Articles + Reviews - GERHARD RICHTER

Review: Gerhard Richter: The Search for the Real

Moore, Claire. "Gerhard Richter: The Search for the Real." NY Arts. (March 2002).

Gerhard Richter has always been a difficult artist. His work makes use of numerous approaches to painting including the realm of abstraction, photo-realism, and Pop Art. His diversity has cause many to characterize him as "an opportunist unable, or unwilling, to make choices. While others see in him as a conceptual artist that has a theoretical attitude towards painting." The issue of consistency or style throughout an artists' career is by no means limited to Richter, it is often brought up in relation to Lee Krasner, John Baldesari, Hans Hoffman, and Robert Morris to name but a few. The very breadth of their work brings to light a general call for order, consistency, and progression.

The fabric of our society is based on the use of categorization to define and clarify a highly complex system, when an artist disrupts this structure by refusing to be classified in its terms there is invariably tension and frustration. The inability to locate these artists within the current structure does not signify an inadequacy of the artist, rather, it points to a failure of the system of classification. Throughout the years art has undergone vast transformations, and with these transformations there must also come a new understanding of what art is. In this sense, it becomes clear that art has outgrown the existing hierarchy. All great art challenges us to see things in a new way, it is this very attribute that makes it so powerful because it forces us to redefine the way we view the world.

A close inspection of Richter's career reveals an uncompromising vision that strives to overcome the inadequacy of any singular system in defining our perception of reality. "The first impulse towards painting or towards art in general, stems from the need to communicate, the effort to fix one's own vision, to deal with appearances (which are alien and must be given names and meaning)." Although the work undergoes countless visual transformations, it remains consistent in its aim to transcend the boundary personal style demands in favor of an art that operates beyond the confines of individual taste.

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, an environment wrought with rivalry and contradiction in both politics and art. In an entry in his diary he states, "To be alive is to engage in the daily struggle for form and for survival. " His views on art and politics stem from a skepticism toward any rigid structure that is strictly adhered to, "As soon as artistic activity turns into an 'ism', it ceases to be artistic activity. By way of analogy; social concern is a form and a method that is currently seen as appropriate and right, but where it elevates itself into Socialism, an order and a dogma, then it losses its best and truest qualities and may turn criminal." He questions the validity of any belief that is elevated to the level of doctrine because such extreme positions limit your possibilities from the outset.

At an early age he received commercial training in the area of stage and billboard painting (1948-1951) in Zittau before entering the Kunstakademie in Dresden in 1951(through 1956) where he was instructed in Socialist Realism. At the time he claimed, "He had an ambition to paint like the old masters." "While in East Germany, he became acquainted with the work of Pablo Picasso and Renato Gusttuso (both known to him because they were approved by the Communist party)." Richter became very skilled as both a draftsman and a realist painter through his training at the academy, but he began to long for something more.

In 1959, three years after finishing school, he made a trip to Kassel to attend the international art fair, Documenta 2. This experience had profound impact on his development. At the exhibition "he was exposed to the works of Fontana, Fautrier, and Rauschenberg among others [the trip] convinced him he should leave East Germany for the "West" and what that implied." Some say it was an attempt to "escape the socialist realism that reigned in the name of the proletarian masses. However, the situation in Düsseldorf was not much different."

"You moved from East to West Germany in 1960. Why was and is social realism totally unattractive to you?

Because it subordinates art to an ideology. This is a misinterpretation of the social relevance of art. Art can be truly relevant only when it isn't directly employed to do a job. If art represents itself, society can use it; but not if it advertises anything. Then it's advertising design. All this has nothing to do with art for arts sake. There's no such thing as art for our sake."

"My idea of a powerfully realistic work of art is, for example, a sculpture by Carl Andre. You can't get more realistic than that."

In 1960 Richter moved to Düsseldorf to study at the Kunstakademie where he came in contact with "Abstract Expressionism under [the influence of] Karl Otto Götz". In the West, Richter was exposed to Fluxus and Pop art -- influences that were responsible in part for prompting him, in his own words, to "paint a photo". Shortly after arriving in Düsseldorf he met Konrad Lueg (an art dealer), Sigmar Polke, and Blinky Palermo who introduced him to the magazine Art International where paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were being reproduced. He was "struck with how a painting could be based on a reproduction, even a photograph [A method he soon adopted]."

