GERHARD RICHTER
Edited by Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota
Citadelles & Mazenod. 416 pages. £45. ISBN-10 : 2386110591; ISBN-13
: 978-2386110597
Reviewed
by Tony Roberts
Two years ago my wife and I visited the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.* I
illustrated my sophistication when I tried to enter the Gerhard Richter rooms by
flashing my bus ticket instead of the gallery’s. At any rate, after polite
laughter all round, we entered the ‘100 Works for Berlin’ exhibition.
Fortunately a little confusion is almost a prerequisite for confronting the work
of Gerhard Richter. His is the art of posing questions. And Richter, the
alchemist of blurred photo-paintings and polychrome abstractions, does not offer
answers.
But that was Berlin; this is Paris. The first thing to say about the catalogue
from the six decade retrospective exhibition, Gerhard Richter, organised
by Fondation Louis Vuitton (October 17, 2025 to March 2, 2026) is that it is an
art object in itself: handsome and heavy, very well illustrated, with a large
clear font for the informative text. The exhibition involved 270 works he
created between1962 and 2024. The cover itself, Gudrun (1987), makes a
powerful impact.
To think of Richter is, for me, to remember the provocative work associated with
the war and 1970s German terrorism —the blurred or overpainted photographs, the
grey paintings that might be photographs but are not —and the beautiful, soft
focus canvases. The irony is, as the editors of the book point out, that ‘You
immediately recognize a Richter painting, but you don’t recognise his hand.
There’s no typical gesture, no given flourish, no sense of signature.’
He is Germany’s premier artist who, over the decades —he is 94 — has explored
the nation’s consciousness and conscience. He was born in Dresden, seven
years before the Second World War in which his father served and two uncles
died. Their sister, who suffered from schizophrenia, died also, but as a victim
of the Nazis’ euthanasia programme.
As a young artist he followed the political and social turbulence that the Cold
War brought, moving from Dresden (in the GDR) to Düsseldorf, West Germany, in
1961 (and since to Cologne) only two months before the Berlin Wall was built.
Thomas Mann observed that ‘Everything is politics’. Richter’s escape proved more
than geographical. He has endured three prevailing ideologies. First came the
fascist National Socialism, then the communist GDR and now Western capitalism
with its obsession with consumerism. Perhaps then it is not surprising, as Dr.
Steven Zucker wrote elsewhere, ‘His
art, while deeply concerned with politics and morality, rejects the very
possibility of answers, even of the idea that we can know.’
Gerhard Richter the
book is divided chronologically: 1962-70 Painting after Photographs; 1971-75
Questioning Representation; 1976-86 Exploring Abstraction; 1987-95 Sombre
Reflection; 1996-2010 New Perspectives in Painting; 2011-17 Elegies of Painting.
After that there are works On Paper, Sculpture, Atlas, Public Works. The Atlas
is what Richter calls his documentation: a collection of photographs and
reproductions, sometimes source material for paintings. In making it public,
Leah Dickerman explains, it ‘seems a declaration intended for his audience so
that we might know that his painting practice is paralleled by a process of
archive-making’.
In the early days, 1962-70, Richter reproduced in paint black-and-white family
photographs and those from newspapers, with the effect of partly blurring the
images or their contours. To the artist this had
a distinct purpose. He once said, ‘I blur to make everything
the same. Everything equally important and unimportant.’ And of these
photos he has painted otherwise so unerringly, he has also said, ‘I’m not trying
to imitate a photograph; I’m trying to make one.’
We see it in such droll painting as Klorolle (Toilet Paper), which
depicts a holder and roll with a soft focus monochrome style, or the altogether
more serious image painted of ‘Tante Marianne’(1965), or the evocative,
polychromatic photo-paintings of clouds and seascapes of the late sixties.
Interestingly Zucker wrote of Onkel Rudi (1965), ‘The artist has drawn a
dry brush across the wet surface of the nearly finished painting, and by doing
this, he obscures the clarity of the photograph, denying us the easy certainty
we expect. Richter reminds us that Uncle Rudi, like all images, promise and then
fail to bring us closer to the people, things or places represented.’
The 1971-75 period includes his work for the Venice Biennale (1972) for which he
made a monochrome study, 48 Portraits, of figures from the cultural past
of Europe and North America, portrait heads from Einstein to Wilde. The heads
incline towards the centre of the rows in which they were hung. These were
copied from history books. The period also included his ‘Inpaintings’, such as
the Rot-Blau-Gelb (Red-Blue-Yellow) series, abstracts of darkly tangled
colours.
Apparently Richter viewed abstraction as an obvious direction that evaded the
necessity to find suitable subjects to depict. The work from 1976-86 saw him
turn to more brightly coloured abstraktes bilder (abstract paintings),
here favouring reds in particular. This includes his Strich (auf Rot)
canvas (Stroke (on Red), reproduced in the catalogue as a fold-out
while
actually it is the length of a long wall and, to quote one critic,
‘contains what looks like one extended and enlarged yellow brushstroke on a
speckled red backdrop, but is really the work of highly precise small ones’. At
the same time Richter continued with the smaller scale and, for me, more
interesting works based on photographs he had taken. Among them is one of his
most famous, Kerze (Candle) from 1982, a beautiful, masterly meditation
on a simple lit candle.
