Gerhard Richter's "Painting After All"
Gerhardt Richter’s photo paintings are an important part of his oeuvre and well represented in Painting After All, the current Met Breuer’s sixty-year retrospective of this master artist, with a gorgeous and thorough catalog to accompany it (available to order online, too). Richter’s relationship to photography, however, is much more complicated than his appropriation of media imagery may at first suggest. The image used by the Breuer to represent the show, Ice (1981) is an example of his work derived from personal photographs. He has remarked that amidst countless landscapes, he photographs one in 100,000 and maybe paints one out of 100 of those photographs. Ice is a work among others based on photographs taken during a trip to Greenland in 1972. The sky and sea blend into one another, meeting but distinguished, similar but different, epitomizing his interest in that counter-play. The blurriness creates a romantic effect that reaches towards the sublime, but the vague sensibility is indistinct and creates distance that manages to undermine any feelings of reverence.
‘ Ice‘ 1981, 70 x 100 cm Oil on canvas © Gerhard Richter, Image Courtesy of the Artist.
In contrast, the hazy effect in Eight Student Nurses (1966), an important early series of his photo paintings, does connote nostalgia. The works are taken from yearbook photos of the eight women who were murdered by a serial killer; a ninth nurse was able to hide and live. The nurses are softly rendered, their portraits treated like memories, which makes their brutal demise at an early age all the more tragic. Richter included the newspaper reproduction of those yearbook photos in his Atlas, an extensive sort of sketchbook in which he includes photographs, cut-outs, as well as quick drawings that help reveal his thought and practice. In 1962, he’d already appropriated media imagery for Table, the first work in his catalog raisonné, though in that instance he painted the interior design image only to blur it with solvent in large swiping motions.
‘ Eight Student Nurses‘ 1966 Oil on canvas 8 parts, each panel: 95 cm x 70 cm © Gerhard Richter, Image Courtesy of the Artist.
He is known for his struggle to acknowledge and address human horror without turning it into yet another spectacle, while also trying to accept social responsibility. His use of family photographs in this capacity is also represented in the show, as in the infamous oil on canvas work, Uncle Rudi (1965), his uncle who served in the Wehrmacht and died in World War II, or Aunt Marianne (1965/2000) who is holding a baby Richter. This inkjet print of an earlier painting shows her a few years before she was put into an asylum, sterilized, and duly starved to death as a part of the Nazi regime’s purging of undesirables. The digital duplication of the painting of the photograph exemplifies Richter’s engagement with issues of representation.
This recurs with Birkenau (2014) shown in the United States for the first time, and painfully relevant. Birkenau is a set of four massive paintings that are reproduced on the opposing wall as digital prints divided in four. The paintings respond to four photographs smuggled out of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Taken illicitly by inmates forced to dispose of those who had already been gassed, the photographs are blurry, off kilter, but make evident the piles of bodies, the smoke, the fire, those tasked with burning, amidst the birch trees that give name to that prison of industrialized extermination. Provided to Polish resistance fighters, they were testimonials of the atrocities committed therein.
‘ Birkenau ‘ 2014 Oil on canvas 4 parts, each panel: 260 x 200 cm © Gerhard Richter, Image Courtesy of the Artist.
Richter’s abstractions are not deferrals of an encounter. His original figurative paintings disappear under the layers of paint, scraped and squeegeed, rubbed and raw. The abstraction is important as it keeps the painting from becoming an image to look at, and forces it to become a means to a thought, a memory, a history of violence that we all know. How can a German confront this history and not turn it into a spectacle? This has been an ongoing question for Richter, who has returned to the topic of the Holocaust multiple times across his career. The spectacular nature of the image in this media age is a problem for all of us who wish to acknowledge the histories and events of our nations and cultures, but can reiterate harm in showing them. His work September (2005) responds to the media images of 9/11, when the planes hitting the towers—Richter obscures that impact and in so doing reveals to us how we already know it. We see it though it is not there to be seen.
That is memory complicated through the realm of the image.
‘September’ 2005 Oil on Canvas 52 cm x 72 cm © Gerhard Richter, Image Courtesy of the Artist.
Above and Below: ‘Untitled‘ 1991 from Six black-and-white photographs on resin-coated paper in portfolio 35 cm x 50.8 cm © Gerhard Richter, Image Courtesy of the Artist.
The Birkenau paintings are in direct relationship to the photographs, which are presented as archival digital prints in the exhibit, simply framed and lined up along a wall in the same room with the large-scale paintings and the inkjet prints of those paintings. Seeing the photographs offers some means to recognize the challenge presented within the abstract paintings that engulf at 260 x 200 cm. The smallness of the photographs attracts the viewer to lean in, only to pull away from witnessing their horror. And yet, we are not witnesses of it and that is among the reasons why photography is generally insufficient legal evidence of human rights abuse. There is a weight to these paintings that anchors what the fragile photographs offer. At the beginning of March, a federal judge ordered the deportation of a 94-year old former camp officer, who oversaw the exploitation and death of numerous inmates. History is still present.
Richter’s use of photography serves many purposes and the exhibition catalog provides brilliant essays that expand on this very issue. The authors provide important context for the changes across Richter’s practice, as well as historical and theoretical consideration of his choices. Since Richter is undoubtedly one of the great masters of contemporary art, the catalog’s fuller discussion of his relationship with photography is an invaluable aid for any interested in lens-based media. It does justice to Richter, his work, and the flawlessly curated show, the last one in the Breuer building for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Gerhardt Richter: Painting After All
Met Breuer
March 4 – July 5, 2020
VIsit RIchter’s extensive archive on his website
