How Do Oldenburg Rauschenberg and Warhol Weaken the Barrier Between Art Works and Real Objects

AMONG THE LOOSE COLLECTION of essays, notes, comments, and fragments that William Carlos Williams entitled The Embodiment of Knowledge one finds "The Ancestry of an American Education (Affiliate ii. The Address Toward Collegiate Report. The New in Fine art.)," in which the poet remarks about an art student'southward "difficulty in knowing."¹ Whatever the educatee has learned about what has been done in the by volition, according to Williams, amount merely to "that which is . . . of no employ to him, in fact cipher less than a barrier which he must surmount if ever he is to do anything that tin can be called serious work." Throughout his life Williams guarded against an imposition of the past on the nowadays: "There is an antagonism between the ages," he wrote elsewhere; "Each age wishes to enslave the others. Each wishes to succeed." To Williams the anchor of the past proves especially fatal in fine art, "the category about responsive to living conditions." "A painter like Cézanne or Titian, or a statue as good as some by Phidias, is a complete triumph to the learned, and worth nothing whatever." In 1966, under completely dissimilar circumstances simply for similar reasons, Gerhard Richter expressed the same mental attitude in a remark included in a text of combined statements written with Sigmar Polke for an exhibition at the Galerie H, in Hannover: "I find many apprentice photos better than the best Cézanne. In general information technology isn't just a question of painting expert pictures."

Richter also does non want to be encumbered by imposed doctrines of the by. He began in 1962 by painting pictures that look like photographs. He used illustrations from popular magazines such every bit Quick, Stern, or the Bunte Illustrierte as his sources, choosing them in opposition to the formalistic painting movements such every bit the Nothing group and Tachism that were dominant at the time. "Information technology was perhaps a protestation," Richter says, "considering people here in Germany were constantly looking at the formal side. I resist this because my fine art always has something to exercise with my life and how I deal with it . . . I'm ashamed to say this, because information technology's so obvious that one tin discharge all the criminal energy that one has stored up."ⁱⁱ Richter considers his provocation of Cézanne to have been brought virtually by those protests of the early '60s, simply he considers his statement still truthful: "At that time there were certain claims to quality which art supposedly had to fulfill in order to be art. Nosotros didn't want that. Today I find that fine art by and large has to fulfill economic conditions. That'southward no adept either. Art must be truthful—that's its moral attribute."

In reaction to the pseudo painting movements today and concerned about the "dilettantism" backside them, he adheres to a concept of "beauty, which is a give-and-take no ane likes. 'Beauty' has become a downgraded word, but that shouldn't be the case, because we would all similar to be healthy, perfect, fulfilled, everything—the opposites of state of war, criminal offense, and sickness. I see beauty in all the works of fine art we cherish." In the current context Cézanne's persistent drive for perfection, exemplified in his painting Mont Sainte-Victoire over and over once again, could in fact be seen to correspond with Richter's desire for "Volkommenheit," "perfection"—with similar fixation on painting that is manifested, for case, in his series of "Stadtbilder" (City pictures, 1968–lxx).

For both painters, the want for abyss is accompanied by a continuous state of disillusion distinctly enunciated by Cézanne in a letter to Emile Bernard from 1906, in which he writes that his dissatisfaction will simply disappear "when I have achieved something that comes out meliorate than the previous try and that tin can thus bear witness the theories, which are ever easily stated. The just thing that causes serious difficulty is providing the proofs for what one thinks. And so I go along with my studies."³ And then does Richter continue his studies in an intense search for inclusiveness from picture to pic. While mediating between photography and painting, Richter encounters the gap between an objective image of reality—through the mechanics of the camera eye—and the subjective perception of the senses. He constantly balances all the objective and subjective factors that occur during the act of painting photographically. He tries to span his own "mood" in relation to the mood of the times, and the anonymity of the photograph, which has no style, to his desire for completeness through classical beauty. Gradually the realization grows that something is left out. The sense of imperfection necessitates the painting of another motion picture.

At the age of 64 Cézanne told a young painter, Charles Camoin, whom he accidentally met in the streets of Marseilles, "Everything, especially in art, is theory, adult and practical in contact with nature." He believed in "becoming classical through nature," and thought of the erstwhile masters every bit "a moral support," even when their work offered nil to be copied.

Although Richter'southward approach is more alienated than this, and is expressed through painting only photographic images of nature, he shares with Cézanne the search for classical harmony in the work of older masters and in nature: "I believe that fine art has a kind of rightness, every bit in music when we hear whether or not a notation is false. And that's why the one-time classical pictures, which are correct in their own terms, are so necessary for me. In improver to that there'due south nature, which I encounter also has this rightness. It appears that these days one can put about anything on the canvas, and I am against that."

