One of these last, from , portraying his daughter Betty from behind, seems to me the single most beautiful painting made by anyone in the last half century. It is not in the present show. Those darkling images will always tug at our general assessments of Richter. He is a darling of the contemporary art market, with his works selling at auction for tens of millions of dollars. But his longtime best friend, and a co-curator of this show, is the critic Benjamin H. Buchloh, a hard-bitten apostle of Frankfurt School anti-capitalist, all but anti-aesthetic, political theory.
While never forsaking representation—as seen at the Met Breuer in portraits of his third wife, Sabine Moritz, and their three children, which radiate Titianesque color—Richter took up chromatic abstraction in the seventies, overlaying brushed, slathered, and scraped swaths of paint.
I remember hating those on my first sight of them, circa They seemed to me sloppy travesties of Abstract Expressionism, and pointless: inferior coals to the Newcastle of Willem de Kooning. Gradually, I caught their drift as pragmatic explorations of painterly phenomena: ur-paintings. Not only condoning but soliciting accident, Richter attends to the multifarious effects of layered paint that has been repeatedly smashed and dragged, wet-in-wet.
He appraises the results with an exercise of taste, deciding what to keep and what to efface. Fashion and Culture.
General Non-Fiction. Artspace Art and Design Objects. Prints and Editions. Design Objects. Magazine Architecture. Join Us. Two Candles by Gerhard Richter. Gerhard Richter, Cologne, Photo by Benjamin Katz. Finger painting by Gerhard Richter. Eighteen Colour Charts by Gerhard Richter. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks…The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist.
Richter insists on taking or keeping a photograph because he enjoys it purely in that form; though he will go on to paint some of those images later, taking a photo with the intention to paint it, he has learned, will result in a less-than-superb painting and an even worse photograph. He holds no false impression that any photograph accurately depicts the world from which it came — it instead creates its own world, emerging from ours but remaining distinctly separate from it because of the context its four walls leave out.
Richter seems to be a photographer who is bored with the craft. Richter experiments with other modes as well, as he did for abstract painting, taking a squeegee to the canvas to reveal earlier layers of paint, and photorealistic painting, using various methods to blur what would have been a crisp image. Seeing the photographs he took below and the paintings they become simply illuminates the strong story his art alone begins to tell.
Bottom: Two Candles and Reader It must reveal to each a truth about the world that could not be expressed in any less creative form. Richter is so fascinating for the rigorous intellectualized abstract processes he uses and yet his insistence on painting as a non-conceptual non-verbal experience.
You explore this tension in his work quite well here, with Sontag lurking in the background. On the one hand, Richter seems part of that, but with a colder kind of control or compression to his work?
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