{"id":3518,"date":"2013-04-29T19:40:13","date_gmt":"2013-04-29T19:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=3518"},"modified":"2019-11-21T14:55:00","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T14:55:00","slug":"richters-willkur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=3518","title":{"rendered":"Richter\u2019s Willk\u00fcr"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From <\/span>Art Journal<\/span><\/em> 71, no. 4 (Winter 2012)<\/span><\/h4>\n\n\n
\"\"
Gerhard Richter, Konstruktion (Construction, Werk\u00fcbersicht 389), 1976, oil on canvas, 8 ft. 2\u00bd in. x 9 ft. 10\u215b in. (250 x 300 cm). Staatliches Museum f\u00fcr Kunst und Design, Nuremberg, Germany (artwork \u00a9 2012 Gerhard Richter; photograph provided by Atelier Gerhard Richter, Cologne, Germany)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There was no other choice for me, I have to go through work through [<\/em>sic] that which is. And that which is\u2014is exclusively nonobjective\u2014is a wide big monstrous matter. I wouldn\u2019t say that I\u2019ll always remain nonobjective, for now I can\u2019t [do it] differently. But I do not want to plan, conceive, speculate, nor believe\u2014that is not our profession, while painting we \u201cknow\u201d much more.<\/em>
\n \u2014Gerhard Richter, 1962 <\/p>\n

Layers<\/p>\n

Following on the heels of his signature photorealist blurs, Gerhard Richter\u2019s abstract paintings have long exemplified a \u201cpermanent break in style as principle of style,\u201d as Klaus Honnef noted in the artist\u2019s first retrospective catalogue in 1969.1<\/a><\/sup> Particularly the Abstrakte Bilder<\/em>\u2014gesturally painted or scraped \u201cabstract pictures\u201d that, at some two thousand, by far outnumber the more restrained color charts, gray monochromes, and recent strips\u2014sealed a programmatic stylistic diversity that, in the US craze for New German Painting from the late 1970s on, epitomized postmodern art and attendant attitudes of irony and inauthenticity.2<\/a><\/sup> Yet asked about the parallelism of abstraction and realism in his work, the artist asserted as early as 1973 that \u201cthere is no such parallelism. I don\u2019t see any difference between a landscape and an abstract picture. I refuse to limit myself to one option, that is, to an exterior resemblance, a stylistic unity, which cannot exist.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup> How, then, might we think across the apparent divide in Richter\u2019s oeuvre between representation and abstraction?4<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

The most consistent and idiosyncratic quality of Richter\u2019s abstract pictures, distinguishing them from other twentieth-century gestural abstraction, is their conspicuous layering. Konstruktion <\/em>(Construction, 1976) is Richter\u2019s first Abstraktes Bild<\/em> and the first to work with such layering. Some layers are smoothly painted blurs shaped to produce illusionist depth (large-scale triangular, linear formations pointing into the distance, smaller-scaled ones floating in front and behind), while others are gesturally applied and illusionistically set back (a bright yellow orange area in the lower left) or literally placed as a last touch (the red line and scrape). Over the next two years, Richter abandoned such optical tricks to focus exclusively on literal, material layers. In the abstract pictures he has made since, one can isolate at least seven modes of interaction between these layers, modes that make their first appearance in roughly chronological order, although they often coexist: style, overpainting, scrape, merge, hole, compositions, and system. For a few select paintings, as for example for Abstraktes Bild <\/em>(Abstract Picture, 1978), Richter\u2019s Atlas<\/em> documents different stages of this layering process.5<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

First, style. Konstruktion <\/em>contrasts different modes of abstract form making, the smoothly applied haze reminiscent of Richter\u2019s blur paintings, set against gestural marks rich in texture and prefiguring the abstract pictures to come. Richter especially played with that contrast in his first abstract pictures of the late 1970s, although it echoed the gestural marks obscuring a table in the well-known painting Tisch<\/em> (Table, 1962), reappeared in dramatic form in the overpainted photographs starting in 1986, and is closely related to the painting over or undoing of complete blur paintings, most famously in the 1995 series S. mit Kind.<\/em> The latter suggests the proximity to another, second category, overpainting. Certain abstract paintings are worked over to such a degree that their last layer of paint dominates and effectively covers what is beneath. \u201cIn numerous cases,\u201d Robert Storr reports, \u201cRichter has sacrificed fully developed figurative works on his way to making abstract pictures.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup> In some, this is visible to the naked eye; in others, the act of overpainting leaves only the slightest traces or is merely intuited.7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Third, the scrape. Around 1978, Richter began to apply paint in his abstract pictures by scraping. By 1979 at the latest, it appears he generated speckled patterns by dragging a minimal amount of fresh paint over a dried paint layer with
\n a squeegee, linear smears made by working wet on wet.8<\/a><\/sup> These scrapes stretch across a broad area or concentrate to create compositional accents or axes. By the early 1990s, scraping turned from a means of applying paint to one of taking it away simultaneously; now the process often involved a palette knife and exposed previously covered dried layers and leaving ridges of paint at the edges.9<\/a><\/sup> Undoing, central to both scraping and overpainting, had formed the origin of Richter\u2019s painting practice, as he gesturally and materially erased, as it were, the image of the table he had painted in his self-declared \u201cfirst\u201d painting, Tisch<\/em>.10<\/a><\/sup> The process is closely related to what Richter calls Vermalung<\/em>. This untranslatable term has been poorly referred to in English as \u201cinpainting,\u201d losing its odd conjunction of meanings, namely, making a mistake while painting, as well as undoing by painting. While Richter has used the term to refer to his painting practice more generally, it is the title of 138 works made in 1971 and 1972, in which the artist applied and then blended paints in various shades to create an allover, dense, intertwining trail of what appears to be a single brushstroke.11<\/a><\/sup> By contrast, overpainting in the Abstrakte Bilder <\/em>always leaves some hint at layers beneath; in fact, strong colors and value contrasts often enhance the effect of revealing. <\/p>\n

