Did Gerhard Richter Make His Fortune Strictly Through Art

Amongst THE LOOSE COLLECTION of essays, notes, comments, and fragments that William Carlos Williams entitled The Embodiment of Knowledge one finds "The Beginnings of an American Educational activity (Affiliate 2. The Address Toward Collegiate Study. The New in Art.)," in which the poet remarks about an art student's "difficulty in knowing."^one Whatever the student has learned almost what has been washed in the by volition, according to Williams, amount but to "that which is . . . of no use to him, in fact naught less than a barrier which he must surmount if ever he is to do anything that can be called serious work." Throughout his life Williams guarded confronting an imposition of the past on the present: "At that place is an antagonism between the ages," he wrote elsewhere; "Each age wishes to enslave the others. Each wishes to succeed." To Williams the ballast of the past proves especially fatal in art, "the category about responsive to living weather condition." "A painter like Cézanne or Titian, or a statue every bit good as some past Phidias, is a complete triumph to the learned, and worth nada whatsoever." In 1966, under completely dissimilar circumstances only for similar reasons, Gerhard Richter expressed the same attitude in a remark included in a text of combined statements written with Sigmar Polke for an exhibition at the Galerie H, in Hannover: "I observe many amateur photos ameliorate than the best Cézanne. In general it isn't just a question of painting expert pictures."

Richter also does non want to be encumbered by imposed doctrines of the past. He began in 1962 by painting pictures that look similar photographs. He used illustrations from popular magazines such as Quick, Stern, or the Bunte Illustrierte equally his sources, choosing them in opposition to the formalistic painting movements such every bit the Naught group and Tachism that were ascendant at the time. "It was perhaps a protest," Richter says, "considering people here in Deutschland were constantly looking at the formal side. I resist this because my art always has something to practise with my life and how I deal with it . . . I'm ashamed to say this, because information technology'due south so obvious that one tin discharge all the criminal energy that one has stored up."² Richter considers his provocation of Cézanne to have been brought almost by those protests of the early '60s, simply he considers his statement even so true: "At that time at that place were certain claims to quality which art supposedly had to fulfill in order to be fine art. Nosotros didn't want that. Today I notice that art mostly has to fulfill economic weather condition. That's no good either. Art must be true—that'south its moral aspect."

In reaction to the pseudo painting movements today and concerned about the "dilettantism" behind them, he adheres to a concept of "beauty, which is a word no one likes. 'Dazzler' has become a downgraded word, but that shouldn't be the instance, because we would all like to exist healthy, perfect, fulfilled, everything—the opposites of war, crime, and sickness. I see beauty in all the works of art we cherish." In the electric current context Cézanne's persistent drive for perfection, exemplified in his painting Mont Sainte-Victoire over and once again, could in fact exist seen to stand for with Richter'due south want for "Volkommenheit," "perfection"—with similar fixation on painting that is manifested, for instance, in his serial of "Stadtbilder" (City pictures, 1968–70).

For both painters, the want for completeness is accompanied by a continuous state of disillusion distinctly enunciated by Cézanne in a letter to Emile Bernard from 1906, in which he writes that his dissatisfaction will only disappear "when I have achieved something that comes out better than the previous attempt and that can thus prove the theories, which are always hands stated. The simply matter that causes serious difficulty is providing the proofs for what one thinks. And so I continue with my studies."³ And so does Richter proceed his studies in an intense search for inclusiveness from picture to picture. While mediating betwixt photography and painting, Richter encounters the gap between an objective image of reality—through the mechanics of the camera eye—and the subjective perception of the senses. He constantly balances all the objective and subjective factors that occur during the human action of painting photographically. He tries to bridge his own "mood" in relation to the mood of the times, and the anonymity of the photo, which has no style, to his desire for abyss through classical beauty. Gradually the realization grows that something is left out. The sense of imperfection necessitates the painting of another flick.

At the age of 64 Cézanne told a young painter, Charles Camoin, whom he accidentally met in the streets of Marseilles, "Everything, especially in art, is theory, developed and applied in contact with nature." He believed in "condign classical through nature," and idea of the old masters as "a moral support," even when their work offered nothing to exist copied.

Although Richter's approach is more than alienated than this, and is expressed through painting but photographic images of nature, he shares with Cézanne the search for classical harmony in the work of older masters and in nature: "I believe that fine art has a kind of rightness, as in music when we hear whether or not a note is imitation. And that's why the erstwhile classical pictures, which are correct in their own terms, are so necessary for me. In add-on to that there's nature, which I see as well has this rightness. It appears that these days one tin can put most anything on the canvas, and I am against that."

