Gerhard Richter at the Royal Scottish Academy
The picture radiates rage and disaffection, encapsulating Richter’s disgust with the German post-war predicament. Pop Artists in Britain and America took ironic pleasure in the banalities of consumer culture. But the celebrity-driven, brand-obsessed world of mass media and mass advertising was anathema to Richter and his more freethinking German contemporaries. To embrace its emptiness was to collaborate in a form of corrupt, communal willed amnesia – to pretend that if enough effort could be put into forgetting Germany’s dirty, genocidal past, then it might magically disappear. The blood that wells through the surface of Richter’s painting is like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. It will not be washed away, no matter how many carefree parties are thrown to obliterate the memory of its shedding.
The young Richter was irresistibly drawn to skeletons in the closet, to what Freud once called “the return of the repressed”. Sinister implications abound, in the first few rooms of the exhibition. Photo-realist canvases of fighter planes flying in tight formation high above green and fertile fields allude to the new lineaments of reality in the age of the Cold War. The subject of speed held a gloomy fascination for the artist. Two Fiats of 1964 shows the blurred contours of two cars travelling fast along a road bordered by thick forest. Alfa Romeo (with Text), of the year after, copies a cropped fragment of an advertisment for a sleek new Italian coupe. The first of these pictures might be a deliberate pastiche of Italian Futurist painting, resembling as it does nothing so much as a grey parody of one of Giacomo Balla’s paintings of cars in motion – with all the relish in velocity, and in man’s technical prowess, drained out of it. The second picture is a glum commentary on advertising and the German cult of the car. But each conceals the same implied accusation, that post-war German society is in thrall to speed because it wants to get as far away from its own past as possible.
The most eloquently compressed expression of this idea is a picture simply called Motor Boat (Ist Version), of 1965, in which a quartet of bright young things, crowded together in a speedboat’s cockpit, smile and swoon with the pleasure of their swift passage across the waves. Richter cultivates effects of blur and grain and, once more, translates the image into a washed-out version of a black-and-white photograph. The draining of colour and the softness of focus speak of distance and estrangement. Richter looks at the bright and brave new world of Germany’s so-called “Economic Miracle”, but it brings him no pleasure. He sees it as through a glass, but darkly.
The disaffected works of his youth made Richter’s name, but his grand reputation rests on the singularly varied nature of his subsequent painting. In the mid-1960s, while he was still developing his photo-realist pictures, he developed a concurrent line in bleak, self-consciously dumb abstract paintings closely based on the colour charts of commercial paint producers. Eighteen Colours, which he began in 1966, is a characterictic example of this strain in Richter’s work, consisting simply of eighteen mute panels, each glossed with a single, immaculate layer of a different colour. In the early 1970s, he began a series of densely but repetitively worked paintings in various shades of grey. Playing yet another variation on the abstract theme, he subsequently developed a means of applying layers of coloured paint to his canvas using a squeegee. The resulting, very different series of paintings – to which he continues, regularly, to add – strand smears and smudges of acid reds, yellows and lime greens in fields of striated impasto.
Through the years, Richter also continued to paint figurative works in the self-consciously bland and numb photo-realist style that he first cultivated half a centiury ago. His motifs have ranged from skulls and guttering candles – the memento mori symbolism of the vanitas still life – to the members of the Badder-Meinhof gang and the alpine landscapes of Germany. His style is feather-edged, deliberately blurry, so looking at such works is rather like looking at blown-up photographs through half-closed eyes.
If the exhibition in Edinburgh proves anything, it is that Richter has become the painter, par excellence, of hollowed-out forms and emptied-out meanings. His landscapes take the subject matter of the German Romantics – alp and forest – and render it down to a blank, miserablist inscrutability. His still lifes, both predicting death and enacting that prediction, in the dead repetitiousness of their soft-focus photo-realism, are equally exemplary of his abiding morbidity. So too –perhaps above all – are his abstract paintings, so blank and mute and thoroughly mechanical. These are pictures painted, in the equivalent of quotation marks – paintings which resemble the ghosts of paintings painted by other artists, but only in order to mock their emotional or intellectual aspirations. Richter emerges from this show as the quintessential artist of what has come to be known as “postmodern” doubt and despondency, the prophet of its many manners and mannerisms, and the perfect exponent of its numbed outlook on life. But that is not necessarily the highest of accolades.