Fourth, the merge. At varying points of his abstract picture production, Richter created hazes or patterns in which distinct paint layers can still be intuited but are effectively collapsed. For example, working a squeegee wet on wet with pulsating pressure across the entire canvas produces a dense striated haze where layers blend into one another; or, applying a large number of semidry scraped layers produces an oscillation of minuscule speckles (as in Gudrun<\/em>). In a concentrated body of work produced in 1991 and 1992, Richter locked different layers into almost static regular patterns, creating interwoven grids or stripes of strokes and scrapes. Fifth, by contrast, the hole. Mobilizing the viscosity of the oil medium, Richter used the squeegee to apply a film of paint such that small tears in that film created amorphously shaped openings onto underlying layers; at times there is just a cluster that focuses our attention, at other times they perforate the canvas all over; some are small inversions of the protruding speckles, others big gaping holes. Sixth, compositions. Most of Richter\u2019s Abstrakte Bilder <\/em>are structured through composition\u2014composition understood as the visual balancing of unequal parts in relation to one another. Mobilizing color and scale especially, Richter notably layers within a single painting several compositions that complement or compete with one another. <\/p>\n

Seventh, the system. At certain moments during his close to four decades of abstract picture making, Richter systematically confined himself to creating a limited set of variations of layer interactions with a small number of parameters. Most dramatically, Gr\u00fcn-Blau-Rot<\/em> (Green-Blue-Red, 1993) consists of 115 small (thirty-by-forty-centimeter) canvases, in each of which the artist dragged red and blue paint respectively over a green ground. Interestingly, Richter included this work both in his catalogue raisonn\u00e9 of paintings\u2014as 115 individual paintings\u2014and in that of the editions\u2014as one work in an edition of 115. In other words, Richter systematically explored the boundary between sameness and difference between layer relations, as an edition\u2019s individual exemplars are usually close to the same, whereas in a series of paintings they are different enough to make for distinct paintings.12<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Richter\u2019s most complex, and Richter\u2019s best, Abstrakte Bilder <\/em>combine these layer interactions. Take the 1997 trio now divided among Tate Modern in London, the High Museum in Atlanta, and a private collection.13<\/a><\/sup> The lower and upper layers exist in different registers of style and scale, with detailed texture set against extensive sweeps. In some places the lower layer pops out forcefully through distinct holes, in others it softly merges or dovetails with what is above. The horizontal striations created by the movement of the tool are set against the vertical ones originating from varying pressure to produce a faint grid. Multiple compositions pop in and out of our visual attention (the striated pattern, the single large hole set against multiple smaller ones in the High Museum painting); and as a miniseries worked in similar stages, the three paintings multiply and play out variations of layer interactions. <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Temporality, History<\/p>\n

To what end? On the most basic and conceptually abstract level, the Abstrakte Bilder <\/em>figure temporality, the workings of time. In talking about the process of layering, Richter stresses this temporality of making. \u201cSuch a picture is painted in different layers, which are separated by intervals of time; whereby the first layer often represents the background. . . . And this smooth, blurry surface is at first like a finished picture, which after a while I understand or have seen enough of, and in the next stage of painting I partly destroy it, partly add to it; and so it goes on in temporal segments, until there is nothing more to do to it and the picture is finished.\u201d14<\/a><\/sup> As Richter\u2019s emphasis on the dialectic of making and unmaking suggests, this is not a one-dimensional temporality. If the process of layering as such suggests a basic model of linear time, the layer interactions described above complicate that linearity. <\/p>\n

Stylistic ruptures drive a wedge into continuity; overpainting bars access to the past and renders time as forever slipping, even inaccessible; scraping undoes the disconnect to the past only to reconfigure that past in the process;15<\/a><\/sup> merging and holes intertwine what was and is, suggest the way present shapes past and vice versa; and systems of variations play out the relativities of our access to and knowledge of past and present. Combining these layer interactions, Richter\u2019s best abstract pictures immerse their viewers in the conceptual complexity of temporality while also, in their formal complexity, lifting them from the flow of time. It is in this sense that Richter\u2019s Abstrakte Bilder <\/em>engage in an act of \u201cpicturing\u201d as a form of thinking and knowing. As the artist has noted, \u201cPainting has nothing to do with thinking, because, in painting, thinking is painting.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> In fact, it is through painting that Richter wants to try \u201cto understand what is. We know very little, and I try it such that I create analogies,\u201d analogies for knowledge, both for the artist and his viewers.17<\/a><\/sup>.\u201d Gerhard Richter, \u201cInterview mit Hans Ulrich Obrist\u201d (1993), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>307.]<\/p>\n