Richter analyzes the "nature" of painting. Working from photographs—some of which he takes himself—he tries to attain classical beauty in meticulous "photo/paintings"—oil paintings based on photographs—of cloud formations, skulls, candles, romantic landscapes, and abstract pictures, all of which reflect his dissonant version of a "harmony parallel to nature." They are presented on an intimate scale intended to express "the regret or resignation that I can't work that manner anymore, that this classical art is past. Still I want to paint that way, just not simply as a quotation—that wouldn't be plenty." Indeed, in 1973 Richter painted the serial "Verkündigung nach Tiziari" (Annunciation later Titian) which is more than a reference to the original; it is an attempt at a reconstruction followed by four other pictures in which the image diffuses and vaporizes gradually into a cloud of pigment. Titian'due south image is dissolved in a mass of brushstrokes; only the color scheme and the move of the limerick, echoing the original figures, preserve the atmospheric mood of Titian. The process past which the image gradually disintegrates and disappears reverses the stages in the development of a Polaroid photograph.

Merely in the deed of painting snapshots, combining not-high-fine art subject matter with a conventional way of rendering in chiaroscuro, tin can Richter both oppose and accept tradition in art, thus achieving a modern schismatic sensibility. If any contemporary creative person greatly and paradoxically both scrutinizes and resists the "classics" it is this obsessed painter, who, every bit much as Williams or Cézanne, cannot extricate himself from the dilemma of choosing the nowadays while calling upon the past. His struggle for self-actualization is shaped past the dualism of his own past.

Richter was built-in Feb nine, 1932, in Dresden. He recalls that he decided to get an artist at the age of 16: "It had to exercise with existence an introvert. I was lonely a cracking deal, and drew a lot." For the next 2 years he worked as a scene painter for a theater company and as a sign painter in a manufactory, where he painted slogans on billboards and, occasionally, portraits of political leaders. At xix he failed the entrance examination for the Kunstakademie Dresden, only was admitted the following twelvemonth. There he received a thorough training in traditional genres—figure drawing, notwithstanding lifes, and landscape painting—always working from the existent thing, as any other method was forbidden. After five years Richter had accomplished infrequent skills in a broad range of techniques, including the illusionistic precisionism of such 19th-century painters as Caspar David Friedrich and Adolf von Menzel, only he grew increasingly weary of the official esthetic doctrines of E Germany. He had learned something about 20th-century art, despite the fact that everything from Impressionism on was officially considered "decadent," and books on the subject were not available in the library. Somewhat influenced at the time by the work of Picasso and of the Italian Socialist-Realist painter Renato Guttuso, both members of the Communist Party and thus among the few foreign contemporaries whose piece of work was shown in East Germany, Richter started to experiment. The result was that "I was a Modern painter, but with a horrible mixture of things." When these deviations from the prescribed esthetics—by Richter and a few others every bit rebellious—gained sudden notoriety as a "new" formalistic direction in fine art, he realized that he had to leave East Germany and commencement from scratch. "I knew that I did not desire to accept that kind of false importance," he explains.

In 1961, two months before the construction of the Berlin Wall, Richter crossed the border by streetcar, taking with him two suitcases. A friend found him a place to alive in Düsseldorf, and shortly after he received a scholarship to the Staatliche Kunstakademie in that city. At that place he analyzed and skillful Tachism and a conglomerate of other styles, quickly communicable upward with stylistic developments in the West. No longer depending on nature, he painted imaginary figures, and made objects out of shirts stiffened with mucilage. He scanned avant-garde periodicals, visited out-of-the-mode exhibitions, traveled, and questioned his contemporaries. But the half classical, half Modernistic esthetics, in the vein of the École de Paris, that were taught at the academy in Düsseldorf left Richter unsatisfied. Then in 1962–63 Pop art appeared on the scene, and became the turning betoken for Richter.

The American Pop artists, including Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, and others, reacted against the elitism and abstruseness of the Abstract Expressionists past making icons taken from the surround of daily life, and by choosing as subject affair such mutual things as comic strips, billboards, supermarket fast nutrient, hardware supplies, article of furniture, and so on. Their industrial style and iconographical treatment of kitsch initially had political, social, and economic implications, even though the artists were not necessarily involved in politics. Nevertheless the misconception that equated Popular art with naive optimism was common in the early '60s: as i critic wrote, "They [the Popular artists] have done so not in a spirit of contempt or social criticism or self-conscious snobbery, but out of an affirmative and unqualified commitment to the nowadays circumstance and to a fantastic new wonderland, or, more than properly, Disneyland, which asserts the witting triumph of man's inner resources of feeling over the material rational world."⁴

The release from tradition provided by American Pop art, together with the experience of Fluxus concerts, annihilated everything Richter had done up to that fourth dimension. "I thought that one was not allowed to paint from photographs," he remembers, "until I saw the first reproductions of Roy Lichtenstein's paintings in Fine art International." Lichtenstein's nonartistic and unconventional method of painting drawing images provided Richter with the next necessary detachment to break from the ascendant European painting tradition. At about that time, he recounts, "I threw away all my paintings, burned them, and started afresh."

