Richter confounds our nostalgia for the truth of art and evidence. He rigs a content that offers easy accessibility, and then his technical virtuosity and sardonic wit seduce us. As we draw nearer to inspect the work, truth is revealed as only style, and art as another feckless lover. A news photo arouses the false certitude of the instantaneous photo glance—in the 1964 “Woman with Umbrella”, for example—only to be slowed down and have its temporality betrayed by its translation into paint. Immersed in the fluidity of his oil technique, the photo is delayed and revealed as a blurred mirage instead of a punctum of reality.

The artist's 1972 “48 Portraits” of leading scientists, writers, and composers, rework the pseudo-scientific physiognomic taxonomy of Sander’s analysis of the German people. Richter's grisaille painting technique evens out the tone and scale of the photographs, based on encyclopedia portraits, in a style characteristic of 1930s' studio work. The images are arbitrarily arranged in a sequence that moves from three-quarter left profile to full face to three-quarter right profile. There is a homogeneity of style and face that eradicates any real difference between or meaning of the people signified. Any ontological referent is vanquished here as strongly as in Richter's constructions of color charts and monochrome paintings. His romantic landscapes and still lives seem to bring the greatest approval from the museum crowds starved for the naturalism that grounds conservative populist ideologies. The uncanny presence of these paintings is only partly explained by their unedited compositions and photo-gloss finishes. Their surface calm is fractured by their underlying method: an amateur photo is projected onto the canvas, and from it the artist paints. This spectacle of a copy of a copy is disconcerting to the viewer who approaches these paintings with a need for the immediacy of realism. Our desire for the truth of painting is reduced to the chimera of an empty sign; a memento mori for the metaphysics of painting and the positivism of photography.

Richter's «soft» abstract paintings of the late 1970s also revolve around a blurring of the distinctions between painting as original and photography as copy. The expectation of expression and immediacy in painting is neutralized by photography's anonymous surface gloss. What is visible is not an index of either reality or personal gesture, but of the mechanical nature of both systems of representation and the fetishizing of their respective surfaces. Though these paintings play upon the conventions of abstract expressionism, they all appear to be fragments or details of larger compositions and lack the gestural evidence of an author. In point of fact, they too are painted from projections of earlier sketches. The hope of transparency that once grounded both painting and photography is frustrated by the collusion and collapse of both systems into a catalogue of copying techniques.

Richter's “free” abstract paintings (1980 to the present) also deny us entry into the inner life or intuition of the artist, with their strident colors and relentless rejection of the finesse of hand gestures. A reversal of his earlier methods, this series of directly painted works subjects painting to the scrutiny of illusionistic photography. As the artist puts it: "Pictures should be made according to a recipe. The act of making should occur without inner involvement, like crushing stones or painting a building. Making is not an aesthetic act."

In a world where social relations are progressively more mediated by images detached from life, art and craft are denied access to the immediate world. Richter's work visualizes, with far more intelligence and rigor than any of the Simulationists, the aporia of the postmodern condition. The contradiction he makes manifest, as Guy Debord put it, is that "In all societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." Painting no less than photography.

Maureen P Sherlock

This review was published by Arts Magazine (New York, February 1989) on occasion of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, September 17-November 27 (1988).

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932.
He studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden between 1951 and 1956 before moving to Düsseldorf in 1961. Over the next two years he completed his studies at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, where he has been Professor since 1971.

Richter knew he wanted to become an artist since his mid-teens. In 1951, he was admitted to the Dresden Academy, where he developed his illusionistic painting skills by emulating Casper David Friederich (1774-1840), a leading German Romanic landscape painter. Richter became interested in Modernist painting, and soon realized the political climate in East Germany advocated only the style of Soviet Socialist Realism. In order to escape the political and artistic oppression, Richter moved to West Germany to continue his education at the Düsseldorf Academy, a major center of the European avant-garde. Fluxus, the "name taken by an international art movement founded in 1962 to unite members of the extreme avant-garde in Europe and later in the U.S.A. ... in many respects a revival of the spirit of Dada"1 influenced Richter. It was in the Fluxus spirit that Richter participated in the now famous performance called "Life with Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism" in 1963. Eschewing both the conventional Soviet Socialist painting tradition and the contemporary Capitalist alternatives, Richter invented his own vision of reality an ambiguous mix of avant-garde and tradition that resists categorization.

Over thirty-five years of painting have resulted in an oeuvre that compiles a wide variety of styles. He began in 1962 with the figurative black-and-white Photo Paintings many of which were blurred with a dry brush, for example, Helga Matura, 1966. Richter's work also includes the Colour Charts series (1966-74), and the post-minimalist Gray Paintings series (1967-74). His most recent works include still lifes, landscapes, cloud paintings, and the smooth abstract paintings, for example, Abstract Painting, 1977, which provide grounds for the heavily impastoed Free Abstract paintings of the 1980's.