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Gerhard Richter: Spoon in Hand and Mirror in the Face

For many visitors the show-stoppers in Gerhard Richter’s exhibition "Paintings 1996–2001," in the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York this past fall, were a pair of photo-based paintings of the artist’s infant son Moritz eating spaghetti. The catalogue for the exhibition also reproduced the original colour photo from which the painting was copied. To adapt it for painting, Richter cropped the image, top and bottom, making it almost square, palpably focusing us into a mesmerizingly intimate close-up of the painted Moritz with his unflinching, bulging eyes and ballooning, tomato-smeared cheeks. The "baby flesh is thrust upon us with such exaggerated tactility that we immediately sense the compacted energies of a rapidly growing infant, from cheeks and neck folds, down to the sausage-like hands and fingers"—as Robert Rosenblum has written, describing not Moritz, however, but the German Romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge’s portrait of his son, Otto Sigismund in a Highchair, from 1805, almost two centuries earlier—"dominating the cramped space so totally that we feel a confusion in scale." Once detected, the historical echoes are inescapable, Richter via camera-trained eyes freshly restaging what Runge achieved for the first time in the history of art, the sense that, quoting Rosenblum again, "we are actually face to face with a real baby." The second Moritz portrait, an expressionist gloss on the first, smears the details of face and hands into Munchian ghost-likeness.

It has become commonplace to discuss Richter’s landscape paintings in relation to those of Runge’s early-19th-century contemporary Caspar David Friedrich, so it should not be surprising to find historical echoes in his portraits. Even so, in the exhibition’s catalogue, Benjamin Buchloh holds up the Moritz portraits as somehow exceptional. They, he writes, "puncture Richter’s oeuvre by manifestly positioning themselves in a long historical trajectory of iconographies and genres, suddenly claiming seemingly unperturbed access to historical continuities...." Indeed, to incorporate Richter into historical continuities, rather than separate him from them, registers as an unexpected critical change of mind, because Buchloh has always attributed to him an oppositional attitude to the history of art. And even here, in the balance of the sentence that I have just quoted from, he holds fast to his usual argument that "Richter’s other work…," including presumably the landscapes and the Abstract Paintings, "has been and continues to be engaged in a critical deconstruction of the pictorial and linguistic conventions" of the past.

Overall, given how much aesthetic pleasure Richter’s art gives its public, it is puzzling how much critical writing casts it as a negative operation: painting used to debunk the possibilities of painting in a postmodern period, exposing its powerlessness and loss of will. Such judgements are not as much wrong or irrelevant as incomplete, based, as they seem to be, primarily on the first half of Richter’s career, and wrapped as they often come in a 1950s-ish kind of existential despondency. Often such criticism, while postmodern, advances its arguments with an avant-garde fervour, littering journal pages with discarded modernist values, but venturing into a (dismal) future bereft of residue from which to construct alternatives. In contrast, Richter himself sounds maudlin when he describes art as "the highest form of hope," or when, as he says, "I felt like painting something beautiful."

Dead-end pessimism was the purport of Benjamin Buchloh’s challenge to Richter in that now famous and much quoted dialogue from the 1988 Art Gallery of Ontario/Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) catalogue, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, to the effect that the marks of the Abstract Paintings were in the end only rhetorical reiterations from the history of painting, and by that fact meaningless as direct speech. Instead they are a demonstration or an analysis of its impossibility. But on that occasion Richter rejected this critique of his undertaking, insisting, in a tone of incredulity, that his art, on the contrary, "works emotionally. It occasions moods, both as a whole and in the details." Care must of course be taken not to conflate Buchloh the critic with the interlocutory voice of Buchloh the interviewer acting the skeptical foil, provoking his resistant prey, teasing out his convictions, because Buchloh has over the years been Richter’s most astute critic and prime interpreter, tackling the work, however, always from a certain intellectual distance, as if emotional engagement might undermine analytic objectivity.