In Europe, parallel to radical activities in fine art in the Us, Richter and other artists from the Rhineland section of Germany—including Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg, and Wolf Vostell—as well as Grand. H. Hödicke and K. P. Brehmer, from Berlin, opposed ceremonial in preference to an art that dealt with their own environment. This entailed taking a field of study matter that contrasted sharply with the ironic attitude of American Pop. The Germans chose the uncertain political reality of daily life and work in a country divided by a biting schism. Brehmer expressed the implications of their socially conscious attitude: "nosotros tin can simply detect a wider ground for our work if we deal with the problems of the masses, if we get into these bug and try to contribute something to their solution. Simply that can't be accomplished through our piece of work alone."^five Richter, too, struggled with conscientious objections to being "but a painter": "There were things that were more important to united states of america than painting. We had to get into the street, to demonstrate and create a party, to be active. This time was a bit neurotic, of class, when y'all had to ask yourself what you were allowed to do. The activity of painting in context was understood to exist reactionary, and and then if you were somewhat sensitive you ever had to retrieve carefully most whether it was permissible to paint or not, and if and then, what."

But it was the inflow of Fluxus, with its ironical, anarchistic attitude toward order, that released Richter from this repression, and at the same fourth dimension lifted somewhat for him the political imperative of the times. On February 2 and 3, 1963, the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus, initiated by Joseph Beuys (a professor at the Düsseldorf university) and organized by George Maciunas, took place in the academy as a "colloquium for the students." Maciunas ready the tone of the evening with his manifesto: "Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, 'intellectual,' professional and commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead fine art, false, artificial fine art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art—PURGE THE Globe OF 'EUROPANISM!' [sic]." This presentation was described by Tonio Finta in his article "Kaka, Sch und geplatzte Torte" (Kaka, shit, and exploded cake), in Der Mittag, February vi, 1963: "Then over the paper curtain flew, alternately, huge amounts of cardboard strips and printed newspaper, which later turned out to be the manifesto of the 'fluxus' movement, authored by Maciunas, its chief ideologue, and equanimous in flawless American."

Richter remembers Nam June Paik'southward Fluxus Champion Competition (in pissing) performed by members of the group—Frank Trowbridge won, at 54 seconds. He likewise remembers Beuys' functioning of Siberische Symphonie, I Satz (Siberian Symphony, start movement, 1963); Vostell's Décollage musique, Kleenex 4, 1963; and John Cage (who appeared on the poster and possibly on sound tape, simply not in person). He summarizes the events: "Information technology was all very cynical and subversive. Information technology was a bespeak for us, and we became cynical and self and told ourselves that art is bull and Cézanne is stupid, etc., and . . . I'll paint a photo! Fluxus was the goad."

Soon thereafter, on October xi, 1963, Lueg and Richter staged their own issue, "Eine Demonstration für der kapitalistischen Realismus" (A demonstration for backer realism), in a Düsseldorf furniture shop, Bergeshaus, Flingerstrasse 11. Here the usually serious Richter loosened upwardly. He recalls the occasion:

It wasn't very serious. There was Socialist Realism, which was very well known, especially to me. This was just the opposite, and I could use it without taking it besides seriously, considering "Capitalist Realism" was another form of provocation. At that place is no such thing every bit Capitalist Realism. This term somehow attacked both sides: it made Socialist Realism appear ridiculous, and did the aforementioned to the possibility of Capitalist Realism every bit well.

The concept for the demonstration had three parts: first, the complete furniture store would be exhibited in an unaltered state; second, a programmed viewing of the Sit-in would be presented to spectators on Oct xi; finally, in a separate space an average living room would be exhibited equally if it were beingness lived in, along with such typical paraphernalia equally food, drinks, books, and housewares. The 2 painters, dressed in blackness suits, white shirts, and ties, were as well on exhibition. Some pieces of piece of furniture were placed on pedestals, like sculptures, to make people realize that they were seeing an exhibit.

Richter's and Lueg's exhibiting of themselves recalls Piero Manzoni'southward presentation of himself on the pedestal he called "base of operations magica," in 1961, and it predictable the "living sculptures" of Gilbert & George. The setting in the furniture store is too reminiscent of Oldenburg'southward "Shop" exhibition, which opened in December 1961 in a small shop on East 2nd Street in New York. "The Store" had been an attempt to bring art objects dorsum to their real function equally Oldenburg saw it: "Why should I even want to create 'fine art'—that'due south the notion I've got to go rid of. Assuming that I wanted to create some thing what would that matter be? Simply a affair, an object. Art would non enter into it."⁶ "The Shop" had also served as a location for performances, which Oldenburg characterized every bit "Theater of Objects." The several floors of the much larger furniture store called by Richter and Lueg were also used to present a combination of consequence and exhibition. In the midst of the showrooms of bed and living room furniture they hung their own paintings (all 1963): Lueg presented Vier Finger (Iv fingers), Betende Hände (Praying hands), Bockwürste auf Pappteller; Bügel (Sausages on paper plate; hanger); Richter showed Mund (Oral cavity), Papst (Pope), Hirsch (Stage), and Schlosse Neu-Schwanstein.