In that sense, then, Richter\u2019s abstract pictures and his photographic blur paintings are not parallel endeavors but one and the same preoccupation, not just with abstract time but also, as we will see, with specific history and the sliding scale between them. By the 1970s at the latest, Richter\u2019s abstraction and representation begin to collapse. If Richter\u2019s signature blur paintings of the early to mid-1960s are about history and memory, the blur paintings from the late 1960s, created around the time that he begins to experiment with color charts and gray monochromes, dissociate from particular instants in history to reflect on the nature of perception\u2014as in the motifs of curtains, doors, and windows. Then, the blur paintings from the late 1970s onward, around the time the Abstrakte Bilder<\/em> start, become involved with quasi-philosophical, timeless contemplations of time\u2014as
\n in the motifs of children, candles, skulls, land- and seascapes, even flowers. By contrast, the totality of Richter\u2019s abstract painting production might be considered as a series of efforts to puncture the vast unfolding of time, over and over again, with moments of visual intensity and particularity, for himself and his viewers. <\/p>\n

More specifically, however, there are four modes in which the abstract pictures push the abstract investigation of time discussed so far toward more specific historical reflection: titles, photography, ruination, and Informel<\/em>. First, titles. Richter\u2019s titling of the abstract pictures is closely related to the way in which their formal differentiation lifts moments from the flow of time. While most are simply entitled Abstraktes Bild,<\/em> a good number bear specific, seemingly obscure titles. These may indicate the owner of a painting (B. B.<\/em>, for the critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh), mark the coincidence of a painting\u2019s making with a partic\u00adular experience that then gives it an additional dimension (Static<\/em>, for the band whose concert the artist had attended), or suggest persons with whom the artist is wrestling (Gudrun<\/em>, for the Red Army Faction member Gudrun Ensslin). That said, they rarely relate to the specific nature of a composition and are mostly given after a painting is finished. Most important, Richter\u2019s titles serve to enhance the particularity of a painting and its experience.18<\/a><\/sup>, 1983) was not painted in July but first shown in that month. Gerhard Richter, \u201cKommentare\u201d (1991), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>274. ]<\/p>\n

Second, photography. An important precedent for Richter\u2019s first abstract pictures was his Ausschnitte<\/em> series\u2014literally \u201ccut-outs\u201d but commonly translated as \u201cdetails\u201d\u2014that are blurred, enlarged copies of photographic details of liquid paint.19<\/a><\/sup> The earliest of the Abstrakte Bilder<\/em>, the so-called soft abstractions, developed these Ausschnitte<\/em> by using abstract sketches as their photographic source.These were closely followed by the first layered abstract pictures, which, like Konstruktion,<\/em> have identifiable base layers of abstract, blurred blow-ups.20<\/a><\/sup> While some of these layers actually copied photographic enlargements of sketches or details thereof, others merely mimic or recall the photographic blur. Like the better-known color charts, this body of work blatantly collapses figuration and abstraction (actual and represented paint), but Richter\u2019s Abstrakte Bilder<\/em> do so more subtly. What matters is the general reference to photography, to the historical poignancy and \u201cthat has been\u201d aura of the photographic medium, and to the artist\u2019s earlier photographic blur paintings of historically significant subjects.21<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

For 128 details from a picture (Halifax 1978), <\/em>Richter in turn returned an early abstract picture, Halifax <\/em>(1978), to the photographic medium: one hundred twenty-eight black-and-white photographs of details of said painting\u2014in extreme close-up, in raking light, and from varying angles\u2014are reproduced and laid out as a grid in an editioned artist\u2019s book published in 1980.22<\/a><\/sup> The effect is stunning, revealing and accentuating the raw materiality Halifax<\/em> shares with other Abstrakte Bilder<\/em>, especially in contrast with the book paper\u2019s lack of texture. While Richter\u2019s photographic blur paintings of the 1960s too exhibit far more material qualities and a far greater range of textures than is usually acknowledged, the artist\u2019s occupation with the heavy texture central to this book dates back to his cityscapes made a decade prior, in 1968, for example, the view of D\u00fcsseldorf in Stadtbild D <\/em>(Cityscape D, 1968). That the cityscapes are formative for Richter\u2019s abstract pictures is confirmed by two anomalous paintings from that year that must be regarded as direct predecessors of the abstract pictures, the only colored and blurred cityscape, closely followed by the only large-scale, gestural colored abstraction made before 1976.23<\/a><\/sup> More important, this body of work proves not just formative but informative regarding the abstract pictures. <\/p>\n