Date: 23-11-2008
Owning Institution: Royal Scottish Academy
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011
Subject:
Now 20th Century
Gerhard Richter, who was born in Dresden in 1932, is widely considered one of the most significant European painters of the post-war period. He remains the only German artist to have been accorded the honour of a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in his own lifetime. The Royal Scottish Academy’s new exhibition of his work, “Gerhard Richter: Paintings from Private Collections”, is much more extensive than its modest title implies. The private collections in question include that of Richter’s friend and long-term dealer, Anthony d’Offay, and that of the painter himself. The resulting exhibition contains some 60 paintings and covers more or less the full gamut of Richter’s coolly detached, heavily ironic and intriguingly eclectic oeuvre. It is the first serious retrospective of his work since the Tate mounted a large-scale show back in 1991.
Richter studied painting in Dresden in the 1950s before moving to West Germany in 1961. He enrolled at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf until 1963, subsequently choosing to destroy almost all the pictures he had created up until that date. His earliest surviving works show the influence of American and British Pop Art, although the young Richter adapted the means and methods of painters such as Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton to his own bitterly acerbic ends. Party, painted in 1963, is one of the painter’s first essays in what would become his trademark idiom, a form of strongly disaffected photorealism. The source for the picture was a magazine photograph of a slick Sixties entertainer named Vico Torriani enjoying a drink with a bevy of smiling young ladies. With the help of a slide projector, Richter painstakingly reproduced the scene, in black and white, on a medium format canvas. He then slashed and ripped it, subsequently repairing the damage with prominent stitches like sutures in human flesh, decorating these scars with liberal drips of red paint. In a macabre final touch, he transformed Torriani himself into a modern vampire, drinking from a cup of blood as gore dribbles liberally down his dinner jacket.
The picture radiates rage and disaffection, encapsulating Richter’s disgust with the German post-war predicament. Pop Artists in Britain and America took ironic pleasure in the banalities of consumer culture. But the celebrity-driven, brand-obsessed world of mass media and mass advertising was anathema to Richter and his more freethinking German contemporaries. To embrace its emptiness was to collaborate in a form of corrupt, communal willed amnesia – to pretend that if enough effort could be put into forgetting Germany’s dirty, genocidal past, then it might magically disappear. The blood that wells through the surface of Richter’s painting is like the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands. It will not be washed away, no matter how many carefree parties are thrown to obliterate the memory of its shedding.
Another of Richter’s early paintings is the disarmingly titled Family at the Sea, of 1964. Based on an old family snap, it shows the artist’s first wife as a little girl, together with her mother and father and another sibling, against a backdrop of spumy sea. This time no explicit, physical violence has been done in the rendering of this photographic image to the canvas, although a distinct sense of unease prevails. The grins seem too fixed, the clenched unity of the group somewhat forced. For the truth behind the photo-fiction, the viewer is obliged to consult a text on the wall beside the picture, which reveals that the proud father in this seaside idyll had formerly been a gynaecologist working for the Nazis – and had collaborated in the execution of his own sister on the grounds of her presumed insanity.
The young Richter was irresistibly drawn to skeletons in the closet, to what Freud once called “the return of the repressed”. Sinister implications abound, in the first few rooms of the exhibition. Photo-realist canvases of fighter planes flying in tight formation high above green and fertile fields allude to the new lineaments of reality in the age of the Cold War. The subject of speed held a gloomy fascination for the artist. Two Fiats of 1964 shows the blurred contours of two cars travelling fast along a road bordered by thick forest. Alfa Romeo (with Text), of the year after, copies a cropped fragment of an advertisment for a sleek new Italian coupe. The first of these pictures might be a deliberate pastiche of Italian Futurist painting, resembling as it does nothing so much as a grey parody of one of Giacomo Balla’s paintings of cars in motion – with all the relish in velocity, and in man’s technical prowess, drained out of it. The second picture is a glum commentary on advertising and the German cult of the car. But each conceals the same implied accusation, that post-war German society is in thrall to speed because it wants to get as far away from its own past as possible.