The upshot in the furniture store owed something to Duchamp, but when this was pointed out to Richter he qualified the reference: "Yep, yes. But then someone more similar a prole would exercise information technology. But I'm no prole, never was . . . and I like a bit of culture. But I've never been a bully, either. I don't accept this intellectual arrogance. It's not my thing." Richter was not and so much attracted by Duchamp's more private erudite puns as by his set-mades, and fifty-fifty more then past his paradoxical mental attitude, reflected in Fluxus, of making an intellectual, disquisitional statement through the use of public imagery and banal materials. Fluxus' emphasis on ephemera confirmed for Richter the use of casual family snapshots and ordinary magazine clippings, which he had begun to piece of work with in 1962. Once Richter had purged himself of tradition through his active participation in what at the time was radical and "new" in fine art, he could reconcile that aforementioned "anti-art" attitude with his desire for classical beauty. From then on he would no longer experience painting hesitation, evidenced by the hundreds and hundreds of pictures that follow, which he numbers for organizational reasons.

The first numbered photo/painting is Tisch (Tabular array, 1962), which he based on a black and white analogy from the Italian mag Domus. This use of an illustration from a glossy design magazine such as Domus is exceptional; most of the serial of tabloid pictures that followed, up to the terminal one, "Tourist," 1975, take poor-quality reproductions from cheap magazines as their models. Tisch could be an illusionistic painting, precisely and smoothly painted, if the motion picture were not "spoiled" by a highly visible smudge. This textured, streaky smear, which could exist a mockery of gestural painting, leaves the spectator in doubt: is it just a nonartistic smudge, or an element of the painting painted in Abstract Expressionist mode? In either instance, the smudge obstructs the plasticity of the table, and causes it to flatten out so that the object becomes identified with the ground of the canvas. In order to soak up the surplus oil and thereby thin the paint surface to brand it resemble a photograph, Richter pressed a paper on to the wet paint; this left a slight imprint which contributes to the upshot of a poor-quality paper reproduction. Because of this the image shifts between representing a conventionally painted illusion and a magazine illustration.

Tisch seems shut in thinking to Vostell's procedure of décollage, begun in 1958, equally demonstrated during the Fluxus events in Düsseldorf and afterward in May 1963 during the Yam Festival of Happenings in the Smolin Gallery, New York. There Vostell put upwards a wall of collages from current Life magazines and invited the audience to smudge out parts of the collage with cotton drenched in carbon tetrachloride. For Vostell, "Décollage is the fine art of de-collaged forms—such equally disrupting, squashing, exploding, tearing, erasing, and melting. The objects change their original class. Décollage decomposes the collage that preceded it."^seven Richter'southward photo/painting as well suggests details of Rauschenberg's combine paintings in which he applied his invented technique of transferring photographs from their original ground on to a new one. Later Rauschenberg, along with Warhol, hitting upon silkscreen reproduction equally a ways of transferring blowups of photographs to canvas. "The printed material became as much of a bailiwick every bit the paint," he wrote, "causing changes of focus and providing multiplicity and duplication of images. [It was] a third palette with infinite possibilities of color, shape, content and scale . . . added to the palettes of objects and paint."⁸ In Tisch Richter, using instead a tradition of painting the photograph, arrived at a similar result equally Rauschenberg had.

Unlike such 19th-century predecessors as, say, Degas, and more significantly dissimilar Rauschenberg, Richter's work is more a photograph than a painting. Dissimilar Warhol, nonetheless, it feels more than similar painting than a photograph. Richter'south vision twists the 19th-century idea of the radical choice between painting and photography, between abstraction and realism. Instead of choosing between the ii ways he embodies the 20th-century split sensibility which combines the miscellaneous experience of both. His dualism broke his enslavement to past traditions of both painting and photography, showing him the possibility of crossing the borderline back and forth and of exploring a stylistic no-human being's-land between realism and brainchild: "I was able to meet it [the photograph] differently, equally a picture . . . without all those conventional criteria, which I formerly attached to fine art. In that location was no style, no limerick, no judgement. It liberated me from personal experience. There was nothing just a pure pic. Therefore I wanted to possess it and show it—not to use information technology as a ways for painting but to use painting equally a means for the photograph."^ix

Tisch may accept been for Richter what Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, was to Rauschenberg, who said of that work that he "was trying both . . . to purge myself of my teaching and at the same fourth dimension do the possibilities and then I was doing monochromatic no-image."¹⁰ Using the eraser every bit a cartoon tool fit de Kooning's practise of erasing images. Richter, through the double entendre of the smudge in Table, got rid of the old Tachistic esthetics, exploring at the aforementioned time new not-stylistic possibilities. Rauschenberg and Richter, secure in their knowledge of the past, could virtuously efface the methods of their predecessors in the hope of condign a part of their ain historic period—although some leftovers tended to slip in.