Richter\u2019s cityscapes address the ruined cities of Germany and other European countries in the wake of World War II. One critic at the time remarked that Richter\u2019s cities \u201crecall fields of ruins [Ruinenfelder<\/em>],\u201d another that the \u201ccity panor\u00adamas from a birds-eye perspective\u201d suggest \u201ccities that already appear to dis\u00adintegrate into ashes.\u201d24<\/a><\/sup> The artist later noted about Stadtbild Paris<\/em> (Cityscape Paris, 1968), not coincidentally the cityscape with the thickest and most gesturally applied paint and hence with the strongest association of ruins, that \u201cwhen I look at the cityscapes today, they seem like certain photographs of war-destroyed Dresden.\u201d25<\/a><\/sup> As for so many Germans of his generation, that experience was deeply ingrained in the artist\u2019s memory. The thirteen-year-old boy had witnessed the February 1945 bombings of his native Dresden, shielded in the countryside from physical harm but, even at a distance, not from their aural and emotional impact. Richter reports, \u201cThose were important years for me. Dresden as a rubble desert [Tr\u00fcmmerw\u00fcste<\/em>], to live in that, that was formative.\u201d26<\/a><\/sup> After war\u2019s end, the ruins remained for considerable time in many East and West German cities. Says Richter, \u201cWhat I remember well is that very often, actually every day, we would walk through rubble to get from one building to another building, from G\u00fcntz-strasse to Br\u00fchlsche Terrasse and back. The whole city only rubble.\u201d27<\/a><\/sup> In Dresden especially, East German authorities famously decided to leave untouched the rubble of the Frauenkirche<\/em> in the middle of the city center, where it served as an antiwar memorial until the reunification brought its reconstruction. <\/p>\n

Mark Godfrey has recently discussed the cityscapes\u2019 emphasis on materiality and undoing in relation not only to this experience of the material aftermath of the Allied bombings of Germany but also to the looming nuclear threat of the Cold War.28<\/a><\/sup> Germans experienced that threat with a different kind of urgency, not only because they lived at the front between East and West, but also because many had lived through the Allied bombings. One might add that especially fellow Dresden artists like Richard Peter and Wilhelm Rudolph rendered the experience of the bombings\u2019 aftermath via excessive materiality; that the less material certain cityscape paintings such as Stadtbild M\u00fc <\/em>(Cityscape M\u00fc, 1968) are, the more they rely on other references to ruins, like the glaringly blank, white gaps marking the windowless walls of partially destroyed buildings still all over German cities today; and that some cityscapes like that Munich version were painted with Amphibolin, an acrylic paint widely used during the reconstruction and after for interiors and facades.29<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Along with the Halifax<\/em> photographs, then, the cityscapes lead to a third and more specific mode of historical reflection embedded in the abstract pictures, namely ruination. However, not the image but the logic<\/em> of the raw materiality of a world destroyed and reconstructed, undone and redone, echoes in the layers of Richter\u2019s entire abstract picture production, starting with what the artist notably called Materialbilder <\/em>(Material Pictures) of 1962.30<\/a><\/sup> Against this background, it matters that Richter photographed the details of Halifax<\/em> at oblique or aerial angles, and that he posed with the painting amidst construction and debris in Halifax, Canada, that must have reminded him of the reconstruction during the 1950s and 1960s back home. <\/p>\n

Willk\u00fcr<\/p>\n

The double photographic mediation of painterly gesture in 128 details<\/em> had further historical resonance for Richter and leads to the abstract pictures\u2019 fourth mode of reflecting on history, namely Informel<\/em>, a term generally used to describe abstract gestural painting made in Western Europe in the 1950s. Richter\u2019s artistic formation in the GDR (German Democratic Republic, or East Germany) during that decade is finally receiving more attention, including his training and practice as a Socialist Realist mural painter before he relocated to West Germany in March 1961 at the age of twenty-nine, just months before the building of the Berlin Wall. While that move deeply informed his photographic blur paintings of the 1960s, its impact extends further into the abstract pictures.31<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

