If anything links the diverse approaches seen in the work of
Gerhard Richter currently on display in an extensive retrospective at Tate
Modern it would be materiality, surface and illusion. One thing pretends to be
another - a photograph is a painting - a sky is a sea. Seascape (Cloudy), (1969), offers a view it would be impossible to
see, the horizon being below eye level. Some of the early work appears crude (Himalaya (1968), Folding Dryer (1962)), and the dry brush scraped over wet paint
becomes a little tiresome. In the first few rooms there is a sense of relief
when one comes upon a painting which uses colour – there is only so much grey
one can take. And even the first colour chart is poorly executed (192 Colours (1966)). But the sheer
variety of styles, often painted alongside each other, shows Richter to be a
painter exploring all aspects of his chosen medium with the attention of a
serious artist.
Richter is not an artist with clearly defined ‘periods’
depicting linear progression, he moves from one approach to another and back
again with seeming ease, merely adding to his oeuvre over time – photo-realism,
abstraction, abstract expressionism, figurative, landscape, and with his Grey
paintings and colour charts the introduction of random processes. The colour
charts improve with a switch to enamel paint (4096 Colours (1974)) where the surface becomes flatter and more
pure. In Double Pane of Glass (1977)
a change of surface (glass as opposed to canvas) transforms the quality of the
paint (oil) and therefore the surface of the painting and the quality of the
brushwork. A change of tool (roller as opposed to brush) does the same (Grey (1974)). Richter’s approach is that
of a scientist changing a single parameter of an experiment to see the change
in outcome. This is most clear in the Grey
paintings.
There is something very clinical about even his ‘loosest’
paintings. The meticulous nature of the work makes the minor deficiencies more
apparent, imperfections on the surface (cracks, blemishes, a thumb print,
staples and folded canvas visible on the sides of unframed paintings) break the
illusion momentarily, offering the work a fragility and impermanence that they
otherwise seem to be denying. And across the two canvases of Moonscape II (1968) the colours are ever
so slightly wrong.
By abstracting photographs almost beyond recognition as he
does in Tourist (With 1 Lion) and Tourist (With 2 Lions) (both 1975) is
Richter trivialising an event (the mauling of said tourist by lions), or guarding
the viewer from the horrible reality, or does the fact you have to work harder
to ‘see’ the image heighten the horror? Similar could be asked regarding his portraits
of Nazis and the 18th October
1977 series.
The Cloud paintings
of 1970 are beautiful and manage to avoid the slight frustration felt by his
other smooth surfaced photo-realist paintings. Richter’s most iconic painting, Betty (1988), also achieves this. This
painting, a portrait of his daughter, could be regarded as Richter’s Mona Lisa, except we are denied her
beauty as she is facing away from us and once again all we can do is wonder at
the surface, stepping closer in an effort to break the illusion. This is the
one painting that looks no different to its often seen reproductions. This is
the slight frustration of which I speak – the reproductions (photographs of
paintings of photographs) are always smoother and flatter than the actual
paintings and so the ‘real’ painting, being merely a painting, although a
marvel, is almost always a slight disappointment.
The only work on display here where the audience isn’t aware
of the surface is Mirror (1981)
(which, as the title suggests, is a mirror hung in the place of a painting). Here
the viewer looks beyond the surface to see only themselves. The relationship
between viewer and work is made explicit in Mirror,
the artist is saying look at my work, or indeed any work of art, and you will
see only yourself.
In the 1980’s Richter, an artist always at odds with
fashion, momentarily joins in with the popular style with his large brash
abstracts. The abstract paintings have everything the majority of the photo-realist
paintings lack – texture, thickness, and vibrant colour. Interestingly, Richter’s
early abstracts (where he blows up and reproduces details of other paintings)
retain the smooth surface of the rest of his oeuvre. His 1980’s landscapes
however are a disappointment, well
executed but uninteresting. They are reasonable paintings of badly taken
photographs, neither good photographs nor good paintings.
In his 1990’s abstracts Richter starts to cut into the
surface of his paintings, revealing other surfaces beneath, other potential
paintings, partially revealing also the processes behind the work.
In the late 1980’s Richter, who has spent so much time
replicating photography in paint, began a series of small scale works applying
paint directly onto photographs, personal family snapshots and portraits
obscured by often a single brush stroke. Providing respite from his monumental
paintings these ‘sketches’ are simple, quick and intensely beautiful. There is
an apparent casualness to them unseen anywhere else in his body of work, almost
as if he simply picked up the photograph to wipe his brush clean (I know this
is not the case and these pieces are far from casual, but they successfully
give that impression). These pieces are direct, they contain less illusion than
much of his work, they are not paintings manifesting as photographs, or vice
versa, they are what they are, a photograph daubed with paint, the successful
merging of two media Richter has spent so much time questioning and separating.
Maybe he finally realises the limits of painting with September (2005), in which he obscures a
painting he had begun, depicting the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre as
they were destroyed on September 11th 2001. It is a modest painting
but it shows his failure. His painting of an atrocity fails to evoke any of the
powerful emotions - dread, fear, awe - that the photographs of the event so
successfully induce. Why did he abandon this painting, deface it and then choose
to exhibit the defacement? Is he, after a lifetimes work pushing at the limits
of painting, acknowledging his failure? Is there nowhere else to go? Is the
photograph of the painting, no matter how wonderful the paining is, always
going to be better than the painting itself? This, ultimately, is the question
we always return to with Richter’s work.