Richter has in common with Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and others the rejection of traditional subject affair in favor of a more directly accessible iconography that mirrors banal daily life—he has to such an extent that too often over the last twenty years superficial comparisons have been made and based but on the employ of similar field of study matter. The fact that Lichtenstein and Oldenburg both used a lightswitch, a stove, and other household appliances as field of study thing, that Robert Morris and Beuys both worked with wax and felt, or that Lichtenstein and Richter both took brushstrokes as bailiwick matter for a mural doesn't necessarily brand these works cancel each other out or prove that one was made totally nether the influence of the other. Instead, such similarities show how differently the same field of study thing or fabric tin can be treated. In fact, in photo/paintings such equally Trockner (Drier, 1962), Schärzler, 1964, Turmspringerin I and II (High diver I and 2, 1965), or Alfa Romeo (mit Text) (Alfa Romeo [with text], 1965), he stands closest to (and uttermost from) Lichtenstein, who met the dilemma of painting and yet not painting past introducing cartoon images he did non create. "The impersonal look is what I wanted to have," Lichtenstein wrote. "I prefer that my work appear so literary that you lot can't go to information technology as a work of art."^xi Lichtenstein searched for an enhancement of the highly mechanical and discrete way of cartoon images, for a technique that would seem to exist, merely really would not exist, commercial. Richter also wanted an impersonal procedure. "Pictures should be made according to a recipe. The act of making should occur without inner involvement, like crushing stones or painting a edifice. Making is not an esthetic act."¹² Just as Lichtenstein had done in his cartoon images, Richter found a way in his photograph/paintings to handle such emotional content as love, war, and crime in a common manner. Simply he doesn't choose an industrial mode similar Lichtenstein'southward application of benday dots, or Warhol'southward assembly-line employ of silkscreen reproductions, which builds up the power of the image. Richter never loses the painting touch, and the provocation of the discipline matter is brought out by his "classical" method of transferring the prototype past dividing the sail into a grid, merely as the former masters used to do. Later on, in 1965—again as Lichtenstein had done—he used an episcope to project the image onto the canvas, but not out of a sense of the necessity to be true-blue to the original, as Lichtenstein had said in an interview with John Coplans in Artforum in Oct 1963: "The closer my work is to the original the more threatening and critical the content." Especially in the beginning, Richter stayed close to the original because he felt he had to establish that he was painting photographs. In retrospect he realizes how imperfect these early pictures were: "When I expect at these pictures today, they're so imperfect that they wait like paintings again, because in the concurrently we've had the Super-Realists—I admired Malcolm Morley's bounding main liner very much—and they showed u.s.a. how to really achieve technical perfection."

In his later photo/paintings, Richter could freely depart from the original model, as long as he maintained the essentials of photography. Past using defects in the photographic method, such as blurring due to camera movement, combinations of in focus and out of focus, simplification due to precipitous black and white contrast, grainy quality, smudges and specks due to sloppy evolution technique, and so on, he created "flaws" that mediate between the two mediums. Nor was he balky to introducing television static or to painting other arbitrary and invented, even so disarming, disturbances, like the smudge in Tisch. In all these variations Richter employed the softening, blending effects of "classical" painting techniques to intensify the ambiguity between style and nonstyle. He attributes the haziness of many of the photo/paintings to his own relation to reality, which has something to do "with insecurity, inconsistency, and fragmentary functioning." Simply he insists that since paintings "are not made in order to be compared with reality they cannot be indistinct or inexact or different."¹³ They only seem hazy in comparing with the subject painted.

Richter took for subject field matter images that are at beginning sight irksome, in contrast to Warhol, who chose newsworthy, dramatic images and used them with calculated timing, for example in his silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe, done just afterward her death. Even when he used front end-page material Richter e'er underplayed the sensational and avoided the fashionable: "I painted Jacqueline Kennedy, but I made her unrecognizable, because I was embarrassed to pigment Jacqueline Kennedy. It was such a cute photo, of a woman crying." Where Warhol'south detachment seems to be complete in his utilise of an objective, mechanical style to depict such gruesome subjects as the electric chair or disastrous car crashes, Richter, despite his detached vision, still shows a sentimental involvement: "I would rather pigment the victims than the killers. When Warhol painted the killers, I painted the victims. The subjects were oft poor people, banal poor dogs."

In 1964 the architect Philip Johnson commissioned Rauschenberg, Warhol, Oldenburg, and Robert Indiana, amongst others, to make murals for the New York Earth'due south Off-white. Warhol made 10 huge silkscreens of the FBI'south "most wanted" men, which proved too controversial and were exhibited just briefly. In 1966, Richter, in his plow, painted portraits of eight educatee nurses who had been killed in the dormitory of a South Side Chicago hospital, in Acht Lernschwestern. "And here, because I didn't know them personally," he wrote, "I just wanted to paint anonymously, non in color, from the photos, that is, to avoid painting, avoid straight involvement with life and through it subjectivity and still, despite the detour, produce an affect so that it touches your heart, indirectly, not in a conventional—sentimental—way." Even the subject of Turmspringerin, which embodies the desire for abyss, the Olympic ideal of physical strength and beauty, is given a human being turn to emphasize the sloppy grayness world we alive in. In painting with high black and white contrast a photograph of poor quality, casually cutting out yet enclosing the full-bodied energy of the athlete trying for a perfect spring, Richter establish a style to underline perfection past containing information technology in an imperfect state. His series of urban cityscapes, the "Stadtbilder," are another case of the paradox between a desire for classical beauty in the way they are architectonically painted and a precise photographic registration of the pessimism at the end of the '60s about an obliterating technocracy. Such a pessimism surprises him considering of his non hands achieved earlier commitment to detachment: "They were horrible, like newly built housing developments, and then inhuman, revolting. They looked as if they had been bombed, though they were normal cities. But I never said that I meant annihilation with them."