According to Michael Lüthy it was at this time Richter made a breakthrough to a
direct process of image making, which did not necessitate sketches first and
could record abstraction naturally on larger canvases. This involved, ‘alongside
the brush, which remained important for the initial ground of the images and for
gestural accentuation, tools such as the palette knife, the roller and —with
increasing dominance —the squeegee came into play.’ It allowed for the easier
manipulation of print mass.
The period 1987-95 included another famous and beautiful image, of ‘Betty’ (a
soft focus oil painting based on a photo of his daughter —aged eleven at the
time — her head turned away) and fine small works like Flasche mit
Apfel (Bottle with Apple, 1988) and Besetztes Haus (Squatted House,
1989) but also the alarming monochrome group of fifteen studies of 18.Oktober
1977, which chronicles the fate of the Baader-Meinhof Group. It derived from
photos of the last days of the anti-Capitalist, anti-Imperialist terrorist group
that stunned Germany with its political violence in the 1970s.
Gudrun
(1987), for instance, makes reference to Gudrun Ensslin of the Baader-Meinhof
gang (aka Red Army Faction). Called the intellectual leader of the group —and
Baader’s partner— she died in prison. The painting’s political, violent red
dominates the black and yellow. Richter completed this a year before the RAF
series done in blurred photo style, which may refer back to his family-war photo
of Onkel Rudi. The arresting, sombre grey figure of Confrontation 1
(1988) also belongs to the 18. Oktober 1977 series.
Of these images Richter later said, ‘I tried to have some of their hope come out
in the paintings.’ That hope was not necessarily conveyed. Yet the TLS
reviewer Rod Mengham, for one, acknowledged it when he wrote: ‘Richter’s
paintings are nevertheless elegiac for the loss of young lives dedicated to a
utopian political project. The mixture of abstract hope and concrete
ruthlessness is left carefully unresolved.’ They raise again the times and
issues involved, the past being always present. Ambiguity and ambivalence, of
course, are Richter’s artistic stance.
The work of 1996-2010 includes some fine blurred works in subdued colour, a
self-portrait, landscapes like Gehöft
(Farm) and Schnee (Snow ) from 1999, and the more ambitious series of
abstracts. These include Cage (2006) —after avant-garde composer John
Cage —in which greys predominate with a little green, and Silikat
(Silicate, 2003), which abstracts in grey the chemical composition of the
minerals.
Central to both exhibition and book
(here page-foldouts) is a sequence of paintings titled Birkenau (2014).
It constitutes four large abstract canvases which began as photographic
reproductions from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The original
photos from 1944 were clandestine shots of bodies being burnt and of women on
their way to the gas chambers. Richter obscured these by his use of levels of
grey, red and green overpainting.
In an interview at the time of 18, Oktober 1977 he confessed, ‘I still
think it wouldn't be possible for me to make paintings of concentration camp
scenes. I tried to do it when I was young and even then I gave up immediately. I
just put the photos in the atlas where I collect all the subjects that have
interested me. The concentration camps were simply terrible, without any hope,
and that is something I can't paint.’
In conclusion, for the academically initiated the book has all the usual
cultural and philosophical allusions – references to Heidegger, Barthe, Derrida,
Wittgenstein, and artists like Lichtenstein and Duchamp—to theorize what is
described in the highbrow language of art criticism.
In response to the question whether art history was important to him, Richter
has been quoted as saying, ‘I am definitely inside of art history; it’s my
domain, my home.’ On the basis of the amply illustrated retrospective one would
have to agree. He certainly is a ‘classical painter’. This catalogue traces a
fascinating journey from depiction to abstraction, from brush to roller and
squeegee and back again and again back, all in the pursuit of remembering,
questioning (and withholding judgement on) German history and our times.
Inevitably expensive, it is nevertheless a treasure for the Richter enthusiast.
*****
*I think it significant to note, especially regarding Richter’s thematic
preoccupation with World War II and German guilt, that the Neue
Nationalgalerie’s website acknowledges the following: ‘No other museum lost as
many works through the actions of the Nazis as the Nationalgalerie (National
Gallery) did. In the period 1937 to 1945 the collection lost more than 500
works: they were either confiscated, sold, or lost in the chaos of the Second
World War…. When the Neue Nationalgalerie opened in 1968, its director, Werner
Haftmann, was an art historian who already had a major impact on the reception
of twentieth-century art. But his biography is an example of the continuity that
existed between the Nazi era and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).
Like many others, after 1945 he had chosen to conceal and deny significant,
disturbing information about his work for the Nazi regime.’