A comparable anxiety prevails in the Marian Goodman Gallery catalogue from the past fall. The "practice of painting," which Richter seems to find such fertile ground, Buchloh describes as a "discursive confinement" and as bound up in "an abstraction of disenchantment." The purpose of Richter’s "comprehensive allegorical project" is "to subsume the lost practices within the very process of deconstructing them." To merely subsume, rather than to re-embrace on fresh terms? Why the absolutes? Why the nervousness that the work may fail some rigid measure of political/theoretical correctness? It may be that Richter’s painting has ensued out of a postmodern "evacuation of the spiritual, the transcendental and the utopian dimensions from abstract art." But simultaneously does not the question apply, as it is asked by a character in a recent story by Louise Erdrich, "why are we given the curse of imagining eternity when we can’t experience it, when we ourselves are so finite?" Why the high modernist fear that the work of an artist who has expressed his admiration for the de-hierarchizing gestures of John Cage may become contaminated by kitsch, or even the ordinary? Discovering an implausible pink wave structure in a winter landscape, Buchloh shudders that nevertheless the painting "does not even allow for a moment to think about the work’s dangerous proximity to convention." On the contrary, we cannot help thinking how close the scene is to a Hallmark greeting card, and how pretty the pink is. But then our double reward is to realize how surely—it shouldn’t be possible—the painting skirts sentimentality and marshals its resources to reach for something that is much more marvellous.

Nevertheless the Marian Goodman Gallery catalogue essay stands as Buchloh’s finest analysis of the currents of ambivalence and contradiction that run through Richter’s work. At the same time, as we have seen with regard to the Moritz portraits, Buchloh seems also to have undergone a sort of reticent sea change, for the first time almost openly moved by the work he is writing about, to the point of applying such terminology as "chef d’oeuvres" and accepting the "increasingly irresistible appeal of Richter’s paintings," even acknowledging, on behalf of other viewers at least, if not quite for himself, the work’s "putative" qualities of "beauty" and "truth value" quarantined between quotation marks.

The Goodman exhibition, with nearly 60 recent paintings, along with Buchloh’s quasi-revisionist essay, constituted a significant prelude to "Gerhard Richter: 40 Years of Painting," which opened this February at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, billed as "the first full-scale survey of the paintings...ever mounted in New York, as well as the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s work seen in North America." The show includes some 188 paintings from every phase of the artist’s career, from Table (1962), work #1 in the catalogue raisonné of his painting, to the latest works from 2001. As we have come to know, the term "painting" in Richter’s oeuvre has been elastic enough to include a variety of mirrors and other viewing machines. And alongside the paintings stands a voluminous production of drawings and watercolours, of photographs, paintings on photographs and photographs of paintings, as well as prints, books and other multiples.

In sheer artistic output, Richter’s career is remarkable, as is the documentation of it. The first catalogue raisonné of the paintings was published in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle in 1986; the second was part of the three-volume catalogue for a European touring exhibition in 1993; and the latter was followed by a supplement, published by the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London, in 1998. Separate catalogues raisonnés of the drawings and watercolours have since been published. Add to this Atlas (published in its most recent version in 1997), the systematic and exhaustive compilation documenting Richter’s pictorial sources and a variety of working collages and sketches, and a nearly 40-year bibliography of exhibition catalogues, books, reviews and critical articles. His anthology of writings and interviews, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962–1993, published in English in 1995, has become required reading for students and artists. With his phenomenal success in the marketplace and a broad public following, Richter stands as perhaps the most respected and celebrated artist since Picasso.

