- Catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, November 5, 2015. - January 24, 2016. "When in 1970 with his 'Cremation Project, ' Baldessari destroyed all the paintings he had done between 1953 and 1966, he opened the way for a new concept of the picture, one that mediates between the visual world of the mass media and the motific canon of art history. As one of the most important representatives of Concept and Media Art, he developed an unmistakable concept of the picture oscillating between painting and photography, between text and image." John Baldessari is an important American conceptual artists and the last member of the American post-war avant-garde. His large collages, created for the Frankfurt exhibition, draw on masterpieces at the Städel, from Lucas Cranach the Elder to Maria Lassnig. A multifaceted opposition and juxtaposition of old and new art is revealed by the texts and photographs. By destroying all of his paintings created from 1953 to 1966 in 1970, John Baldessari (*1931) paved the way for an independent and unmistakeable pictorial style between painting and photography, text and image. He employs classic Modernist pictorial strategies such as montage and the integration of everyday elements in order to confront these with artistic practices of the post-war avant-gardes, such as discourses on consumerism and the media. Baldessari intertwines media and materials and thereby combines entirely distinct groups of artistic subjects. In the process, the unambiguousness of the pictorial language has given way to a multi-layered readability.