"The first time I painted from a photograph, I did so on the mixture of exhilaration and fear, partly because I was strongly affected by contemporary Fluxus events, and partly because I once did a lot of photography myself and worked for a photographer for 18 months: the masses of photographs that passed through the bath of developer every day may have created a lasting trauma. There must be other reasons. I can tell exactly… If my paintings differ from the original, this is not intentional on my part; it is not a matter of design but of technique. And technique lies outside my voluntary control and influence, because it is itself a reality, like the model, the photograph and the painting. I want to leave everything as it is. I neither plan nor invent I add nothing and omit nothing. At the same time, I know that I inevitably shall plan, invent, alter make and manipulate."

Painting from a photograph was a far cry from the classical training he received as a painter in Dresden that emphasized a direct relationship to nature. Pop gave Richter an alternative to Socialist Realism and Expressionism. It is said that after seeing Roy Lichtenstein's work for the first time he set fire to all he had done before, "from then on, he started to depict capitalist mass culture in a fairly realistic style."

"I was relieved of the need to choose or construct a subject. I had to choose to photographs, of course; but I could do that in a way that avoided any commitment to the subject, by using motifs which had very little image to them as which were anachronistic. My appropriation of photographs, a policy of copying them without alteration and without translating them into a modern form, as Warhol and others do, represented a principal avoidance of the subject."

1962

Table. 35 ½ x 44 ½ inches

1963

Dead. 39 3/4 x 59 1/16"

Andy Warhol. Most wanted men No. 13, (Joseph F.) Silkscreen on-canvas, two panels, each 48x40".)

Richter's use of photography, as a starting point for his paintings, has a strong correlation to both Newman and Stella's move away from the relational model of art as embodied by Mondrian. Photography enabled him to leave behind traditional modes of composing an image because it provided him with a ready-made structure, a strategy foreshadowed by Duchamp. This epiphany really freed him because it enabled him to move beyond the traditional methods preached by the academy into a new realm. In this manner he was able to escape the difficulty the Abstract Expressionist's stance required in the sense that Richter began with an image already in hand while the Abstract Expressionists created each piece from scratch out of nothing.

"Do you know what was great? Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting -- color, composition, space -- and all the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art….When I draw -- a person, an object -- I have to make myself aware of proportion, accuracy, abstraction or distortion and so forth. When I paint from the photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I'm doing. The photograph took the place of all those paintings, drawings and illustrations that serve to provide information about the reality they represented. The photograph does this more reliably and more credibly than any painting. It is the only picture that tells the absolute truth, because it sees 'objectively'. They usually get believed, even where it is technically faulty and the content is barely identifiable."

1964

Cow. 51 1/4 x 59 in.
Kitchen Chair. 39 1/2 x 30 1/2 inches
Woman with Umbrella. 63 x 37 1/2 inches
Family at the Seaside. 59 x 78 3/4 inches
Administrative Building. 98 x 150 cm
Great Sphinx of Giza. 59 x 67 inches

1965

Uncle Rudi. 34 1/4 x 19 11/16"
Tiger. 55 1/4 x 59 in.

He began his series of photo-based painting in 1962. In most cases the images were based on photographs from newspapers and amateur snapshots. When asked about the selection of particular images he claimed that they were chosen because they had "little image" or a "neutral quality" . There is no apparent hierarchy in terms of the selection of images. A snapshot of a family at the beach is treated in the same manner as a role of toilet paper, or a postcard of the Great Sphinx of Giza. In a sense they were interchangeable. It did not matter what he started out with.

The blurring effect used throughout the photo-paintings recalls the allover quality of a painting by Jackson Pollock because it allows the eye to move quickly over the image by eliminating extraneous detail and emphasizing the initial 'gestalt'. Richter claims that "When he dissolves demarcations and creates transitions, this is not in order to destroy the representation, or to make it more artistic or less precise. The flowing transitions, the smooth, equalizing surface clarify the content and make the representation credible (an alla prima impasto would be too reminiscent of painting, and would destroy the illusion.)" The even surface of the paint and the diffusion of the image created by the blurring fuse the panel into a single scrim-like sheet. The resulting emphasis of the flat plane has a unifying effect that dominates the relationship between the individual components within the image. This tendency toward unification closely corresponds to the outline of Minimal art, Donald Judd brought forward in his article, Specific Objects (Although I'm sure he did not have Richter in mind).