What does it all mean? Is the MOMA exhibition merely icing on the cake of an established career, re-reviewing the already known? MOMA’s press release for the current show laments that "Although Richter has been a well-known and greatly respected figure in Europe for many years, his achievement has been comparatively slow to come to the attention of the general public in the United States." So the marketing terms of the exhibition, even in a New York that has had continual regular exposure to his work for the past quarter-century, are not so different from what they were when the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago organized Richter’s first retrospective in North America in 1988. Then we thought it timely to bring a public on this side of the Atlantic up to date on an artist whose critical significance in Europe was indisputable, but whose work at the same time was only little known here, and was certainly puzzling. Richter’s choice to paint—using as traditional a medium as oil paint—in a disparate variety of styles, not only sequentially, but simultaneously, ran counter to our usual expectations of consistent, linear stylistic developments. In the mid-1980s the problem had turned from being merely theoretical—something one knew about by hearsay or from reproductions—to being in your face. This was when Richter, after being reintroduced to New York in 1978 at the Sperone Westwater Fischer gallery as an abstract painter (his first and only previous solo show with a New York dealer, in 1973, had attracted little notice), began to hang realist landscapes and still lifes side by side with his abstract paintings. Since then, of course, many artists’ oeuvres have become characterized by stylistic plurality.

So here, at the beginning of the 21st century, how do we understand Richter? Who is the painter of those glorious high-chroma abstracts and the piercingly beautiful, Vermeeresque portraits of his daughter Betty, the wistful landscapes, the brooding memento mori still lifes of candles and skulls, an artist who still on occasion startles us with glass and mirror installations? Is he the nihilistic postmodernist deconstructor of the conventions of painting? Or has he, on the contrary, become the major standard-bearer for pleasure and beauty as over the past couple of decades we passed through a theory-driven vale of tears? Or are there other, larger questions that may subsume these smaller ones?

There are no simple reductive answers. Richter’s work offers any number of handles for critical investigation and aesthetic reward. The most important, I think, the reason he originally embraced the photograph, has to do with that family of double-edged—that is, simultaneously destructive and restorative—artistic techniques that have regularly reinvigorated the avant-garde over the past century. The Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky spoke of the need to "de-automatize" perception, finding artistic devices to impede it, especially to slow viewers’ perception down, prompting critical alertness. Bertolt Brecht called it the alienation effect; Michael Fried, in his description of Minimalism, disparagingly labelled it "theatricality"; and most recently, Mieke Bal, in her critique of the absoluteness of the gaze, evokes what she calls the "vocative or I-you

For Richter the fundamental problem, I think, has always been with vision itself, both his, in relation to the world of phenomenal reality, and ours, as we engage with his paintings; with the thresholds at which perceptual experience changes from being direct to becoming mediated and given purpose by desire, or knowledge; and with how to give us a picture of this fleeting event and make it available for fresh experience. It is this focus in his work that leads him continually to separate painting from other activity, especially from the realm of language, ideology and theory: "Language can express only what language enables it to express." A corollary issue, one that accounts for the emotional richness of the work, has to do with how the work, whatever its critical stance with regard to the history of art, nevertheless acknowledges its place in painting’s memory and history. For all his deconstructive work on the past of painting, Richter has in other ways succeeded in uncompromisingly reconstituting the expressive richness of its tradition. It could of course get confusing on this continent, insofar as it was in the United States that the critical ground rules were set and managed in the years after the Second World War. Accordingly Richter’s early work was classified as a German variation of Pop or Minimal art; or of Conceptual art, the latter association making it possible to validate him, the conventional painter in oils, as an avant-garde artist. Not that assimilations to up-to-the-moment American movements were irrelevant. Richter, after all, took his license to choose "anti-art" subjects for his paintings, and to paint inartistically, from a small painting of a kitchen stove by Lichtenstein. But, by the same token, as Richter told Buchloh, when it came time to paint monochromes, at a time when monochromes were being painted everywhere, "I was doing it for a different reason."