Richter analyzes the "nature" of painting. Working from photographs—some of which he takes himself—he tries to accomplish classical beauty in meticulous "photo/paintings"—oil paintings based on photographs—of deject formations, skulls, candles, romantic landscapes, and abstruse pictures, all of which reverberate his dissonant version of a "harmony parallel to nature." They are presented on an intimate calibration intended to express "the regret or resignation that I tin can't work that way anymore, that this classical fine art is past. Yet I want to paint that way, but not simply every bit a quotation—that wouldn't be enough." Indeed, in 1973 Richter painted the series "Verkündigung nach Tiziari" (Declaration later on Titian) which is more than a reference to the original; it is an attempt at a reconstruction followed by four other pictures in which the image diffuses and vaporizes gradually into a cloud of pigment. Titian's image is dissolved in a mass of brushstrokes; just the color scheme and the motion of the limerick, echoing the original figures, preserve the atmospheric mood of Titian. The process by which the image gradually disintegrates and disappears reverses the stages in the development of a Polaroid photograph.

Merely in the act of painting snapshots, combining not-high-art subject matter with a conventional mode of rendering in chiaroscuro, can Richter both oppose and have tradition in art, thus achieving a modernistic schismatic sensibility. If whatsoever contemporary artist profoundly and paradoxically both scrutinizes and resists the "classics" it is this obsessed painter, who, as much as Williams or Cézanne, cannot extricate himself from the dilemma of choosing the present while calling upon the by. His struggle for cocky-actualization is shaped by the dualism of his own past.

Richter was born February 9, 1932, in Dresden. He recalls that he decided to become an artist at the age of sixteen: "It had to practise with existence an introvert. I was alone a great bargain, and drew a lot." For the next two years he worked equally a scene painter for a theater company and equally a sign painter in a factory, where he painted slogans on billboards and, occasionally, portraits of political leaders. At xix he failed the archway examination for the Kunstakademie Dresden, merely was admitted the following year. There he received a thorough training in traditional genres—figure drawing, still lifes, and landscape painting—always working from the real thing, as any other method was forbidden. After v years Richter had achieved infrequent skills in a wide range of techniques, including the illusionistic precisionism of such 19th-century painters as Caspar David Friedrich and Adolf von Menzel, merely he grew increasingly weary of the official esthetic doctrines of East Germany. He had learned something about 20th-century art, despite the fact that everything from Impressionism on was officially considered "corrupt," and books on the subject were non available in the library. Somewhat influenced at the fourth dimension past the work of Picasso and of the Italian Socialist-Realist painter Renato Guttuso, both members of the Communist Political party and thus among the few strange contemporaries whose work was shown in East Germany, Richter started to experiment. The effect was that "I was a Modern painter, only with a horrible mixture of things." When these deviations from the prescribed esthetics—past Richter and a few others as rebellious—gained sudden notoriety as a "new" formalistic direction in art, he realized that he had to exit Due east Frg and get-go from scratch. "I knew that I did non desire to accept that kind of false importance," he explains.

In 1961, 2 months earlier the construction of the Berlin Wall, Richter crossed the border past streetcar, taking with him 2 suitcases. A friend found him a place to alive in Düsseldorf, and soon later on he received a scholarship to the Staatliche Kunstakademie in that metropolis. In that location he analyzed and practiced Tachism and a conglomerate of other styles, quickly catching upward with stylistic developments in the West. No longer depending on nature, he painted imaginary figures, and made objects out of shirts stiffened with gum. He scanned advanced periodicals, visited out-of-the-way exhibitions, traveled, and questioned his contemporaries. Just the one-half classical, half Modern esthetics, in the vein of the École de Paris, that were taught at the academy in Düsseldorf left Richter unsatisfied. Then in 1962–63 Pop art appeared on the scene, and became the turning signal for Richter.

The American Pop artists, including Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, and others, reacted confronting the elitism and abstruseness of the Abstract Expressionists past making icons taken from the surround of daily life, and by choosing as subject field affair such common things equally comic strips, billboards, supermarket fast nutrient, hardware supplies, article of furniture, and then on. Their industrial style and iconographical treatment of kitsch initially had political, social, and economic implications, even though the artists were not necessarily involved in politics. However the misconception that equated Pop art with naive optimism was common in the early on '60s: as one critic wrote, "They [the Popular artists] have washed and then not in a spirit of contempt or social criticism or cocky-conscious snobbery, simply out of an affirmative and unqualified commitment to the present circumstance and to a fantastic new wonderland, or, more properly, Disneyland, which asserts the conscious triumph of man's inner resources of feeling over the material rational world."⁴

The release from tradition provided by American Pop art, together with the experience of Fluxus concerts, annihilated everything Richter had done up to that time. "I thought that 1 was not allowed to pigment from photographs," he remembers, "until I saw the first reproductions of Roy Lichtenstein'southward paintings in Art International." Lichtenstein's nonartistic and unconventional method of painting cartoon images provided Richter with the side by side necessary detachment to interruption from the ascendant European painting tradition. At about that time, he recounts, "I threw away all my paintings, burned them, and started anew."