Throughout the sixties there was a move to integrate sleek industrial materials such as steel, plastic, and Formica into an art context. In many cases modes of industrial production were adopted as well. Instead of fabricating a piece themselves, artists would often place a custom order at a factory. It is interesting to note in this context that although Richter remained faithful to the tradition of painting, a medium highly dependant on skill and craft, he was in tune to this new sensibility. He often spoke about the perfection of the photograph in a similar vein emphasizing its even surface and capacity for objectivity. Richter claimed that the uniformity of the surface of his paintings made them look more "technological, smooth and perfect [rather than artistic or craftsmen like]". He attempted to eliminate the trace of his hand by sweeping a very soft sable brush over the wet oil paint thereby eliminating any residual marks left from the initial application of the paint. In this sense his work is almost diametrically opposed to an artist like Franz Kline, who can be readily identified by his distinctive mark. We find the same insistence on a smooth impersonal surface present in a painting by Richter as that found in a sculpture by Donald Judd.

1966

Eight Student Nurses. 37 3/ 8 x 27 9/16 inches
Helga Matura. 71 x 43 1/4 inches
Twelve Colors. 27 1/2 x 25 and half inches
Color Chart. 27 1/2 x 25 and half inches

In using photography as a starting point Richter was able to eliminate the whole set of decisions involved in composing an image. The process was streamlined in the sense that the artist's role was reduced to the selection of an image that was systematically reproduced in paint as faithfully as possible. "Richter's brushstrokes are not random. Each and every one of them bears the stamp of 'the only possible' decision leading to the next 'only possible' decision." This approach directly challenged the existing relationship between form and content.

The composition and subject came readymade and the form [in terms of paint handling] becomes a given that is uniformly applied. In this sense it is no longer valid to view the subject and the form as an integrated structure. One does not inform the other; they exist independently. In terms of unlocking the meaning of these works, it becomes clear that this opposition is crucial. The fact that a given form is universally applied to such a diverse group of subjects leads the viewer to confront the inadequacy of all styles because the adherence to any given style confines us to an arbitrary set of rules.

In 1967 Richter made several works that took the form of doors, curtains, and panes of glass. These pieces addressed issues of perception in a very literal way as questions involving the nature of reality were explored in terms of illusionism and physicality. The Large Curtain, a painting of a curtain convincingly rendered over the entire surface of a stretched canvas, is in my view, a comment on the evolution of painting from an illusionist window to a barrier which does not allow the viewer to look beyond the surface. Richter claims these works are, "metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but the same time restricts and partially precludes our apprehension of reality." The work from this particular period bears a close correspondence to Magritte (i.e. Magritte's painting of a pipe that is accompanied by the text, "This is not a pipe." ) in both instances there are multiple realities at play.

Richter was once asked if he based his pictures on photographs because he mistrusted reality. He replied:

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed. Our eyes have evolved for survival purposes, the fact that we can also see the stars its pure accident. And because we cannot rest content with this, we go to a lot of trouble -- we paint and take photographs, for instance, not as a substitute for reality but as a tool.

Richter did not feel that we could trust what we see, "because it is mediated through the lens apparatus of the eye, and corrected in accordance with past experience." In his view, what we describe as real or factual is actually a very uncertain thing. With this statement in mind it seems likely that Richter's work is an investigation of the nature of reality and the role of perception. Style, like our past experiences, acts as a distorting mechanism that impairs our vision.

1967

Large Curtain. 78 3/4 x 110 1/4 inches
Four Panes of Glass. 74 3/4 x 39 1/2 inches

In 1968 Richter began a series of landscape paintings that was brief but prolific. Although the theme of the landscape is consistent throughout, the form undergoes radical transformations ranging from illusionism to a very free and gestural sensibility. This body of work is almost a complete reversal of the structure identified in the photo-paintings. The photo-paintings contained a consistent form that was applied indiscriminately to a range of subjects, while the landscapes maintain a cohesive subject that is addressed in a variety of forms.

1968

Cityscape Madrid. 109 x 115 inches
Cityscape F. 78 3/4 x 78 3/4 inches
Alps. 78 3/4 x 256 inches
Untitled. 30 1/2 by 15 3/4 inches
Vintage. Thirty-seven and half x 45 1/4 inches

1969

Landscape near Hubbelrath. 39 1/2 x 55 1/4 inches
Landscape with little Bridge. 47 1/2 by 59 1/2 inches
Star Painting (Series of Three). 27 1/2 by 27 and half inches

"In the late 1960s, Richter took a hiatus from representational painting altogether and made only monochrome pictures in gray on gray, which he said in retrospect were 'the most complete ones I could imagine.' " In light of his previous work, however, "There are indications that purely abstract concepts were not an end in themselves. When Richter blows up color-charts on an outside wall to a size of 250 x 950 cm: the commonplace squares of paint become monochromes and the monochromes become part of what looks for the entire world like a billboard. Pure abstraction, or is it?" With an awareness of Richter's development as an artist it is difficult to view a monochrome painting by him in the same terms as those that would be applied to another artist. "Just as Kasimir Malevich's white is a different white from Robert Ryman's, so the stylistic element changes with the artist's intention."