But in 1975 Richter'due south indirect interest came to an stop in a serial of paintings entitled "Tourist." Information technology was painted afterward a movie still which illustrated a newspaper story well-nigh a tourist who was eaten by a panthera leo while visiting a wildlife park in France. The tourist had stepped out of his jeep for a moment in society to photo the lion. His friend, who remained behind to picture the animal, accidentally recorded the tragedy. Richter commented: "I made four pictures, and that was the end of it. Since and then I haven't painted from photos anymore. I realized that I was becoming the tourist, because I would get eaten up besides. I tin't ever restrain myself."

At the end of the '60s the attitude of West German language artists toward America changed. In 1970 Beuys published a small edition of the Fluxus manifesto that Maciunas had performed at the Düsseldorf university. Beuys tore the manifesto out of Jürgen Becker and Vostell's book Happenings, Fluxus, Popular Art, Nouveau Réalisme (Hamburg: Röwholt Taschenbuch, 1965), photocopied it, and changed the word "Europanism" to "Americanism", which fabricated the sentence read: "PURGE THE WORLD OF 'AMERICANISM!'" He so had it published with his signature and postage. Richter did not speak out as directly, but he gradually turned away from the consumer earth equally subject matter, and engaged himself more and more in a dialogue on painting and style in relation to photography.

Richter is not the blazon of painter who keeps working in any one style; he is too circuitous, as well restless, and likewise responsive. He is engaged in a continuous process of discovery: information technology may be an obsession with a painterly idea to be followed to the finish; he may dialectically choose to oppose his ain piece of work; or once more, in asking questions, he may become aware of so many new issues that he has to start all over once more. For case, in 1968 he reacted to his ain series of emotionally loaded, sharply assorted black and white "Stadtbilder," painted in heavy impasto, by doing a serial of monochromatic "Graue Bilder" (Gray pictures, 1968–76), smoothly painted in a neutral, emotionally unified tonality. The latter have aught in common with the monochrome paintings of Yves Klein, or Ad Reinhardt's painting everything into an overall uniformity and regularity. They non only avoid the mystical "pettiness" of the Nix group, just are besides too sentimental to fit the Minimalists, with their anti-illusionistic, nonmetaphorical approach. For Richter, "Painting always deals with illusion. You tin can't avoid it. The 'Graue Bilder' are total illusion, they are not simply color." At that fourth dimension Richter was rather drastic, a fact that is reflected in his making what he thought was a nihilistic statement in the "Graue Bilder." He recalls comparison them to John Cage's remark, "I have nothing to say, and I am saying information technology." But the nihilistic motive turned into something positive, even beautiful: "It was the ultimate possible statement of powerlessness and desperation. Zero, absolutely zilch left, no figures, no color, zero. Then y'all realize after yous've painted iii of them that one's amend than the others and yous ask yourself why that is. When I encounter the eight pictures together I no longer experience that they're lamentable, or, if so, and then they're sad in a pleasant way."

His indirect involvement in the "Graue Bilder" is almost identical to his approach in the photograph/paintings of the student nurses; apparently it makes no difference whether an image is used or not: "With the "Graue Bilder" I wanted to avoid painting. I forbade it. Merely I also wanted to avert representing life in any way; nevertheless I did correspond it. They have emotion and sadness, and 1 can feel moved past them. I wanted to get into these things precisely past avoiding painting, and avoiding life." The monochromatic "Graue Bilder" became in their nonreferentiality more field of study to painting than to photography; in 1975 they were included in the "Fundamental Painting" show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. But to Richter, "Gray is, by virtue of its neutrality, . . . eminently suited to deed as mediator, to analyze, just equally illusionistically as a photo,"¹⁴ and he believes information technology is better than any colour in the representation of "pettiness."

