IN A TYPICALLY WRY, feminist twist on the trauma of a midcareer retrospective, Rosemarie Trockel named her current exhibition at the Ludwig Museum “Post-Menopause.” Or rather, so she renamed it: Advance publicity referred to the show simply as “Menopause” and so do the accompanying catalogue texts, suggesting an eleventh-hour switch as the book’s cover and exhibition poster went to press. Retrospectives, of course, merely exaggerate the post hoc condition of all exhibitions—a morbid state refused by Ed Ruscha, who had the words “I Don’t Want No Retro Spective” embossed on the catalogue of his

From the beginning, Frances Scholz wanted her paintings to rise above the opposition between narrative and abstraction. All along, she has challenged herself with color, line, and pure form—the elements of painting. And yet she didn’t want to stick with just that. The world of her paintings was not meant to renounce all relationship to reality, even though she didn’t want to paint narrative pictures. But how can one carry this ambition off?

In her most recent paintings, Scholz has discovered a method that allows her to do so. Photos, symbols, and logos from the daily press provide her starting