1970

Clouds. 78 3/4 x 118 1/4 inches
Gray. 33 3/4 x 35 3/4 inches

1971

Forty-Eight Portraits. Each 27 1/2 x 20 1/2 inches

By implementing a full arsenal of styles and modes of painting throughout his career he leads the viewer to conclude that style like art's other means is depicted- for its own sake. All styles are inadequate because they set preconceived limits to thought and feeling in the same way that the academy limited the possibilities for an artist and Socialism setup an oppressive structure in the political realm.

"What makes art ambiguous and complicated is that it holds up its own means like a mirror…Generally speaking, the aim should not be to make good images, because painting is a moral action." Richter goes to great length to create a "realistic abstraction" and the same care is given to his pursuit of other genres as well. His photo-realistic paintings are convincing as illusions, etc.

In 1989 Richter made another radical shift by taking on a number of loaded subjects. It seems that he felt an obligation to challenging the notion that painting could no longer convey historical subject matter in light of the development of photography.

"Photography altered ways of seeing things and thinking. Photographs were regarded as true, paintings as artificial. The painted picture was no longer credible; its representation froze into immobility, because it was not authentic but invented…The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style, both in its way of informing, and what it informs."

The series 18 October 1977 caused major upheaval when it was put on view. The paintings, similar in style to those completed in the early sixties,

"made use of press and police photographs that portray a compelling moment in recent German history: the last days of the Baader-Meinhof gang, a group of terrorists who committed suicide in 1977 after the attempted hijacking of a plane by their supporters had failed… It was generally believed that the government had murdered them after reports were released that all three men: "Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Ian-Carl Raspe had committed suicide simultaneously, in separate cells in the Stammheim Prison."

This series challenged "the crisis of contemporary painting" as its roll and social function had been redefined. Since the advent of photography, painting shed its previous role as a means to documenting historical events. Photography, in its capacity for the objectivity, was felt to be more suitable in regard to representation. Since the integration of photography into daily life painting has turned more and more to its own inherent properties. The goal of Modernism in fact became, "the systematic negation of the functions of representation." "For Richter it was precisely painting's continuing ability to embody historical consciousness, in the light of photography's usurpation of the business of recording that was at issue."

Richter described Modernism as a "puny system which set limits to thought and feeling." It is likely that he would have said the same in regard to any style or set of rules that is strictly adhered to. All styles invariably hold something back because they force the artist to conform to a preconceived idea that is limiting from the outset. "I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent)." I feel that Richter has approached his entire career with the kind of deadpan leveling found in a dictionary or encyclopedia. In the case of a dictionary or encyclopedia, the meaning of the words included is relegated to a secondary position in relation to the overarching structure that dominates the book. The rigid format creates a sense of leveling that dismisses the content of the words in favor of an alphabetical order. Each word is given equal significance regardless of meaning.

This model can be used as a parallel to unlock Richter's work in the sense that he applies the same equalizing force in terms of style, all being equally limited or inadequate, and subject, all being equally valuable or insignificant. The leveling achieved is produced in a variety of ways ranging from the blurring device used early on, to the introduction of the grid, and the outright refusal to conform to any given style or subject throughout his career.

Richter's forces himself to attain a level of impersonality in order to overcome his individual limitations and so the work takes on a variety of forms versus a distinct individual style. Duchamp once said, "I must force myself to contradict myself in order to prevent myself from conforming to my own taste." I believe Richter's stance is of a similar nature; however, he goes further in suggesting the inadequacy of all styles.

In Suzi Gablik's book, Progress in Art, she states that:

"Our criteria of truth and reality are, to a large extent, examples of 'modal logic': they change with cognitive growth. They also change with the progress of science, and every culture has its own norms which enter into the perception of reality…Stylistic changes in art do not reflect a mere jumble of divergent impulses across time. They are part of an integrated pattern of development which reflects the fundamental character of cognitive systems and the historical development of conceptual frameworks."