In Europe, parallel to radical activities in art in the United States, Richter and other artists from the Rhineland department of Federal republic of germany—including Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg, and Wolf Vostell—equally well equally Thou. H. Hödicke and K. P. Brehmer, from Berlin, opposed formalism in preference to an art that dealt with their ain environment. This entailed taking a subject thing that contrasted sharply with the ironic attitude of American Popular. The Germans chose the uncertain political reality of daily life and work in a country divided by a bitter schism. Brehmer expressed the implications of their socially conscious attitude: "we tin only find a wider basis for our work if we deal with the problems of the masses, if we become into these problems and try to contribute something to their solution. But that tin't be accomplished through our work alone."^v Richter, too, struggled with conscientious objections to being "just a painter": "There were things that were more important to us than painting. We had to get into the street, to demonstrate and create a party, to be active. This fourth dimension was a bit neurotic, of course, when you lot had to ask yourself what you were allowed to do. The activity of painting in context was understood to be reactionary, then if you were somewhat sensitive you e'er had to call back advisedly almost whether it was permissible to pigment or not, and if so, what."

But information technology was the arrival of Fluxus, with its ironical, anarchistic attitude toward club, that released Richter from this repression, and at the same time lifted somewhat for him the political imperative of the times. On February 2 and iii, 1963, the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus, initiated by Joseph Beuys (a professor at the Düsseldorf university) and organized past George Maciunas, took place in the academy as a "colloquium for the students." Maciunas fix the tone of the evening with his manifesto: "Purge the globe of bourgeois sickness, 'intellectual,' professional and commercialized civilization, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial fine art, abstract art, illusionistic fine art, mathematical art—PURGE THE WORLD OF 'EUROPANISM!' [sic]." This presentation was described past Tonio Finta in his article "Kaka, Sch und geplatzte Torte" (Kaka, shit, and exploded cake), in Der Mittag, Feb six, 1963: "And so over the paper mantle flew, alternately, huge amounts of cardboard strips and printed paper, which afterward turned out to be the manifesto of the 'fluxus' movement, authored by Maciunas, its primary ideologue, and composed in flawless American."

Richter remembers Nam June Paik'southward Fluxus Champion Competition (in pissing) performed past members of the grouping—Frank Trowbridge won, at 54 seconds. He also remembers Beuys' functioning of Siberische Symphonie, I Satz (Siberian Symphony, start movement, 1963); Vostell'south Décollage musique, Kleenex 4, 1963; and John Muzzle (who appeared on the poster and perchance on audio record, but not in person). He summarizes the events: "It was all very cynical and destructive. It was a point for us, and we became contemptuous and self and told ourselves that fine art is bull and Cézanne is stupid, etc., and . . . I'll paint a photo! Fluxus was the goad."

Soon thereafter, on October eleven, 1963, Lueg and Richter staged their own event, "Eine Demonstration für der kapitalistischen Realismus" (A demonstration for capitalist realism), in a Düsseldorf furniture store, Bergeshaus, Flingerstrasse 11. Here the commonly serious Richter loosened upward. He recalls the occasion:

It wasn't very serious. In that location was Socialist Realism, which was very well known, especially to me. This was just the reverse, and I could use it without taking it too seriously, considering "Capitalist Realism" was another course of provocation. At that place is no such matter as Capitalist Realism. This term somehow attacked both sides: it made Socialist Realism appear ridiculous, and did the same to the possibility of Capitalist Realism as well.

The concept for the demonstration had 3 parts: beginning, the complete furniture store would exist exhibited in an unaltered state; 2nd, a programmed viewing of the Sit-in would exist presented to spectators on October 11; finally, in a separate space an average living room would be exhibited as if it were being lived in, along with such typical paraphernalia as food, drinks, books, and housewares. The two painters, dressed in black suits, white shirts, and ties, were also on exhibition. Some pieces of piece of furniture were placed on pedestals, like sculptures, to make people realize that they were seeing an exhibit.

Richter's and Lueg's exhibiting of themselves recalls Piero Manzoni'southward presentation of himself on the pedestal he called "base magica," in 1961, and it anticipated the "living sculptures" of Gilbert & George. The setting in the furniture store is too reminiscent of Oldenburg's "Store" exhibition, which opened in December 1961 in a small shop on East second Street in New York. "The Store" had been an endeavor to bring art objects dorsum to their real function every bit Oldenburg saw it: "Why should I even want to create 'art'—that's the notion I've got to get rid of. Assuming that I wanted to create some thing what would that matter exist? Just a affair, an object. Fine art would non enter into it."⁶ "The Store" had as well served as a location for performances, which Oldenburg characterized equally "Theater of Objects." The several floors of the much larger furniture store called by Richter and Lueg were too used to present a combination of outcome and exhibition. In the midst of the showrooms of bed and living room furniture they hung their own paintings (all 1963): Lueg presented Vier Finger (Four fingers), Betende Hände (Praying hands), Bockwürste auf Pappteller; Bügel (Sausages on newspaper plate; hanger); Richter showed Mund (Oral fissure), Papst (Pope), Hirsch (Stage), and Schlosse Neu-Schwanstein.

