Content provided in partnership with
Stammheim. - book reviews
Art Journal, Fall, 1996 by Tom McDonough
Gerhard Richter. Text by Anne Seymour. London: Anthony d'Offay Gallery, 1995. 60 pp.; 23 color ills. $45.00 paper
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
German painter Gerhard Richter is in an enviable position: in midcareer--he is sixty-three years old--he has achieved an almost unheard-of acclaim, earning equal respect from critics, collectors, and curators. Not that his work has been well understood, particularly by its English-speaking audience--critics typically express a rather puzzled approval, unable to place it in any particular cognitive niche but enjoying it nonetheless. This condition has largely persisted, particularly in the American appreciation of Richter's work, aggravated no doubt by the standoffish attitude most U.S. museums have had toward it until quite recently. (The Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut, held a miniretrospective in 1987 and the following year a larger show organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario traveled to Chicago, Washington, and San Francisco.) This has placed a double burden on private galleries: not only have they had to provide the primary venue for seeing the artist's work, they have also been responsible (in the absence of museum catalogues, etc.) for creating a climate of scholarly understanding around it. This latter role has recently been admirably served by three books published in cooperation with the Anthony d'Offay Gallery of London: a lavishly illustrated catalogue, Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties, which highlights the artist's production of the last five years and which contains an outstanding essay by Peter Gidal; an artist's book, Stammheim, which reproduces a set of small paintings on paper that continue the artist's interest in the theme of the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists; and The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, an anthology of Richter's private journals, public statements, and interviews. Together, these books make a significant contribution to our understanding of his work.
Gerhard Richter: Painting in the Nineties could quite easily be called the ideal gallery catalogue. It begins with a fantastic seven-page spread of photographs tracing the evolution of a single abstract painting in Richter's studio, from initial conception through final state. Much like the photos documenting the various stages of De Kooning's Woman I, this simple display provides truly enlightening insights into how such a painting is made. The catalogue reproduces in full color each of the forty-three works (all abstract) included in the exhibition, most pieces being given at least a full page so that a maximum amount of detail is visible. After the requisite (if perfunctory) chronology and bibliography, there are even eight pages of photos that depict each work to scale--a nice touch, although probably unnecessary.
This catalogue, unlike most, is not valuable solely for its photographic documentation; it includes an essay, "The Polemics of Paint," by British filmmaker and film theorist Peter Gidal, which provides a fundamental redirection of our reading of Richter's work. It may seem odd for a filmmaker to offer insights into these paintings, but Gidal's particular interest in developing a "materialist" film practice makes him unusually sensitive to the physicality of Richter's painting.
Gidal polemically dismisses previous interpretations in order to create a fresh space for Richter's paintings. The first reading he rejects, one of the most popular (and most questionable), sees Richter as fundamentally an inheritor of the last century's romanticism. Typical is a recent article by Jean-Pierre Criqui, in which Richter is seemingly assimilated into a venerable (pre)modernist iconography of the sublime.(1) Gidal demonstrates that such a reading requires peculiar distortions of the artist's recent production, for the very density and disunity of the surfaces of Richter's abstract paintings deny the necessary suggestions of spatial infinity called for by the sublime (as in, say, Rothko's diaphanous veils of color).
Gidal also discards the influential reading of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh who, instead of asserting a continuity between past categories of abstraction and Richter's current production, has situated the work definitively in the present.(2) Buchloh sees these works as breaking with a modernist tradition by being fundamentally declamatory or rhetorical: "one always gets the feeling that [Richter is] showing the various possibilities just as possibilities, so that they simply stand alongside or against each other, without performing any other function." Richter's works constitute a reflection on the history of painting, "a catalogue of the rhetorical possibilities of painting," and thus resist incorporation into a traditional concept of the medium (as in the Neoexpressionism contemporary with his art).(3) Buchloh's powerful argument has one major flaw, however, as recently pointed out by Desa Philippi: in emphasizing the catalogue-like quality of Richter's paintings, it leaves little specific to say about their formal qualities.(4) They become empty rehearsals or restatements by an artist with a solely ironic, if not political, agenda for his medium.
