One way to approach the work of the German painter Gerhard Richter is to think that it represents three major and only partially overlapping events: a contribution to the history of artistic painting, a prolonged flurry in the history of taste, and an episode in the attempts to bring philosophy to bear on understanding the arts. Born in 1932, Richter is surely the best known and most written about painter of his generation. Best known perhaps for his figurative works that are in every case based upon some photograph, he has also produced a large number of typically large abstract paintings, first some peculiar color charts, large grids of individually differing color samples, then from the 1980s to the present paintings produced by passing squeegees multiple times over differentiating fields of paint. Along with his rigid practice of basing figurative paintings on photographs, a second peculiarity of Richter’s oeuvre is his maintenance of a strict separation of abstracts and figurative works; each work falls comfortably and wholly under one or the other category, and so there is no instance in his oeuvre of the semi-abstracts and/or loosely figurative works so common in modern art, as with de Kooning’s women or landscapes. A third characteristic of his work is his consistent use of techniques resulting in a ‘blur’. This is plain in any of his figurative works, where the figure depicted seems as if in soft focus or a mist. Analogously, the use of the squeegee in the abstract paintings produces a stupefyingly complex micro-texture of ‘blurrings’, skeins and layerings resistant to linguistic description, as the numerous deposits of paint are subjected mechanically to a dragged bar that leaves them distended, pocketed, and blended. The result of the unvaryingly sustained use of these practical conceptions and associated techniques—the reliance upon photographs; the strictly maintained distinction between abstract and figurative works; the unvarying appearance of blurs—gives almost any work by Richter the feel of a puzzle and challenge to the viewer: Why do this, working within such idiosyncratic imperatives? Why so many prohibitions? What diagnosis, what theory, what poetics guides so strictly this peculiar body of work?
As part of a great shift in taste in recent art Richter’s work began to be shown in New York City in the 1980s, along with paintings by Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, and other living German artists. As with a slightly earlier appearance of works of now largely forgotten Italian artists including Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia, the efflorescence of manifestly ambitious and sophisticated works from outside the small world of Soho and East Village studios and galleries marked a shift away from the New Yorkers’ native trivializing artistic conceptions and projects--end-game aesthetics (Peter Halley), commercialist titillations (Jeff Koons), and feverish trend-sniffing (Ashley Bickerton)--, and towards works that addressed the great issues of historical traumas and the rise and fall of ideologies. While Polke’s anarchic stylistic heterogeneity and high-spirited experimentalism left him forever unassimilable, and Kiefer’s grand gestures were self-glorifying and could never shake off the sense that they were somehow of a piece with the tragedies they addressed, Richter’s work became a focal concern for any consideration of the achievements and limitations of distinctively contemporary art. Richter’s reputation seemed to culminate with the comprehensive exhibition of his work at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art in 2002, and its catalog monograph by the curator Robert Storr immediately became the standard orientation in English to Richter’s work. Storr treats Richter as one of the central artists of our time, and one whose work is particularly notable for its engagement with the basic conditions and ideologies of modern and contemporary art.
And of course the counter-reaction was quick: in the New Republic the art critic Jed Perl published a thorough-going attack on Richter’s work. On Perl’s account Richter was a ‘charlatan’ whose work was built upon a “counterfeit crisis” of the status of painting after its alleged death. Richter is a “phony Kafka”, pretending to be distressed while keeping an eye on his audience. But painting, Perl says, had never died, and so the extremism of Richter’s conceptions was unmotivated, except as a way of playing to the jaded tastes of contemporary curators and gallery-hoppers. Fundamentally, “Richter is a post-Duchampian message artist” who “gives us nothing to look at”. Perl notices that there is a great deal of discussion of and writing on Richter’s work, as well as large number of published interviews with and writings by Richter himself; Perl contents himself with asserting that this “chatter that swarms around his work is full of brain crushers”, which he seems to think is a very bad thing.
So both Richter’s prominent proponents and detractors agree that his work is a focus of interest and discussion in contemporary art. They further agree that it presents especially difficult interpretive challenges on account of its peculiarly strict self-imposed practical conceptions and prohibitions, while simultaneously offering no as visually evident guidance in recovering the motivation for this unique poetics. In this and several successive blog posts, I’ll briefly review four (but by no means all) of the major books on Richter published in the past decade, with a short statement of critical questions for each, and then on the basis of these offer a fuller, more general assessment of the current state of thinking about Richter’s work. The writings discussed are all ‘philosophical’, construed loosely. That is, they all address basic features of Richter’s practice, including inter alia the diagnosis of modern art and culture that partially motivates his poetics, the issue of Richter’s peculiar kind of consistency and comprehensiveness, and associated concerns that touch on epistemology, ethics, pragmatism, and critical theory.
I begin with the Florian Klinger’s short, densely argued, difficult book, recently published in translation from the German original of 2013. Klinger stays close to Richter’s own explicit verbal formulation; the great majority of the book’s 342 footnotes give the source of quotations of Richter, mostly from his collected writings. The book as a whole, Klinger writes, is a philosophical elaboration of Richter’s remarks on his own poetics, a conception that Klinger endorses “without reservation.” (3) Klinger argues that the key to understanding Richter’s work is to grasp his distinctive, indeed unique, conception and employment of the concept of ‘form’. Richter’s conception of form must first of all be distinguished from various inherited metaphysical and artistic conceptions. So here ‘form’ has nothing to do with Aristotle’s hylomorphism whereby form (morphe) combines with matter (hyle) in giving an entity its identity. Nor does Richter’s form have anything to do with traditional artistic distinction between form and content; form does not play the ‘how’ to content’s ‘what’. Nor, finally, is form here a rough synonym for ‘composition’ as designating the particular selection of contents, arrangement, and internal hierarchical ordering in an artwork. Klinger considers all such inherited conceptions of form to be ‘metaphysical’, and he thinks that a core motivation for Richter is to dispense with metaphysical conceptions and develop an alternative. Put positively (and initially mysteriously), form is “a singular act of distinction” (2) that arises in a ‘reaction’. Klinger calls this conception of form ‘pragmatist’, seemingly because this form is (the result of) something done, and in each case done the relevant act is done without being rigidly determined by rules or actually existing conventions. This conception of action without guidance gives Klinger’s and Richter’s scheme an existentialist tinge, as they insist that in each case in acting and making one must decide, as Richter says, or judge, in Klinger’s preferred formulation.