The event in the furniture shop owed something to Duchamp, but when this was pointed out to Richter he qualified the reference: "Yes, yeah. But and then someone more like a prole would do it. Only I'thou no prole, never was . . . and I like a bit of culture. But I've never been a dandy, either. I don't take this intellectual arrogance. It's not my thing." Richter was not so much attracted by Duchamp'south more private brainy puns equally by his ready-mades, and even more than so by his paradoxical attitude, reflected in Fluxus, of making an intellectual, critical statement through the use of public imagery and banal materials. Fluxus' emphasis on ephemera confirmed for Richter the use of coincidental family unit snapshots and ordinary magazine clippings, which he had begun to work with in 1962. Once Richter had purged himself of tradition through his active participation in what at the time was radical and "new" in art, he could reconcile that same "anti-art" mental attitude with his desire for classical dazzler. From then on he would no longer experience painting hesitation, evidenced by the hundreds and hundreds of pictures that follow, which he numbers for organizational reasons.

The first numbered photograph/painting is Tisch (Table, 1962), which he based on a black and white illustration from the Italian mag Domus. This use of an illustration from a sleeky blueprint magazine such every bit Domus is exceptional; nearly of the series of tabloid pictures that followed, upward to the last one, "Tourist," 1975, have poor-quality reproductions from cheap magazines every bit their models. Tisch could be an illusionistic painting, precisely and smoothly painted, if the picture were not "spoiled" by a highly visible smudge. This textured, streaky smear, which could exist a mockery of gestural painting, leaves the spectator in doubtfulness: is it only a nonartistic smudge, or an element of the painting painted in Abstract Expressionist style? In either case, the smudge obstructs the plasticity of the table, and causes it to flatten out so that the object becomes identified with the footing of the canvas. In club to soak up the surplus oil and thereby sparse the paint surface to go far resemble a photograph, Richter pressed a newspaper on to the wet paint; this left a slight imprint which contributes to the effect of a poor-quality paper reproduction. Considering of this the image shifts between representing a conventionally painted illusion and a magazine illustration.

Tisch seems close in thinking to Vostell's process of décollage, begun in 1958, as demonstrated during the Fluxus events in Düsseldorf and later in May 1963 during the Yam Festival of Happenings in the Smolin Gallery, New York. There Vostell put up a wall of collages from electric current Life magazines and invited the audience to smudge out parts of the collage with cotton drenched in carbon tetrachloride. For Vostell, "Décollage is the art of de-collaged forms—such every bit disrupting, squashing, exploding, tearing, erasing, and melting. The objects change their original form. Décollage decomposes the collage that preceded it."⁷ Richter's photo/painting as well suggests details of Rauschenberg's combine paintings in which he applied his invented technique of transferring photographs from their original ground on to a new one. Later Rauschenberg, forth with Warhol, hitting upon silkscreen reproduction as a means of transferring blowups of photographs to canvas. "The printed material became every bit much of a discipline as the paint," he wrote, "causing changes of focus and providing multiplicity and duplication of images. [It was] a 3rd palette with infinite possibilities of color, shape, content and scale . . . added to the palettes of objects and paint."⁸ In Tisch Richter, using instead a tradition of painting the photograph, arrived at a similar result equally Rauschenberg had.

Unlike such 19th-century predecessors equally, say, Degas, and more significantly dissimilar Rauschenberg, Richter's work is more than a photograph than a painting. Dissimilar Warhol, however, it feels more than like painting than a photograph. Richter's vision twists the 19th-century idea of the radical pick between painting and photography, between brainchild and realism. Instead of choosing betwixt the two ways he embodies the 20th-century divide sensibility which combines the miscellaneous feel of both. His dualism broke his enslavement to past traditions of both painting and photography, showing him the possibility of crossing the borderline back and along and of exploring a stylistic no-man'due south-land between realism and abstraction: "I was able to see it [the photo] differently, as a picture . . . without all those conventional criteria, which I formerly attached to fine art. In that location was no manner, no composition, no sentence. It liberated me from personal experience. There was nada but a pure picture. Therefore I wanted to possess information technology and show it—not to employ it as a means for painting but to apply painting as a ways for the photograph."⁹

Tisch may have been for Richter what Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, was to Rauschenberg, who said of that piece of work that he "was trying both . . . to purge myself of my teaching and at the same time exercise the possibilities so I was doing monochromatic no-image."¹⁰ Using the eraser equally a cartoon tool fit de Kooning'southward practice of erasing images. Richter, through the double entendre of the smudge in Tabular array, got rid of the quondam Tachistic esthetics, exploring at the same fourth dimension new non-stylistic possibilities. Rauschenberg and Richter, secure in their cognition of the past, could virtuously efface the methods of their predecessors in the hope of becoming a function of their own age—although some leftovers tended to slip in.