An equally applicable context for Richter’s work may be an avenue of artistic investigation that in the early 1960s emerged almost simultaneously in several places internationally—Germany, Britain, Canada, Venezuela, the United States—one which was not "ism"-bound or style-specific. This was the orientation towards Fried’s "theatricality," not confined only to Minimal art and other work cast up in its wake, but also characteristic of so-called Op art—in the work of Bridget Riley, Guido Molinari and Jesús Rafael Soto, among others, and, for our purposes here, of Richter. "Theatricality," the concept that an artwork is dependent upon its audience in order to come into view, investigated the epistemological problem of how we know and negotiate the world, as Merleau-Ponty would put it, through our embeddedness in the flesh of the world. When American art in the 1960s wanted to de-automatize perception, it paradoxically did so largely at the expense of sight. In work from the 1960s by Robert Morris and Richard Serra, for example, the visual remained essentially at the service of the documentary, unaesthetic in itself, a material fact against which to measure all the other freshly rediscovered bodily sensations. This was perhaps an inevitable development in the wake of the dominance of the Greenbergian critic whose principal tool was his "good eye." Visuality on the whole remained rigorously derogated in American art through the 1980s, to the point that even so successful a painter as Peter Halley needed to justify his geometric patterns of cells and conduits as critical illustrations of bureaucratic social structures.

The confidence in sensuous visuality did not waver to the same extent elsewhere, although it may have seemed so when Richter first defended his decision to make painted copies of humble family and newspaper photos: "I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent.)" But the efficacy of the photograph was that it provided the optimum model for a kind of disinterested seeing, one that preceded interpretation, and provisionally held stylizations at bay. Richter’s essential description of that moment of innocence, the fleeting return to before the Fall that the photograph gave access to, occurs in his Notes 1964–65:

...the camera does not apprehend objects; it sees them. In ‘freehand drawing,’ the object is apprehended in all its parts, dimensions, proportions, geometric forms. These components are noted down as signs and can be read off as a coherent whole. This is an abstraction that distorts reality and leads to stylization of a specific kind. By tracing the outlines with the aid of a projector, you can bypass this elaborate process of apprehension. You no longer apprehend but see and make (without design) what you have not apprehended. And when you don’t know what you are making, you don’t know, either, what to alter or distort.

The elusiveness of indifferent perception is further demonstrated by Richter’s framed and rotating panes of glass and the large and small mirrors. They may yield us an infinite number of pictures of "reality," but this is not helpful, because, as Richter says, while they allow us to "see everything," as a corollary, they let us "grasp nothing." Unlike Robert Morris at the end of the 1970s, Richter did not resort to funhouse mirrors. The distorted mirror is a superfluous trick when the flat quotidian mirror by itself can prove how the viewer’s position endlessly defeats comprehensive or conclusive objectivity. Notice also how the photographs of Richter’s mirrors, those that issue from his studio, picture reflections of perceiving others, catch them absorbed in looking through windows at a light-dissolved nature beyond, making these photos near-infinitely regressive, secular restagings of Caspar David Friedrich’s theme of the window-threshold that separates us from other worlds of experience.

But the effects of the photo and the mirror are fleeting. Richter’s streaked Administrative Building (1964) and Thomas Ruff’s recent swiftly panned photographs of Mies van der Rohe buildings are ostensibly similar drive-by takes on architectural modernism, but while Ruff rushes us past with futurist speed, Richter demands our swooning concentration, holding his subject matter in aqueous suspension. Richter has given various explanations for the streaking and blurring effects that characterize the Photo Paintings, but finally, however mechanized the procedures, they are evidence of the handmade and a trace of the slow deliberateness of the labour of painting. They give the image both body and time, so that seeing a work requires a complementary perceptual response that takes up the full somatic apparatus of the viewer’s body in the slowness of time. Unlike photorealism, which with its positivistic optimism pretended to a descriptive clarity of the visual world, Richter undermines and problematizes the truth value of the photograph, increasingly dissolving the details and contours of the subject matter the harder and closer one looks. Our usual behaviour gets upset, satisfaction is deferred, perception held in suspension, closure between visual field and its reduction into language and knowledge endlessly deferred. Readers may recall how truly frustrating the Photo Paintings first were, and how perverse they seemed when exhibited alongside other so-called realist paintings. Since, Richter has taught us how to find beauty there, to take pleasure in antitheses.