Richter had first encountered Western abstraction when in 1959 he was allowed to visit Documenta 2in Kassel, West Germany. That exhibition\u2019s legendary inclusion of American Abstract Expressionism and European Informel<\/em>, particularly painters like Lucio Fontana loosely associated with the latter, shocked and left lasting impressions on the twenty-seven-year-old artist, and he returned with the catalogue full of reproductions of mid-century painting.32<\/a><\/sup> Already before and after, while still in the GDR and in private, Richter experimented with various forms of abstraction: with applying printer\u2019s ink with a rubber roller to create dynamically speckled or even monochrome surfaces in a series entitled Elbe <\/em>(1957; see pages 32\u201333); with mixed media worked on cardboard echoing much of mid-century European abstraction; and with small untitled ink studies dating from 1959 reminiscent of icons like Willi Baumeister\u2019s black amorphous shapes and Jackson Pollock\u2019s drips in particular.33<\/a><\/sup> After his relocation to West Germany and into the next year, Richter embarked on a significant body of his own Informel <\/em>paintings, many of which featured centered compositions of encrusted oil on canvas, and of the closely related Materialbilder, <\/em>which were made with collaged, folded, or wrinkled, at times painted, fabric. Although the artist had his public debuts in the West with abstract art\u2014showing Informel <\/em>paintings at the Akademie-rundgang<\/em> exhibition at the Kunstakademie D\u00fcsseldorf and Informel<\/em>-and Materialbilder<\/em> at the Galerie Junge Kunst in Fulda\u2014he soon burned both bodies of work to start anew with photographic blur paintings.34<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Various qualities of this early work echo in Richter\u2019s Abstrakte Bilder<\/em>: the textured paint surfaces of the Informel<\/em> paintings; the intense materiality of these paintings, of the mixed media works, and especially of the Materialbilder<\/em>; the layering of marks in the ink studies, and of films of ink applied with a printer\u2019s roller in the Elbe<\/em> sheets; even the layered ground preparation of professional wall-painting. Yet most relevant in this context is that\u2014following his return to the GDR after visiting Documenta 2, following his relocation after making his own abstractions, following his burning of his own Informel<\/em> paintings\u2014Richter\u2019s closest and most meaningful encounters with abstraction, like his Socialist Realist career, existed only in his memory, in the past, in photographs, carefully arranged in albums that were part of just a handful of items he was able to take West with him and that Jeanne Nugent has poignantly called a \u201cshadow archive.\u201d35<\/a><\/sup> The return of that photographic mediation of abstraction in the Abstrakte Bilder <\/em>pays respect to these early abstract encounters and experiments, through the very use of photographic blowup, but also measures the distance that Richter had come since\u2014by making it but one of many layers of abstract forms. If his later layered abstractions were onto something\u2014like the reflection of time and history\u2014that was partially and paradoxically because of their reference to the early abstract encounters that had remained largely derivative, fallen flat, as it were. <\/p>\n

Richter has insisted continuously over the course of his career on the importance for him of Informel. <\/em>That should not merely be understood narrowly as an importance of mid-century European abstraction, even though the aforementioned encounters were formative and the Abstrakte Bilder <\/em>betray affinity in style and process with historical Informel<\/em>. More significantly, Informel<\/em> for Richter encapsulated an experimental art making that included his photo-based figurative blur paintings: \u201cWhen I copy a photo conscious thinking is turned off. I do not know what I am doing. My work is much closer to the Informel than any kind of \u2018Realism.\u2019\u201d36<\/a><\/sup> While this Informel <\/em>mode underlies all of Richter\u2019s art making, it crystallized most clearly and confidently as he embarked on the abstract pictures: \u201cWith the color charts\u2014chance (Zufall)<\/em>, everything is right or better: forming is nonsense; with the new abstract pictures\u2014Willk\u00fcr<\/em>, almost everything is possible.\u201d37<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

In modern usage, Willk\u00fcr<\/em> mostly means \u201carbitrariness\u201d but still carries with it, in certain contexts like Richter\u2019s usage here and as distinct from chance, its etymological meaning of \u201cacting according to free will.\u201d38<\/a><\/sup> to do everything that I had forbidden myself: simply placing something willk\u00fcrlich<\/em> to then notice that it can never be willk\u00fcrlich<\/em>. This happened so that a door opened for me.\u201d Richter, \u201cInterview mit Sabine Sch\u00fctz\u201d (1990), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>261\u201322. Cf. Gerhard Richter, \u201cInterview mit Jonas Storsve\u201d (1991), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>280.] Willk\u00fcr<\/em>, for Richter, means painting without deliberate thinking, where \u201cpainting is thinking.\u201d It captures his free and open-ended way of working that generates both photo blurs and abstract layers, that sublates realism and abstraction and thereby liberates their opposition from Cold War ideological clich\u00e9s, that produces autonomous paintings in their own right and paintings that can help us reflect on, perhaps even know, the world, on painterly terms.39<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

\n

Christine Mehring is associate professor in the department of art history at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Blinky Palermo, Abstraction of an Era<\/em> (Yale, 2008), and co-editor of Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951\u20131972 <\/em>(Getty Publications, 2010). She is currently working on a book with Sean Keller on the art and architecture at the 1972 Munich Olympics and on a book about abstraction and design in the twentieth century, both forthcoming from Yale University Press. <\/p>\n

\n

This essay originally appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of Art Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n