Richter has in common with Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and others the rejection of traditional subject thing in favor of a more directly attainable iconography that mirrors banal daily life—he has to such an extent that too often over the last twenty years superficial comparisons have been made and based only on the utilize of like subject area affair. The fact that Lichtenstein and Oldenburg both used a lightswitch, a stove, and other household appliances every bit subject matter, that Robert Morris and Beuys both worked with wax and felt, or that Lichtenstein and Richter both took brushstrokes equally subject affair for a mural doesn't necessarily make these works cancel each other out or show that one was fabricated totally under the influence of the other. Instead, such similarities show how differently the aforementioned subject matter or material can be treated. In fact, in photo/paintings such equally Trockner (Drier, 1962), Schärzler, 1964, Turmspringerin I and II (High diver I and Two, 1965), or Alfa Romeo (mit Text) (Alfa Romeo [with text], 1965), he stands closest to (and farthest from) Lichtenstein, who met the dilemma of painting and yet not painting by introducing drawing images he did not create. "The impersonal await is what I wanted to have," Lichtenstein wrote. "I prefer that my piece of work appear then literary that you lot can't become to it as a work of art."^eleven Lichtenstein searched for an enhancement of the highly mechanical and detached style of drawing images, for a technique that would seem to be, but actually would not exist, commercial. Richter also wanted an impersonal procedure. "Pictures should exist made co-ordinate to a recipe. The act of making should occur without inner involvement, similar crushing stones or painting a edifice. Making is not an esthetic human activity."¹² Just as Lichtenstein had done in his cartoon images, Richter constitute a way in his photo/paintings to handle such emotional content as love, war, and criminal offense in a mutual mode. But he doesn't choose an industrial style like Lichtenstein'southward application of benday dots, or Warhol'south assembly-line use of silkscreen reproductions, which builds upward the power of the image. Richter never loses the painting affect, and the provocation of the subject field affair is brought out past his "classical" method of transferring the prototype by dividing the canvas into a grid, but as the onetime masters used to do. Later, in 1965—once again as Lichtenstein had washed—he used an episcope to project the prototype onto the canvas, but not out of a sense of the necessity to exist faithful to the original, as Lichtenstein had said in an interview with John Coplans in Artforum in Oct 1963: "The closer my work is to the original the more threatening and disquisitional the content." Especially in the beginning, Richter stayed close to the original because he felt he had to constitute that he was painting photographs. In retrospect he realizes how imperfect these early pictures were: "When I look at these pictures today, they're and then imperfect that they look like paintings again, because in the meantime we've had the Super-Realists—I admired Malcolm Morley'south ocean liner very much—and they showed us how to really attain technical perfection."

In his later photo/paintings, Richter could freely depart from the original model, equally long as he maintained the essentials of photography. By using defects in the photographic method, such every bit blurring due to camera move, combinations of in focus and out of focus, simplification due to sharp black and white contrast, grainy quality, smudges and specks due to sloppy evolution technique, so on, he created "flaws" that mediate between the two mediums. Nor was he averse to introducing goggle box static or to painting other arbitrary and invented, yet convincing, disturbances, like the smudge in Tisch. In all these variations Richter employed the softening, blending effects of "classical" painting techniques to intensify the ambiguity between style and nonstyle. He attributes the haziness of many of the photograph/paintings to his own relation to reality, which has something to do "with insecurity, inconsistency, and bitty performance." But he insists that since paintings "are not made in order to be compared with reality they cannot be indistinct or inexact or different."^thirteen They but seem hazy in comparison with the subject painted.

Richter took for subject affair images that are at beginning sight irksome, in contrast to Warhol, who chose newsworthy, dramatic images and used them with calculated timing, for example in his silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe, done just after her expiry. Even when he used forepart-folio textile Richter e'er underplayed the sensational and avoided the fashionable: "I painted Jacqueline Kennedy, just I made her unrecognizable, because I was embarrassed to paint Jacqueline Kennedy. It was such a cute photo, of a adult female crying." Where Warhol's detachment seems to be complete in his use of an objective, mechanical style to depict such gruesome subjects equally the electric chair or disastrous car crashes, Richter, despite his detached vision, still shows a sentimental interest: "I would rather paint the victims than the killers. When Warhol painted the killers, I painted the victims. The subjects were ofttimes poor people, bland poor dogs."

In 1964 the architect Philip Johnson commissioned Rauschenberg, Warhol, Oldenburg, and Robert Indiana, among others, to make murals for the New York World'south Fair. Warhol made ten huge silkscreens of the FBI'due south "about wanted" men, which proved too controversial and were exhibited only briefly. In 1966, Richter, in his turn, painted portraits of eight educatee nurses who had been killed in the dormitory of a South Side Chicago hospital, in Acht Lernschwestern. "And here, considering I didn't know them personally," he wrote, "I simply wanted to pigment anonymously, not in color, from the photos, that is, to avoid painting, avoid direct interest with life and through it subjectivity and nonetheless, despite the detour, produce an affect and then that it touches your middle, indirectly, not in a conventional—sentimental—way." Even the subject of Turmspringerin, which embodies the want for completeness, the Olympic platonic of concrete force and beauty, is given a human turn to emphasize the sloppy gray world we live in. In painting with high black and white dissimilarity a photograph of poor quality, casually cut out withal enclosing the concentrated free energy of the athlete trying for a perfect leap, Richter found a style to underline perfection by containing it in an imperfect country. His series of urban cityscapes, the "Stadtbilder," are another example of the paradox between a desire for classical beauty in the way they are architectonically painted and a precise photographic registration of the pessimism at the end of the '60s virtually an obliterating technocracy. Such a cynicism surprises him considering of his not hands achieved before commitment to detachment: "They were horrible, like newly built housing developments, so inhuman, revolting. They looked equally if they had been bombed, though they were normal cities. But I never said that I meant anything with them."