Later, with regard to his Color Charts, Richter would claim that he pushed their random complexity in order "to permit exciting detail," to allow, despite everything, "the formation of figurations" so as to regenerate the possibility of a kind of imagery, objectives that seemed weird if you thought these paintings had something to do with abstraction or minimalism. These were, I think, Richter’s ruminations on what we actually do when we look at anything, our urge to make pictures—even if, once we discover a face in it, our favourite abstract painting is ruined forever—a kind of "innocent" acceptance of chance appearances, as opposed to a self-conscious policing of what may be appropriate aesthetic behaviour, by paintings or their viewers.

We should heed in the same light an observation, one I have always found quite moving, that Richter made in the early 1970s when he was painting monochromatic grey paintings in series because, as he explained, he "did not know what [else] to paint." After painting several of these, trying to make them look more or less alike, he noticed something unexpected: that "one’s better than the others and you ask yourself why that is." Indifference, his guiding principle since the selection of images for the Photo Paintings, falters in the face of reality. In practice one cannot stop looking aesthetically when looking at works of art. Richter’s re-engagement with the language of gestural painting would occur just around the corner in 1976.

One of the strengths of formalist criticism as it was practiced in the 1960s was its eagerness, in comparison to the vagaries of impressionistic writing, to reach for a kind of scientific precision. You had not really seen a painting, nor accounted for its workings, until you could describe it precisely. The incontrovertible dictum was that failures to explain were caused by failures to describe, even as you acknowledged that there were things about art you could not describe. About those you remained silent. The rift between seeing and describing Richter’s Photo Paintings, and even more so his Abstract Paintings, is unbridgeable in more fundamental ways, because even the identity of what we call the formal or structural escapes stability. A material fact has a way of turning into an illusionistic image, clusters of formal relations have only periodic lives, their liaisons as volatile as political ones, and descriptive language slips from the factual into the metaphoric.

The Abstract Paintings overwhelm the eye with an ecstatic surplus of pictorial events. Those shown this past fall were alternately full of energy or (expressively) lackadaisical, even listless in execution; some were liquid and silken, others dry; sometimes the paint was mechanically spread, relentlessly, revealing spaces and other spaces underneath; in others it could veer off erratically in ripples, folds and scrapes; some were crossed with hapless graffiti, and so on, with many techniques coexisting side by side and at the same time. In art-historical terms this is work that draws its visual effects from the dynamic end of the classical-baroque continuum. It opts for baroque’s penchant for dazzling and disorienting excess; it delights in baroque’s contradictions between surface and depth, and baroque’s disinterest in reducing a multiplicity of visual spaces into any single order of coherence. "Like our lives, these paintings are not seamless, rational predictable worlds. [This] painted world reverberates with the vicissitudes and contradictions of our everyday world," writes the California painter Wayne Thiebaud, as if giving voice to the metaphoric dimension of Richter’s Abstract Paintings. In fact he is describing the paintings of Thomas Eakins in a New York Times article entitled "Slowing the World in Order to See It":

He keeps the pictures alive by using knives, brushes, rags and his fingers to vary suggestions of time and movement. Many things can be suggested by the way in which paint is applied. Slow, reflective time is depicted by the sluggish drag of the paint, while a swift darting thrust of a brushed surface indicates a hurried movement. Lyrical staccato brush marks can appear as microseconds. These various tempos keep the painting ticking along.

Without for a moment confusing Eakins’ 19th-century descriptive program and Richter’s depersonalized late-20th-century attempts in his abstracts to "visualize a reality which we can neither see nor describe," Thiebaud’s elaborations on the eloquence of paint also describe something about the rhythms of our readings of Richter’s paintings through the flow of their accumulative details. They are a concrete art made of the material of paint arranged on a surface in a certain order. If they are to reveal their simultaneous irreducibility to verbal order, they cannot be mere chaos. We need a horizon against which to see the processes of formation and dissolution take place. The modernist grid is usually there somewhere, in the 1990s explicitly dragged through the paint in broad continuous horizontal and vertical strokes. The grid may be an ordering device, but more potent is what it cannot control, what tumbles out of it, or exposes itself in its unpredictable interstices. If at first glance some of Richter’s recent paintings seem flat and leaden, soon they begin to glisten a little in the eye, and then they open up to expose evocative depths of iridescent colours, revealing their trademark, complex palimpsest structure of multiple times and place, consciously mirroring the viewer’s loci of attention.