<\/div>
  1. Klaus Honnef, \u201cSchwierigkeiten beim Beschreiben der Realit\u00e4t: Richters Malerei zwischen Kunst und Wirklichkeit,\u201d in Gerhard Richter, <\/em>exh. cat. (Aachen: Gegenverkehr, Zentrum f\u00fcr aktuelle Kunst, 1969), n.p. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Richter first used the term Abstrakte Bilder<\/em> in 1977; see Richter, \u201cInterview mit Amine Haase\u201d (1977), in Gerhard Richter Text 1961 bis 2007: Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, <\/em>ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Cologne: Walther K\u00f6nig, 2008), 97. Only twenty-eight abstract gestural paintings made between 1964 and 1969 might be characterized as Abstrakte Bilder<\/em>; thereafter their number explodes: 276 (including 139 Vermalungen<\/em>) in the 1970s, 547 in the 1980s, 847 in the 1990s, and 212 in the first decade of the new millennium. The term Bild<\/em> is complicated; in the most basic terms and like the English \u201cpicture,\u201d it implies a form of representation, as Richter\u2019s remarks in this context make clear; for that reason, the frequent translation as \u201cabstract painting\u201d seems misguided. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Gerhard Richter, \u201cInterview mit Irmeline Lebeer\u201d (1973), Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>72\u201379. Cf. Gerhard Richter Writings 1961\u20132007, <\/em>ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, trans. unidentified (Cologne: Walther K\u00f6nig, 2009), 72. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. The most substantial account of doing so remains Benjamin Buchloh\u2019s understanding of both Richter\u2019s photorealist and abstract work through the terms of the \u201cculture industry.\u201d With respect to the abstract pictures, Buchloh has argued in several places that randomized and mechanical processes, together with the accumulation of emptied-out modernist modes of abstraction, paradoxically produce pictorial complexity and differentiation, so that the abstract pictures resemble, undermine, and ultimately transcend spectacle and consumer culture. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. For the painting, see Gerhard Richter: Werk\u00fcber-sicht, 1962<\/em>\u20131993<\/em>, vol. 3, catalogue raisonn\u00e9 to 1993 (Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundes-republik Deutschland, 1993), no. 432-4. See also panels 406-9 and 412, in Gerhard Richter Atlas<\/em>, ed. Helmut Friedel (Cologne: Walther K\u00f6nig, 2006). For some paintings, Richter has made related sketches; see for example Atlas<\/em> panels 486\u20139. Richter\u2019s layering process is also well documented in the recent film Gerhard Richter Painting<\/em>, dir. Corinna Belz (2011; New York: Kino Lorber, 2012), 97 min. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting<\/em>, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 72. Cf. Gerhard Richter, \u201cInterview mit Robert Storr\u201d (2002), in Gerhard Richter Text,<\/em> 392\u201393. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. An example of the former is Decke <\/em>(Blanket, 1988), where Richter applied a layer of white paint to the second version of Erh\u00e4ngte<\/em> (Hanged); examples for the latter are the series of opaque, monochrome red paintings from 1998. See Gerhard Richter: Werk\u00fcbersicht, 1962\u20131993<\/em>, no. 680-3; Gerhard Richter<\/em>, exh. cat. and catalogue raisonn\u00e9 1993\u20132004, ed. Armin Zweite (D\u00fcsseldorf: K20, 2004), nos. 850-1 to 851-6. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. Some paintings in 1978 evidence paint applied by scraping; paintings in 1979 clearly evidence the use of a squeegee or a squeegee-like tool; see for example Gerhard Richter: Werk\u00fcbersicht, 1962\u20131993<\/em>, nos. 432-2 and 432-8 onward, and 446-2 onward. Dietmar Elger\u2019s biography too dates the first use of the squeegee to 1979. Elger, Gerhard Richter, Maler<\/em> (Cologne: DuMont, 2002), 316. By contrast, Richter recently identified Abstraktes Bild <\/em>(456-1), 1980, as the first painting made with a squeegee.
    \n \u201cI have nothing to say and I am saying it: Conver\u00adsation between Gerhard Richter and Nicholas Serota, Spring 2011,\u201d in Gerhard Richter Panorama<\/em>, exh. cat. (London: Tate Modern, 2011), 26. Either way, an important, much earlier precedent is the scraped ink in one of Richter\u2019s 1959 ink studies. I thank Luke Smythe for pointing this out.     ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. Cf. Gerhard Richter, \u201cInterview mit Doris von Drathen\u201d (1992), and \u201cInterview mit Hans Ulrich Obrist\u201d (1993), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>295 and 312. See also Elger, Gerhard Richter, Maler<\/em>, 335. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. A detailed visual examination and photographs of the painting at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University in October 2006 yielded a strong hypothesis that Richter used a solvent to undo the image of the table. I am grateful to Jay Curley and Peter Nisbet for sharing these photographs. John J. Curley, \u201cGerhard Richter\u2019s Cold War Vision,\u201d in Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951\u20131972<\/em>, ed. Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent, and Jon L. Seydl (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 18f. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. On the Vermalungen, <\/em>see, most critically, the addition to the English volume of Dietmar Elger\u2019s biography of the artist: Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting<\/em>, trans. Elizabeth Solaro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 194\u201395. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  12. See Gerhard Richter. Werk\u00fcbersicht, 1962\u20131993<\/em>, nos. 789\/1\u2013115; Gerhard Richter: Editionen 1965\u20132004<\/em>;and Catalogue Raisonn\u00e9<\/em>, ed. Hubertus Butin and Stefan Gronert (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje-Cantz, 2004), no. 81. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  13. The two paintings not illustrated here are also each entitled Abstraktes Bild<\/em>;see Gerhard Richter<\/em>, ed. Zweite, nos. 849-1 and 849-3. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  14. Gerhard Richter in \u201cInterview mit Wolfgang Pehnt\u201d (1984), Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>136. The reference is to the abstract pictures made since 1978. Here and in several places below, I have modified the uncredited translation in Gerhard Richter Writings 1961\u20132007, <\/em>136. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  15. That said, Richter does not engage in a conscious game of uncovering and recalling what is underneath. See Richter, \u201cNotizen\u201d (1992), Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>283. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  16. Ibid., 15. Cf. Gerhard Richter Writings 1961\u20132007, <\/em>15. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  17. Gerhard Richter, \u201cInterview Rolf-Gunter Dienst\u201d (1970), Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>55, and Gerhard Richter Writings 1961\u20132007, <\/em>55; translation modified (see note 14). Elsewhere, the artist describes his abstract pictures as \u201cmodels\u201d for \u201ca different, ever changing [world ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  18. See Elger, Gerhard Richter, Maler<\/em>, 337\u201338. On Static<\/em>, see Gerhard Richter, \u201cInterview mit Bruno Cor\u00e0\u201d (1984), in Gerhard Richter Text<\/em>, 135. In general, Richter plays down the importance of his titles for the abstract pictures as \u201conly names\u201d but does explain that relationships develop between a painting and certain simultaneous or recent experiences. Gerhard Richter, \u201cGespr\u00e4ch mit William Furlong, Jill Lloyd, Michael Archer und Peter Townsend\u201d (1988), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>207\u20138, 211. The relationship is not always the obvious one: Abstraktes Bild (Juli) <\/em>(Abstract Picture [July ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  19. The source photographs are collected in Richter\u2019s Atlas, <\/em>panels 89\u201390, 92\u2013105, 231. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  20. In working on some of these paintings, Richter painted directly on photographs of details. See Atlas<\/em>, panel 405. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  21. Richter relays that he used photographic copies in the early abstract pictures to address his concerns about their subjective nature and to make them more objective. Richter, \u201cInterview mit Dorothea Dietrich\u201d (1985), Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>151. In some later abstract pictures, this nod to the photographic medium takes the form of the absurdly oversized brushstroke that betrays its projected photographic origin. See Camille Morineau, \u201cThe Blow-Up, Primary Color and Duplications,\u201d in Gerhard Richter Panorama<\/em>. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  22. Gerhard Richter, 128 details from a picture (Halifax 1978)<\/em> (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1980); and Gerhard Richter: Editionen<\/em>, no. 56. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  23. The two paintings in question are Stadtbild PX <\/em>(Cityscape PX, 1968) and Farbschlieren <\/em>(Color Streaks, 1968). See Gerhard Richter: Werk\u00fcbersicht, 1962\u20131993<\/em>, nos. 174-3 and 192-2. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  24. Werner Schulze-Reimpell, \u201cFotogenaue Malerei,\u201d July 29, 1968, clipping from unidentified newspaper, Gerhard Richter Archiv, Dresden; and Ursula Binder-Hagelstange, \u201cLaut und Leise: 14 x 14 in Baden-Baden er\u00f6ffnet G\u00fcnther Uecker und Gerhard Richter,\u201d Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/em>,April 12, 1968. Cf. J\u00fcrgen Harten, \u201cDer romantische Wille zur Abstraktion,\u201d Gerhard Richter, Bilder 1962\u20131985<\/em> (Cologne: DuMont, 1986), 39. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  25. Richter, \u201cKommentare\u201d (1991), in Gerhard Richter Text<\/em>, 271, and Gerhard Richter Writings 1961\u20132007<\/em>, 262; translation modified (see note 14). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  26. Gerhard Richter \u201cGespr\u00e4ch mit Birgit Grimm\u201d (2000), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>367. For Richter\u2019s recollections of the bombings, see Richter quoted in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting<\/em>, 19.
    \n     ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  27. Gerhard Richter, \u201cInterview Jan Thorn-Prikker\u201d (2004), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>477, and Gerhard Richter Writings 1961\u20132007, <\/em>467; translation modified (see note 14).
    \n     ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  28. Mark Godfrey, \u201cDamaged Landscapes,\u201d in Gerhard Richter Panorama<\/em>, 74\u20138. Cf. Harten, 39.