But in 1975 Richter's indirect involvement came to an finish in a serial of paintings entitled "Tourist." Information technology was painted after a moving-picture show still which illustrated a newspaper story well-nigh a tourist who was eaten by a lion while visiting a wildlife park in France. The tourist had stepped out of his jeep for a moment in lodge to photograph the panthera leo. His friend, who remained behind to pic the creature, accidentally recorded the tragedy. Richter commented: "I made four pictures, and that was the end of it. Since then I haven't painted from photos anymore. I realized that I was becoming the tourist, because I would get eaten up as well. I can't e'er restrain myself."

At the end of the '60s the attitude of Due west German language artists toward America changed. In 1970 Beuys published a pocket-size edition of the Fluxus manifesto that Maciunas had performed at the Düsseldorf academy. Beuys tore the manifesto out of Jürgen Becker and Vostell'due south book Happenings, Fluxus, Popular Art, Nouveau Réalisme (Hamburg: Röwholt Taschenbuch, 1965), photocopied it, and changed the give-and-take "Europanism" to "Americanism", which made the sentence read: "PURGE THE WORLD OF 'AMERICANISM!'" He and so had information technology published with his signature and stamp. Richter did not speak out as directly, but he gradually turned away from the consumer world as field of study matter, and engaged himself more and more in a dialogue on painting and style in relation to photography.

Richter is not the type of painter who keeps working in any one style; he is as well complex, as well restless, and besides responsive. He is engaged in a continuous process of discovery: it may be an obsession with a painterly idea to be followed to the end; he may dialectically choose to oppose his own work; or again, in asking questions, he may get aware of so many new bug that he has to beginning all over over again. For instance, in 1968 he reacted to his ain serial of emotionally loaded, sharply contrasted black and white "Stadtbilder," painted in heavy impasto, past doing a series of monochromatic "Graue Bilder" (Gray pictures, 1968–76), smoothly painted in a neutral, emotionally unified tonality. The latter have nothing in common with the monochrome paintings of Yves Klein, or Advertizement Reinhardt'southward painting everything into an overall uniformity and regularity. They not simply avoid the mystical "pettiness" of the Zip group, only are also likewise sentimental to fit the Minimalists, with their anti-illusionistic, nonmetaphorical approach. For Richter, "Painting always deals with illusion. You tin't avoid it. The 'Graue Bilder' are full illusion, they are non only color." At that time Richter was rather desperate, a fact that is reflected in his making what he idea was a nihilistic statement in the "Graue Bilder." He recalls comparison them to John Muzzle'southward remark, "I have zilch to say, and I am maxim information technology." But the nihilistic motive turned into something positive, even beautiful: "It was the ultimate possible statement of powerlessness and desperation. Null, absolutely nothing left, no figures, no color, nothing. Then y'all realize after you've painted three of them that ane's meliorate than the others and y'all ask yourself why that is. When I see the eight pictures together I no longer feel that they're sad, or, if and then, then they're pitiful in a pleasant style."

His indirect involvement in the "Graue Bilder" is almost identical to his approach in the photo/paintings of the educatee nurses; obviously it makes no divergence whether an image is used or non: "With the "Graue Bilder" I wanted to avoid painting. I forbade it. Merely I also wanted to avoid representing life in any way; nevertheless I did represent it. They have emotion and sadness, and one can feel moved past them. I wanted to go into these things precisely by avoiding painting, and avoiding life." The monochromatic "Graue Bilder" became in their nonreferentiality more subject to painting than to photography; in 1975 they were included in the "Fundamental Painting" show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. But to Richter, "Gray is, by virtue of its neutrality, . . . eminently suited to act equally mediator, to analyze, just as illusionistically as a photograph,"¹⁴ and he believes information technology is better than any color in the representation of "nothingness."