After get-go the smoothly painted "Graue Bilder," Richter produced the "Fingerspuren" (Finger traces, 1970), the roughness of which is in plough offset by the glacially surfaced "Wolken" (Cloud) studies, 1970. In 1971 Richter made a painting from a photo, with an illusionistic appearance, in shades of xanthous, beige, and brown. In response, Blinky Palermo made a monochromatic, anti-illusionistic companion slice by mixing Richter's different color shades into one color. In withal another series, the "Farbtafeln" (Color charts, 1966–74), which run in size from pocket-size to monumental, Richter wanted to signal out that any color will friction match another every bit long as 1 has the correct system—which in this instance included certain overall proportions, divisions of white strips, and the consequent apply of lacquer paint. Next he contradicted his own system by painting "Farbtafeln" in which the colors match even without white strips. The "Farbtafeln" can be seen as a sequel to the "Graue Bilder," just at the same time they are a annotate on such paintings as those of Josef Albers, Richard Paul Lohse, and Victor Vasarely. It was not a huge transition for him to follow this upward by painting a photograph of an surface area of trees in a park in a painterly way, Parkstück (Park slice), at the end of 1971. For Richter, "There is no difference between a console of colors and a pocket-sized, green mural. Both present an identical, fundamental attitude."¹⁵ Then, instead of continuing his tree studies, he picked upward on the green color scheme, decomposing the mural images more and more toward total abstraction, while sustaining the mood of the park. Whirling touches are extremely prominent in these abstractions; they gave ascent to another painting thought, that of grinding up, which is demonstrated in the paintings of 1972–73, where the colors red, bluish, yellow, and white are mixed in what appear to be enlarged brush strokes made up of overlapping tracks of the dissimilar colors.

The differences between Richter'southward attitude during the '60s and that of the '70s stand out clearly when one compares his collaboration with Lueg, in 1963, to his collaboration with Palermo in 1971, Zwei Skulpturen für einen Raum von Palermo (Ii sculptures for a space by Palermo). The former is an anti-art and ironic event: the latter evinces a longing for classicism. Co-ordinate to Richter, "at that time something classical, an thought of euphoria, of painting purity, clarity, and beauty was strictly forbidden. The installation took identify in Galerie Friedrich in Cologne. Palermo painted the walls in a nonmetaphorical, anti-illusionistic fashion, going beyond their identity as walls to give a universal, generalized result, while Richter installed two plaster sculptures of Palermo and himself with closed eyes, cutting off at the cervix as in normal classical busts, on pedestals as tall as the artists. "It had something to exercise with the prototype of the artist," he recalls "with the memorial of the artists, and with immortalization."

In its classical mood this installation anticipated the "Achtundvierzig Portraits" (Forty-8 portraits, 1971–72). Richter returned to photograph/painting with this impressive series of "portraits" of well-known physicists, philosophers, writers, poets, composers, and others all male and nearly all born in the 19th century. If the photographic illusion had not induced a modern element, the past would have taken over the painter this time, particularly in the symmetrical installation he gave them, as a sort of "hall of fame" in the German Pavilion, during the Venice Biennale of 1972. This installation recalls the traditional portrait galleries institute in universities or aristocratic places. The absence of women enforces the impression of a male-dominated society; where are writers similar Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf; the composers Clara Schumann and Ethel Smyth; the astronomer Henrietta Leavitt or the scientist Marie Curie, to mention a few? Simply women are non allowed; co-ordinate to Richter, because of their divergence in features and clothing, the inclusion of one or 2 female portraits would disrupt the homogeneous, linear menstruum of the installation. The formality of the men, dressed in their night suits, white shirts with stiff collars, and ties, complemented by the classically counterbalanced installation, is undercut merely past the crude highlighting and black and white contrasts which are the result of enlarging photographic reproductions taken from an encyclopedia. In his pick Richter deliberately avoided going off the oppressive track past doing something that would have been noticeably distracting; hence in that location are also no painters, as their inclusion might introduce an element of personal selection.

In exploring different painting styles during the '70s, Richter'due south oeuvre spread out like a fan. During the early '80s the many layers of the fan take closed up over again—but non quite fully—into the introverted "Abstrakte Bilder" (Abstract paintings, 1976–). Hither Richter expresses what he feels and how he lives. They are complemented past a more public outlook on the earth in "classical" photo/paintings of candles, skulls, and landscapes, which are sometimes shown next with the "Abstrakte Bilder": "There is the notion that it's actually appropriate for an artist to develop a specific blazon of expression and that's it. This is seen as the high bespeak. Only and then again you lot'll always find arguments on the side of making two or more different kinds." Compulsively, Richter alternates between the series of "Abstrakte Bilder," boldly painted and vigorously scraped, and meticulously painted photo/paintings, in gild to keep the intrinsic quality of "classical" painting alive.

While the "Abstrakte Bilder" are of a Modern, nonconformist sensibility, the others, fabricated afterward snapshots he takes himself, capture the intimacy of a sentimental, romantic mood, and embody nostalgia for an image of the world that doesn't be any longer just can be held onto through the old masters. Traces of information technology can still be found in an increasingly threatened nature. Richter longs to make "classical paintings" himself, which, equally long every bit they can be understood as a part of our fourth dimension, will be office of today. The drive for a romantic "classicism" is offset by the nonstylistic inclusiveness and impurities found in the snapshots he works from. They are a built-in contemporary opposition which allows him to reveal himself sentimentally: "The paintings are often even kitschy, when I bring all the elements from myself into them, considering I'grand not just expert and rational and all that, but I also put all the rubbish into them." The same can be said of the examples from the "Abstrakte Bilder" series that were fabricated between 1976 and 1980, which he painted from photographic blowups of painted sketches, some of which he changed slightly, blurring the original starting bespeak. Faust, 1980, is the last photo/painting painted according to that method: "In the showtime it's all very simple. It doesn't matter which colour yous use or how big information technology is or whatever. And so information technology gets harder and harder. I starting time to call back near it, and then sometimes I make a photo of it. I try what looks right on the photo and that never works. It'south a way of seeing what to avoid. So sometimes I lay a transparent sheet over the painting and paint on that, and that never works. Whatsoever I think out consciously doesn't work. It suddenly works some other way, and I'm surprised that it works. Then I get something merely right; it'southward right the way a painting can be right—I don't know why."