Richter has hinted that the spaghetti-smeared Moritz may equally be a portrait of the artist as a very young man, i.e., the artist who as a child drew intersecting loops and circles with his fingers on the empty greasy dinner plate, the memory of which would infuse the jungle imagery of his Inpaintings in the early 1970s; the same artist who would make a career of smearing and scraping viscous stuff, in ways that both fundamentally questioned what Buchloh calls "its discursive and disciplinary memory" of painting as an art, and yet retained a profound respect for it. What was at stake was making it do its job, stripped of nostalgia, in ways that address contemporary experience, not forgetting though that nostalgia is one of its substrata. Richter has never, except in early provocative remarks, denied his respect for the history of painting, nor his sense of continuity with it. This is true of his selection of subject matter. The memory of Friedrich pervades the landscapes, as that of Vermeer does the portraits of Sabine and Betty. Memory also pervades the early Photo Paintings, whose photographic sources were purportedly chosen as a demonstration of Duchampian indifference. But as Richter later admitted, "the motifs never were picked at random: not when you think of the endless trouble I took to find photographs that I could use....I looked for photographs that showed my present life, the things that related to me." The presumption that these paintings somehow negated their content, much as Richter may, early on, have encouraged it, also seems curious when we consider the labour-intensity involved in their production, unsupportable, unless as a kind of labour of love. If Richter has reiterated the importance to him of John Cage’s saying, "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it," then we should also recall the smile of delight on Cage’s face when uncovering the beauty of the raw phenomena of the world.

Comparably there is an archaeology of memory in the abstracts; their sequences of decisions, reconsiderations, eradications, additions, erasures and accumulations are also interrogations of, and references and homages to, the history of both the realist and abstract pasts. Hence if they touch us through our memories of past painting, they also keep us critically alert because of their refusal of structural closure, because of their appeal through what we might call a structure of sensual engagement, and because of the way that our interrogation of them turns them into a sequence of mirror reflections of ourselves. This, I think, is what Mieke Bal has in mind when she stresses the theatrical entanglement of the viewing subject and the volatile object that constitutes our engagement with a work of art. By allowing ourselves into the embrace of the work rather than standing apart in objectifying mastery, we become fully engaged in "knowledge that cannot be acquired but needs to be constructed." And, as if she were talking about Molinari, Riley, Ron Martin, Chris Cran, or Richter (she is in fact writing about David Reed), she observes that "If painting, painted shapes, don’t sit still, it becomes harder to pretend not to hear what they have to say, and to refrain from talking back."

Perhaps it is in these terms, his art organized as a "theatre" of viewer-painting interrogative interchange, that Richter in 2002 remains an artist of central importance. Perhaps, after the long visual drought of language- and theory-based art, abstraction is again necessary in order to reconstitute both the erotics and the intelligence of visual and sensual experience, before it is suppressed by the purposeful. Perhaps that is why abstract painting, untainted by postmodern appropriation or ironies, again seems alive and relevant in the studios and the galleries. If this sounds a little whoop-de-doo in contrast to Buchloh’s soberer analysis of the same work, or if a return to abstraction sounds like some traditional "call to order," then let us return to the tomato-smeared portrait of Moritz, recalling that Richter makes no distinctions between his realism and his abstraction. The painting is consistent in its by now familiar blurred realist manner, except for the silver spoon held in the child’s awkward grasp. Looking close we discover, however, that its shiny handle is not painted but has been constructed by scraping the paint down to the white ground of the canvas. This opens up a disconcerting emptiness, as eerily blank as the mirror that a quarter-century earlier Richter had strategically placed lower centre in the studio photograph for the cover of his 1986 catalogue raisonné, a photograph carefully staged to catalogue the principal components of his art: the large abstract paintings, the easel-sized realist ones, the Kodak cartons strewn on the floor, and that cold, empty mirror.

Spring 2002

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