After outset the smoothly painted "Graue Bilder," Richter produced the "Fingerspuren" (Finger traces, 1970), the roughness of which is in plough offset by the glacially surfaced "Wolken" (Deject) studies, 1970. In 1971 Richter made a painting from a photograph, with an illusionistic appearance, in shades of xanthous, beige, and brown. In response, Blinky Palermo made a monochromatic, anti-illusionistic companion piece by mixing Richter's different color shades into one color. In yet another series, the "Farbtafeln" (Colour charts, 1966–74), which run in size from small to monumental, Richter wanted to point out that whatsoever colour will match another as long equally i has the right system—which in this instance included sure overall proportions, divisions of white strips, and the consistent use of lacquer paint. Next he contradicted his own system by painting "Farbtafeln" in which the colors match even without white strips. The "Farbtafeln" can be seen every bit a sequel to the "Graue Bilder," but at the same time they are a annotate on such paintings equally those of Josef Albers, Richard Paul Lohse, and Victor Vasarely. It was not a huge transition for him to follow this up by painting a photo of an area of trees in a park in a painterly manner, Parkstück (Park piece), at the end of 1971. For Richter, "At that place is no difference between a panel of colors and a small, greenish landscape. Both present an identical, fundamental attitude."¹⁵ Then, instead of continuing his tree studies, he picked upwards on the greenish color scheme, decomposing the mural images more than and more than toward total abstraction, while sustaining the mood of the park. Whirling touches are extremely prominent in these abstractions; they gave ascension to another painting idea, that of grinding up, which is demonstrated in the paintings of 1972–73, where the colors reddish, blue, yellowish, and white are mixed in what appear to be enlarged brush strokes fabricated upwards of overlapping tracks of the unlike colors.

The differences between Richter's attitude during the '60s and that of the '70s stand out clearly when one compares his collaboration with Lueg, in 1963, to his collaboration with Palermo in 1971, Zwei Skulpturen für einen Raum von Palermo (Two sculptures for a space past Palermo). The quondam is an anti-art and ironic outcome: the latter evinces a longing for classicism. According to Richter, "at that fourth dimension something classical, an thought of euphoria, of painting purity, clarity, and dazzler was strictly forbidden. The installation took place in Galerie Friedrich in Cologne. Palermo painted the walls in a nonmetaphorical, anti-illusionistic way, going beyond their identity as walls to requite a universal, generalized effect, while Richter installed two plaster sculptures of Palermo and himself with closed eyes, cut off at the neck as in normal classical busts, on pedestals as tall as the artists. "It had something to do with the epitome of the creative person," he recalls "with the memorial of the artists, and with immortalization."

In its classical mood this installation anticipated the "Achtundvierzig Portraits" (Forty-viii portraits, 1971–72). Richter returned to photograph/painting with this impressive serial of "portraits" of well-known physicists, philosophers, writers, poets, composers, and others all male person and nigh all born in the 19th century. If the photographic illusion had not induced a modern element, the by would take taken over the painter this fourth dimension, especially in the symmetrical installation he gave them, every bit a sort of "hall of fame" in the German Pavilion, during the Venice Biennale of 1972. This installation recalls the traditional portrait galleries found in universities or aloof places. The absence of women enforces the impression of a male-dominated society; where are writers similar Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf; the composers Clara Schumann and Ethel Smyth; the astronomer Henrietta Leavitt or the scientist Marie Curie, to mention a few? But women are non allowed; co-ordinate to Richter, considering of their difference in features and clothing, the inclusion of one or two female portraits would disrupt the homogeneous, linear menstruum of the installation. The formality of the men, dressed in their dark suits, white shirts with stiff collars, and ties, complemented past the classically balanced installation, is undercut only past the rough highlighting and black and white contrasts which are the result of enlarging photographic reproductions taken from an encyclopedia. In his option Richter deliberately avoided going off the oppressive track by doing something that would have been noticeably distracting; hence at that place are also no painters, as their inclusion might introduce an element of personal option.

In exploring different painting styles during the '70s, Richter'south oeuvre spread out similar a fan. During the early '80s the many layers of the fan take closed upwards again—but non quite fully—into the introverted "Abstrakte Bilder" (Abstract paintings, 1976–). Here Richter expresses what he feels and how he lives. They are complemented by a more public outlook on the world in "classical" photo/paintings of candles, skulls, and landscapes, which are sometimes shown side by side with the "Abstrakte Bilder": "There is the notion that it's actually advisable for an creative person to develop a specific type of expression and that's it. This is seen as the high point. Simply then again you lot'll always find arguments on the side of making 2 or more different kinds." Compulsively, Richter alternates between the series of "Abstrakte Bilder," boldly painted and vigorously scraped, and meticulously painted photo/paintings, in order to keep the intrinsic quality of "classical" painting alive.

While the "Abstrakte Bilder" are of a Modernistic, nonconformist sensibility, the others, made after snapshots he takes himself, capture the intimacy of a sentimental, romantic mood, and embody nostalgia for an image of the world that doesn't exist any longer but tin can exist held onto through the old masters. Traces of it tin can still be found in an increasingly threatened nature. Richter longs to make "classical paintings" himself, which, as long as they can be understood as a role of our fourth dimension, will be part of today. The drive for a romantic "classicism" is get-go by the nonstylistic inclusiveness and impurities found in the snapshots he works from. They are a built-in contemporary opposition which allows him to reveal himself sentimentally: "The paintings are often even kitschy, when I bring all the elements from myself into them, because I'm not just skilful and rational and all that, merely I also put all the rubbish into them." The same tin can be said of the examples from the "Abstrakte Bilder" serial that were made betwixt 1976 and 1980, which he painted from photographic blowups of painted sketches, some of which he changed slightly, blurring the original starting betoken. Faust, 1980, is the terminal photograph/painting painted according to that method: "In the first information technology's all very uncomplicated. It doesn't affair which color y'all use or how big it is or whatsoever. Then information technology gets harder and harder. I start to think about it, then sometimes I brand a photograph of information technology. I try what looks right on the photo and that never works. It's a fashion of seeing what to avoid. Then sometimes I lay a transparent sheet over the painting and paint on that, and that never works. Any I think out consciously doesn't work. It suddenly works some other way, and I'grand surprised that it works. So I become something simply right; it's right the style a painting can be right—I don't know why."