The most eloquently compressed expression of this idea is a picture simply called Motor Boat (Ist Version), of 1965, in which a quartet of bright young things, crowded together in a speedboat’s cockpit, smile and swoon with the pleasure of their swift passage across the waves. Richter cultivates effects of blur and grain and, once more, translates the image into a washed-out version of a black-and-white photograph. The draining of colour and the softness of focus speak of distance and estrangement. Richter looks at the bright and brave new world of Germany’s so-called “Economic Miracle”, but it brings him no pleasure. He sees it as through a glass, but darkly.
The disaffected works of his youth made Richter’s name, but his grand reputation rests on the singularly varied nature of his subsequent painting. In the mid-1960s, while he was still developing his photo-realist pictures, he developed a concurrent line in bleak, self-consciously dumb abstract paintings closely based on the colour charts of commercial paint producers. Eighteen Colours, which he began in 1966, is a characterictic example of this strain in Richter’s work, consisting simply of eighteen mute panels, each glossed with a single, immaculate layer of a different colour. In the early 1970s, he began a series of densely but repetitively worked paintings in various shades of grey. Playing yet another variation on the abstract theme, he subsequently developed a means of applying layers of coloured paint to his canvas using a squeegee. The resulting, very different series of paintings – to which he continues, regularly, to add – strand smears and smudges of acid reds, yellows and lime greens in fields of striated impasto.
Through the years, Richter also continued to paint figurative works in the self-consciously bland and numb photo-realist style that he first cultivated half a centiury ago. His motifs have ranged from skulls and guttering candles – the memento mori symbolism of the vanitas still life – to the members of the Badder-Meinhof gang and the alpine landscapes of Germany. His style is feather-edged, deliberately blurry, so looking at such works is rather like looking at blown-up photographs through half-closed eyes.
But Richter’s work is less broad and free-ranging than it might, at first sight, appear. Running through it all is the same sense of anomie that animated his painting from the start, but whereas once it was touched by anger, it increasingly seems fuelled by a sense of the futility of any artistic activity. Almost all of Richter’s work is infected by the spirit of parody. In his earliest paintings, the pastiche worked to suggest a sense of collective guilt and communal responsibility which, the painter angrily protested, was being shirked. But as the anger drained out of him, Richter became increasingly drawn to parody for its own sake. The variety of his work seems to reflect a perverse desire, on his part, to touch all of the major genres and declare each one dead, null, devoid of meaning or potential. Much of his energy, over the last twenty years, has been devoted to the cataloguing of his own work – a project of deathly taxonomy, registering the extent to which he has managed to lay his chill hand on themes ranging from portraiture toi still life to landscape, history painting and beyond.
If the exhibition in Edinburgh proves anything, it is that Richter has become the painter, par excellence, of hollowed-out forms and emptied-out meanings. His landscapes take the subject matter of the German Romantics – alp and forest – and render it down to a blank, miserablist inscrutability. His still lifes, both predicting death and enacting that prediction, in the dead repetitiousness of their soft-focus photo-realism, are equally exemplary of his abiding morbidity. So too –perhaps above all – are his abstract paintings, so blank and mute and thoroughly mechanical. These are pictures painted, in the equivalent of quotation marks – paintings which resemble the ghosts of paintings painted by other artists, but only in order to mock their emotional or intellectual aspirations. Richter emerges from this show as the quintessential artist of what has come to be known as “postmodern” doubt and despondency, the prophet of its many manners and mannerisms, and the perfect exponent of its numbed outlook on life. But that is not necessarily the highest of accolades.
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