The most recent serial of "Abstrakte Bilder," painted direct, without using a photo of a painted sketch, are fifty-fifty more layered, even more than complex arrangements of contradictory feelings. The get-go stage is a finished pic, which seems dead because information technology is also cute. Next Richter destroys that dazzler by painting some other layer, in a opposite sensibility, over it. Perfect brush strokes have to be offset past venturesome, kitschy ones. Harsh colors, chosen to provide the greatest contrast, are fix next to i another. The color scheme is almost intensity; a new sense of atonality comes into existence, avoiding on the one paw everything that is too "piquant," and on the other hand the complementary, close-ranged tonality found, for example, in landscapes, paintings of old masters, or Kodak photographs. So rich in contrasts are the "Abstrakte Bilder" that information technology is incommunicable to photograph them in color without losing some of the furnishings. Still even these paintings retain an illusion of photographic infinite through their depiction of a blurred, out-of-focus background with clearer layers up forepart.

In his "Abstrakte Bilder" Richter tries to give an independent answer, an actualization of his own experiences, one that is expressive of modern disintegration but that goes beyond it to preserve a unity of opposites. They are not painted in a reaction to or in relation to any dominating art movement. Richter relies on himself, and as a outcome the "Abstrakte Bilder" communicate more immediately his feelings, even when they are ineffable: "The pictures are identical to me; there's no detour and no transformation and non also much intellect. I want the painting be be transparent. I want information technology to tell the whole drama."

The stolid repression of Modernism past East High german doctrines that Richter experienced at the Dresden university made him get against the grain, asserting his ain identity as an outsider. In crossing the border, he lost that identity because of his new-establish, seemingly total freedom of expression and sense of belonging. Withal, that liberation besides turned out to be restricted by the parameters of sophisticated advanced thinking, which is bound to its own rules—of historical analysis and self-criticism; of detachment and interest with society; and, the rule most limiting to Richter, of breaks with the past to reach the "new" in art. It is non the imprisonment of keeping up with the latest styles that turns Richter into 1 of the few serious gimmicky painters. Nor is it an obedience to notions of what a painter is supposed to pigment. In each run into with a fresh canvas Richter relives the conflict inside himself of crossing borders of all types. Unable to forget the by, he forces himself to break with it. This dichotomy, this Janus-faced duality which is so pivotal in his work, this position of voluntary exile which is destined to remain an ongoing restless search, turns Richter into one of the most intense contemporary painters. He is polemical toward "bad" painting, yet always aware of the other side, as is clearly demonstrated in his statement virtually art education today: "Dilettantism is everywhere; that'south the new management. The academies are very much a function of it. On the one hand, this is completely awful and will no doubt pass. Withal, on the other hand something volition develop from this that has less to exercise with pure technique. The dilettantism may provide the basis for a future evolution."

Coosje van Bruggen is an art historian and curator who lives in New York.

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NOTES

1. William Carlos Williams, The Apotheosis of Noesis, New York: New Directions, 1974.

two. Unless otherwise noted all quotes from Richter are from a taped interview with the author on November twenty, 1983, in Cologne. West Deutschland.

3. Paul Cézanne, Uber die Kunst, Mittenwald, West Germany: Mäander Kunstverlag, 1980.

iv. Alan Solomon, "The New Fine art," introduction to the catalogue for "The Popular Image," an exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C., April 18–June two. 1963.

v. Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus, Berlin: Edition René Block. 1971, p. nineteen.

vi. Claes Oldenburg, Notes, New York, 1961.

7. Quoted in Rheinisher Merkur (Coblenz), November 22, 1963.

viii. Robert Rauschenberg, Print XIII, i, Jan–February, 1959, p. 31.

nine. Gerhard Richter, interview in the catalogue of the the 36th Venice Biennale, 1972. p. 23.

10. Interview, May 1976. p 36.

11. "Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol: A Discussion," Artforum, vol. four, no. 6, February 1966.

12. Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus, p. 29.

13. Gerhard Richter, interview in the catalogue of the 36th Venice Biennale. 1972, p. 24.

14. Fundamentele Schilderkunst, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1975, p. 57.

xv. Quoted in Gerhard Richter, Paris: Center National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou—Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1977, p. 47

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/198505/gerhard-richter-painting-as-a-moral-act-35241

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