    \n     ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  29. For Stadtbild M\u00fc<\/em>, see Gerhard Richter: Werk\u00fcbersicht, 1962\u20131993<\/em>, no. 173. On Amphibolin, see www.caparol.de\/produkte\/farben\/fassadenfarben\/dispersionsfarben\/amphibolin.html (as of November 1, 2012). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  30. Gerhard Richter, \u201cArbeits\u00fcbersicht\u201d (1968), in Gerhard Richter Text,<\/em> 48. I am grateful to Luke Smythe for drawing the term and its use here to my attention. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  31. See Christine Mehring, \u201cEast or West, Home Is Best: Friends, Family and Design in Richter\u2019s Early Years,\u201d in Gerhard Richter Panorama<\/em>, 29\u201343. For the most important accounts of Richter\u2019s formation in East Germany, see, in chronological order, Harten, 9\u201318; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, \u201cGerhard Richter: From Socialist Realism to the \u2018Demonstration for Capitalist Realism\u2019 (1963),\u201d in \u201cGerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History\u201d (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1994), 1\u201340; and Jeanne Anne Nugent, \u201cFamily Album and Shadow Archive: Gerhard Richter\u2019s East, West, and All German Painting, 1949\u20131966\u201d (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2005). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  32. Richter mentions acquiring the catalogue in his letter to Helmut Heinze, August 11, 1959, in \u201cBriefe 1957\u20131965 Richter an H. Heinze,\u201d Gerhard Richter Archiv, Dresden. For the catalogue, see II. Documenta \u201959: Kunst nach \u201945, Volume 1:<\/em> Malerei<\/em>, exh. cat. (Cologne: DuMont, 1959). For his recollections of the exhibition visit, see Richter, \u201cInterview mit Benjamin H. D. Buchloh\u201d (1986), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>164f. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  33. Elbe is the name of the river that runs through Richter\u2019s native Dresden, where the series was made and remained until Richter saw it again in 1989 after the fall of the Wall. Richter signed and dated selected works at that point and the remainder in 2008, making them the only works dating from his GDR years that the artist has officially accepted as his art. He did so because he recognized a relationship to his later work, including his landscapes and abstract pictures, particularly a sense of intimacy and melancholy. For full reproductions and a more detailed account, see Dieter Schwarz, \u201cGerhard Richter: Elbe,\u201d in Gerhard Richter: Elbe 1957 <\/em>(Dresden: Gerhard Richter Archiv, 2009), 73. Compare the artist\u2019s comments on this work in \u201cI have nothing to say . . .\u201d 19\u201320. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  34. See Gerhard Richter, Maler<\/em>, 51. One painting\u2014Wunde <\/em>(Wound 16, 1962)\u2014survives because Richter had given it to Franz Erhard Walther. For a reproduction, see Curley, 16. Richter\u2019s photographic documentation of early abstract works made between 1961 and 1963 and not included in his catalogue raisonn\u00e9 is in the Gerhard Richter Archiv, Dresden, Akte NA-D-1\/5 Fr\u00fche Bilder 1961\u20131963. The Fulda exhibition catalogue includes a list of works and two reproductions. M. Kuttner, G. Richter: D<\/em>\u00fcsseldorf<\/em>, essay by Alexander Deisenroth, exh. cat. (Fulda: Galerie Junge Kunst, 1962). Luke Smythe has researched and discussed this body of work in the greatest detail. Smythe, \u201cLightness and Loss: Abstraction in the Art of Gerhard Richter\u201d (PhD diss., Yale University, 2011), 86ff. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  35. The idea of the shadow archive runs through Nugent\u2019s dissertation but above all captures for her the way Richter\u2019s work in the East informed his work in the West. Nugent, \u201cFamily Album and Shadow Archive.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  36. Gerhard Richter, \u201cNotizen\u201d (1964\u201365), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>29, and Gerhard Richter Writings 1961\u20132007, <\/em>29; translation modified (see note 14). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  37. Gerhard Richter, \u201cAus einem Brief an Benjamin H. D. Buchloh\u201d (May 23, 1977), in Gerhard Richter Text, <\/em>93, and Gerhard Richter Writings 1961\u20132007, <\/em>93; translation modified (see note 14). Willk\u00fcr<\/em> is translated there as \u201carbitrariness.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  38. Deutsches W\u00f6rterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm<\/em>, online at http:\/\/woerterbuchnetz.de\/DWB\/?sigle=DWB&mode=Vernetzung&lemid=GW21680 (as of October 1, 2012). Consistent with this older usage, the concept of Willk\u00fcr<\/em> plays an important (and changing) role for Immanuel Kant as the faculty of choice, or the freedom of the power to choose. Richter\u2019s usage of Willk\u00fcr <\/em>in relation to the abstract picturesin two later contexts captures a dialectics of Willk\u00fcr<\/em>. In 1986, he describes Willk\u00fcr<\/em> as an initial means not to communicate something, but to create a \u201cnon-subject\u201d (Nicht-Sujet<\/em>), in order to arrive at a more general and universally valid subject (Sujet<\/em>). Richter, \u201cNotizen\u201d (1986), in Gerhard Richter Text,<\/em> 163\u201364; in 1990, he noted that \u201cthe small abstract pictures [allowed me ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  39. Richter\u2019s anti-ideological stance has run through his writings and interviews. See Gerhard Richter Text<\/em>. His open-ended way of working and the resulting stylistic multiplicity are characteristic of much postwar European art. For Richter and his contemporaries, they stem at least in part from a certain freedom to explore and experiment afforded by the longstanding absence of a continental art market, a freedom that most canonical postwar American artists lacked once their \u201csignature\u201d work had achieved financial recognition. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    By Christine Mehring<\/p>\n

    Following on the heels of his signature photorealist blurs, Gerhard Richter\u2019s abstract paintings have long exemplified a \u201cpermanent break in style as principle of style,\u201d as Klaus Honnef noted in the artist\u2019s first retrospective catalogue in 1969.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":3659,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-art-journal",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3518\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}