The most recent series of "Abstrakte Bilder," painted directly, without using a photo of a painted sketch, are even more layered, even more circuitous arrangements of contradictory feelings. The first stage is a finished moving picture, which seems dead because it is too beautiful. Adjacent Richter destroys that beauty by painting another layer, in a contrary sensibility, over it. Perfect castor strokes have to be showtime by venturesome, kitschy ones. Harsh colors, chosen to provide the greatest dissimilarity, are set adjacent to one another. The color scheme is almost intensity; a new sense of atonality comes into beingness, fugitive on the one mitt everything that is besides "piquant," and on the other hand the complementary, close-ranged tonality found, for example, in landscapes, paintings of old masters, or Kodak photographs. So rich in contrasts are the "Abstrakte Bilder" that it is impossible to photograph them in colour without losing some of the effects. Nonetheless even these paintings retain an illusion of photographic space through their depiction of a blurred, out-of-focus groundwork with clearer layers upwards front end.

In his "Abstrakte Bilder" Richter tries to give an contained answer, an actualization of his own experiences, one that is expressive of mod disintegration but that goes beyond it to preserve a unity of opposites. They are not painted in a reaction to or in relation to any dominating art motion. Richter relies on himself, and as a effect the "Abstrakte Bilder" communicate more immediately his feelings, even when they are ineffable: "The pictures are identical to me; in that location's no detour and no transformation and not too much intellect. I desire the painting be exist transparent. I desire it to tell the whole drama."

The stolid repression of Modernism by East German doctrines that Richter experienced at the Dresden academy fabricated him become against the grain, asserting his ain identity as an outsider. In crossing the border, he lost that identity because of his new-found, seemingly total freedom of expression and sense of belonging. However, that liberation also turned out to be restricted by the parameters of sophisticated avant-garde thinking, which is bound to its own rules—of historical analysis and self-criticism; of disengagement and involvement with order; and, the rule well-nigh limiting to Richter, of breaks with the by to reach the "new" in art. It is non the imprisonment of keeping upwardly with the latest styles that turns Richter into ane of the few serious contemporary painters. Nor is it an obedience to notions of what a painter is supposed to paint. In each encounter with a fresh canvass Richter relives the conflict within himself of crossing borders of all types. Unable to forget the by, he forces himself to intermission with information technology. This dichotomy, this Janus-faced duality which is and so pivotal in his work, this position of voluntary exile which is destined to remain an ongoing restless search, turns Richter into one of the most intense contemporary painters. He is polemical toward "bad" painting, however always enlightened of the other side, every bit is clearly demonstrated in his argument about art education today: "Dilettantism is everywhere; that's the new direction. The academies are very much a part of information technology. On the one hand, this is completely awful and will no doubt pass. However, on the other hand something will develop from this that has less to do with pure technique. The dilettantism may provide the basis for a future development."

Coosje van Bruggen is an fine art historian and curator who lives in New York.

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NOTES

one. William Carlos Williams, The Apotheosis of Cognition, New York: New Directions, 1974.

two. Unless otherwise noted all quotes from Richter are from a taped interview with the author on November 20, 1983, in Cologne. West Germany.

3. Paul Cézanne, Uber dice Kunst, Mittenwald, West Germany: Mäander Kunstverlag, 1980.

4. Alan Solomon, "The New Art," introduction to the catalogue for "The Popular Image," an exhibition at the Washington Gallery of Modernistic Art, Washington, D.C., April 18–June 2. 1963.

five. Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus, Berlin: Edition René Cake. 1971, p. 19.

6. Claes Oldenburg, Notes, New York, 1961.

vii. Quoted in Rheinisher Merkur (Coblenz), Nov 22, 1963.

viii. Robert Rauschenberg, Impress Xiii, i, January–February, 1959, p. 31.

9. Gerhard Richter, interview in the catalogue of the the 36th Venice Biennale, 1972. p. 23.

10. Interview, May 1976. p 36.

11. "Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Warhol: A Give-and-take," Artforum, vol. iv, no. 6, February 1966.

12. Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus, p. 29.

13. Gerhard Richter, interview in the catalogue of the 36th Venice Biennale. 1972, p. 24.

14. Fundamentele Schilderkunst, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1975, p. 57.

15. Quoted in Gerhard Richter, Paris: Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou—Musée National d'Art Moderne, 1977, p. 47

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/198505/gerhard-richter-painting-as-a-moral-act-35241

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