of Heidenreich’s circle of friends and collectors, assembled by Alla Efimova in a series of interviews in 2016–17 and published here for the first time.

A foreword by cultural historian Rachel Schreiber and an introduction by Squier ground the project’s scope within the interdisciplinary and political foundations of art scholarship over the past two decades, drawing parallels between Heidenreich’s work and the writing of literary figures like Arendt and the Frankfurt School scholars as well as the Antillean philosophy of Édouard Glissant.

In the section of essays, special attention is paid to how Heidenreich’s works activate the visual and nonvisual senses. In Barulich’s essay, “Weathering Abstraction,” Heidenreich’s paintings are understood as developing storm systems, combining water, pigment, and substrate in murky and tempestuous combinations of atmospheric form that recall his years in exile, in which the harsh conditions of the elements occupied his personal letters. Squier’s essay, “Listening to Abstraction: On Postwar Silence in Aesthetics, Sonics, and Dreams,” considers the role of silence as an auditory and political phenomenon in postwar visual and textual works; he likens Heidenreich’s paintings to acts of refusal, introspection, and indecipherability that, rather than bear witness as testaments to atrocity, instead provide respite in their nuanced compositions. In her deeply philosophical essay, “Ma(r)king Myth, Imagining Nowhere: A German Exile’s Alaskan Archive,” Valle brings a phenomenological approach to vision and perception, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and Invisible and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to call into question our understanding of reality and memory as understood through the transparencies, opacities, and layered pools of watercolor pigment in Heidenreich’s Alaskan Series.

Within the section of Recollections, Efimova lends an account of her role in the formation of the Carl Heidenreich Foundation as its first director, reminiscing on the process of gathering together the stories and individuals marked by Heidenreich’s work. It is in this spirit of gathering together stories and approaches, past and present, that the Carl Heidenreich Foundation presents Karl/Carl: Three Takes on Heidenreich to the public, sharing dozens of previously unpublished photographs of the artist’s work and recontextualizing his life within the vicissitudes of the postwar period.