Gerhard Richter:
I can communicate nothing…there is nothing to communicate…painting can never be communication. –Gerhard Richter, 1977
Richter’s rejection of an obvious signature, while perhaps stemming from his experience of a totalitarian approach to style, goes against the ethos of much Western art history. By the Renaissance, one painter’s style could be differentiated from another’s; by the time of pioneering abstractionists Mondrian and Malevich, artists were seeking unique shapes that would express the unseen essence of things, hoping to replace religious images with their own icons. American abstract expressionists, and even some pop artists, were arguably trying to do the same, if by different means. But Richter offers the artist as doubter, at once denying the possibility of understanding and fearing the delusion that one does understand. Seeking a different role for his art and a different relationship between picture and viewer, he had to form new artistic languages.
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Richter’s subjects for his photo-based paintings are nowhere near as unconsidered as they first appear: while at first he denied he put much thought into them, much later he admitted to being “highly selective.” Speaking of the stag, he told an interviewer in 1990 that he “wanted to be a forester when…young” and that he based his painting on a photograph he snapped of “a real stag in the forest,” which he was “really excited” to find. His painting combines the aggression of the hunter–or photographer–with a love of sensual surface. Similarly significant is the choice of a humble household item as the subject of three 1965 paintings titled Toilet Paper (two of which are included here). Much later he called these “a kind of ‘poor person’s art,’” suggesting that part of his purpose was to redeem the ordinary (a project related to that of the genre painters who began taking peasants rather than deities or nobles as their subjects in the 17th century). In Richter’s pictures, a single blurred toilet paper roll rests against a bare gray wall, casting a shadow. Part of what impresses is the oddness of seeing such a thing in an art exhibit–as Richter points out, in “the history of art…no one had ever painted toilet paper.” But the combination of photographic accuracy and blurring gives the images a haunting, ghostlike quality that makes the familiar compelling. (Indeed, presenting a common object in an unusual way is an old modernist strategy.) The blurring in Uncle Rudi (1965), showing Richter’s father’s brother in his World War II German army uniform, is more complex, softening and distancing the image. Rudi smiles benignly, which renders the picture all the more disturbing, making Richter’s point that there’s a Nazi residing in the nicest of us–such people are not hopelessly other.
Understanding that in capitalist cultures people invest their egos in things, Richter decenters and blurs his subjects in order to break that bond. The prow of the motorboat speeding toward us at the bottom center of Motor Boat (First Version) (1965) is out of the frame, the people inside look in different directions, and the wake spreads chaotically, defusing the implied power of the boat’s movement. Yet in nearly every picture, Richter achieves an almost miraculous balance between aspects of the subject that he likes and dislikes–and those he can and cannot know. What helps him attain this balance is the care he takes even with the blurs, which are not all identical in appearance or in the technique used to obtain them: sometimes he starts with a hard-edged image and smears it, and other times he meticulously paints on the blur with a brush.
Richter’s color abstractions are striking too for their differences: some are made up of bright, almost garish hues while others have dense, intensely worked surfaces. But though many are big, bold, and apparently full of painterly gestures, they’re not like Pollock’s work. Even though his compositions lack a central focus, Pollock’s use of line evinces a personal quality, an organizing psychology–precisely what Richter abjures. Abstract Picture (1977) has the look of an abstract photo rather than the impassioned revelation of an artist’s soul. There are wide, brushy forms on the left, but most of it consists of small rectangles and trapezoids floating in front of larger brownish curved surfaces. These light geometric areas recall modernist photos, such as Nathan Lerner’s, that were made using light boxes to produce unusual optical effects. The picture’s complex pictorial space engages the viewer, its sensuous colors and depth effects reward, but the image is strangely impersonal.