I believe this has a close connection to Richter's exploration. In his notes from 1962 Richter states:

"Every word, every line, every thought is prompted by the age we live in, with all its circumstances, its ties, it efforts, it's past and present. It is impossible to act or think independently and arbitrarily. It makes no sense to expect or to claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable. We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty. But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it."

Both Richter and Gablik believe art is fundamentally tied to a particular view of the world that stems from our experience at a particular point in time. Our perception of the world changes as our culture evolves. Art and culture are intrinsically linked. Art changes because the way we view the world changes. Richter often speaks about the way we impose our thoughts and ideas onto the world, he believes what we see is in actuality a projection of ourselves which is why he insists on distancing himself from a particular style because it is a filter that distorts the reality.

Gablik goes on to say: "Modern theoretical physics has given up the notion of an ultimate reality -- of finding "a thing in itself. Relativity is the understanding of the world not as concrete events but as abstract relations. The tendency of modern physics to view things in terms of the total relativity of all points of view appears simultaneously in the art of the Cubists, who acted intuitively on the realization that an object is never seen from one perspective only but that there are many spatial frames and points of view which can be applied to it -- all of which are equally valid. With Cubism, there are no more fixed points or isolated moments of perception. By depicting objects in terms of the spectators mobility and change of relative position (rather than his fixity), the Cubists destroyed Euclidean space as a pictorial reality."

In this light, it could be said that Richter is moving the Cubists notion of multiple perspectives forward by adopting a variety of means throughout his career. Instead of creating multiple perspectives on a single canvas as we find in the work of Picasso, Braque, and Cezanne. Each painting represents a single attempt to locate reality. In Richter's case we must look at the trajectory of his entire career to understand the conceptual underpinnings of the work. He is making a statement about the inadequacy of all styles in presenting the world.

Gablik made the following statement in regard to the development of Cubism; however, it is equally useful as a means to illuminate Richter's significance. "To recognize the existence of a plurality of perspectives as one does in relativity is to be already in a sense beyond all of them. The transcendence of the self over the hear and now -- the capability of conceiving other points of view -- is, as we have seen, one of the primary characteristics of formal -- operational logic."

The distancing often associated with Richter's paintings, in the sense that many are based on photographs rather than direct observation as well as the fact that he is not associated with an individual style, has a strong correlation to this notion of relativity. In an attempt to locate reality he is forced to operate at a distance to gain a sense of objectivity.

Richter once said, "Many amateur photographs are more beautiful than a Cezanne." When later asked about this statement in an interview he replied:

"It was primarily a message, and its main target was the academy, the stifling prototypes that I had before me, and from which I wanted to free myself. Photography had to be more relevant to me than art history; it was an image of my, our, present-day reality. And I did not take it as a substitute for reality but as a crutch to help me get to reality.

Richter categorically rejected the notion of art as a set of rules that should be adhered to, this included the pursuit of a distinct style which was highly sought after by many artists and collectors alike. William de Kooning once proclaimed, "Style is a fraud. The desire to develop a style is an apology for one's anxiety [a sentiment Richter strongly supported]." Many believe this issue of style was the very reason Abstract Expressionism finally gave way, because the younger generation of followers adopted the visual semblance but stripped its original meaning; it became superficial mimicry, an academic pursuit. This is precisely what Robert Rauschenberg was getting at in his creation of two identical Abstract Expressionistic "looking" works that undermine the immediacy of the process. He uses familiar means to an unfamiliar end. He essentially adopted a preexisting form and shifted it into an entirely different context by undermining the creator's original intentions.

Richter believed that, "Arts means of representing a thing -- style, technique and the object represented -- are circumstances of art, just as the artists individual qualities (way of life, abilities, environment and so on) are circumstances of art…There is no excuse whatever for uncritically accepting what one takes over from others. Nothing is good or bad in itself, only as it relates to specific circumstances and our own intentions. This fact means that there's nothing guaranteed or absolute about conventions; it gives us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad."

In spite of tradition and all that it provides us with the artist is left with a huge responsibility. Richter's greatest achievement is that he has not allowed himself to be defined by aesthetic dogma, personal inclination, or style. His aim is transcendence. Although he has continually faced criticism due to the seemingly heterogeneous body of work he has produced over the past 40 years, he remains adamant in his beliefs and has persevered.

He currently lives and works in Köln.

© claire moore 2006