Klinger then insists on a further point: there are two kinds of form on the pragmatist conception, the non-artistic and the artistic. Form in its non-artistic sense is just the result of an everyday action construed pragmatically. In his work Richter aims to achieve artistic form, which is first of all a “surpassing of nonartistic reality,” the sort of reality achieved in everyday action. (54) The most general way of articulating how artistic form is achieved is that Richter (a) identifies oppositions or contraries or different dimensions of depiction, such as figuration and abstraction, or reference (which Klinger refers to as ‘mimesis’) and making (which Klinger refers to as ‘performance’); and then (b) paints in such a way in such a way that a resultant picture maintains ambiguously the characteristics and values of each member of the pair. When Richter achieves this, so Klinger maintains, he has avoided the semantic reduction of the painting to one or the other: every successful work of Richter’s has something of the characteristics of both the figurative and the abstract, of both painting as something referring to the world and as something expressive of its own making. In these many cases Richter has achieved ‘potentiation’, that is, not mere actualization of this or that feature of the world or bit of reality, but rather grasping and presenting the bit of reality more richly than it is given in everyday experience.
For Klinger the paradigm of Richter’s manner of achieving artistic form is given in his ‘first’ work, that is, the first work he acknowledges as part of his oeuvre after the loss or intentional destruction of the works of his teens and twenties, Table of 1962. Klinger is surely right to note that this piece is “a kind of manifesto” for Richter. The painting depicts a bare table that occupies much of the canvas, with its leading left corner just breaking the canvas’s edge. Over the table Richter has laid a dark ‘whorl’ of paint that obscures perhaps half of the tabletop and much of the table’s base and legs. In the literature on Richter it is not untypical to treat the whorl as a blot, something to break the ease of identification of the painting’s subject as a table. Further that this is meant to be understood as a rejection (or ‘critique’ or ‘negation’) of the customary sense of pictorial subject matter as identical with what is depicted; and so by implication also a rejection of the inherited ideological framework (whatever that might be) that renders the identification of subject with content as automatic and unproblematic. The customary interpretation, however, is plausible only at a first glance; upon further inspection “the painting proves to be a quasi-didactic tutorial that thematizes the distinction between the two spheres [of figuration and abstraction].” So instead of treating figuration and abstraction as contraries, Richter makes them elements of “one form.” (23) This initial manifesto piece is the paradigm of Richter’s way with contraries, in the service of the pictorial ‘potentiation’ that is the mark of artistic form.
Klinger then applies this point to the interpretation of Richter’s unvarying use of photographs, and not direct views of nature, as material, and the similarly invariable ‘blurring’ of the depiction. According to Klinger, Richter conceptualizes a photograph as a piece of the (non-artistic) world, something that registers an object or event from a single point of view. Richter’s characteristic blurring of the figural content is a way of “equalizing surface” (27), in a twofold sense: the blurring eliminates detail, and so the surface of the painting calls for an even attention whereby no part is allegedly of greater weight or attractiveness than any other; additionally, the blurring draws attention to the surface and so works to undercut the sense that figure and virtual ground, as well as paint and canvas, are of two different orders. Again, as with Table, what is shown is an extraordinarily unified form (in Richter’s and Klinger’s idiosyncratic sense).
In what seems to me the most penetrating passage in the book, Klinger places the blurring within a sequence of four ‘operations’ that jointly characterize Richter’s creative process, the collective aim of which is to ‘amplify’ the chosen material (in Klinger’s technical vocabulary, what I refer to as ‘chosen material’ is rather ‘the mimetic substrate’) in the service of ‘potentiation’. (52-54) The blurring is part of a first stage wherein the material is also painted with non-expressive gestures and generally simplified. In this stage of a figurative work the depicted content (say, a chair) loses its individuality as this chair; in an abstract painting the material (even if originally figurative) “is dissolved into pure form, that is, is rendered completely unrecognizable” (53). Klinger then (puzzlingly, to my mind) asserts that in a second stage the painting contains no “less overall information”, and so since it is also an articulation of the initial material, it presents more information. Klinger likeness this to the way in which the presentation of something actual together with its potentials to be otherwise necessarily is a richer presentation than the mere actual thing as such. Thirdly, this invokes a greater range of possibilities than what is presented, as the various aspects of the depiction “potentiate one another reciprocally through their resonance with each other.” (ibid) What Klinger seems to mean by this is that, despite the equalization of surface, a painting by Richter retains some sense of areas, sub-regions, elements, or parts, and these interact with each other in creating a further dimension of meaningfulness. Finally, these dimensions and parts of the painting are nested within each other in orders of attention from microstructures to the picture as a whole, and the part-part and part-whole relations invoked, and play of analogies among them, provide a fourth level of resonance.
The remaining two thirds of the book can be summarized more briefly. Klinger argues that Richter’s oeuvre addresses two further tensions. First, Richter determinedly rejects any “established standards or criteria.” (55), but also seeks to overcome the threat that his works are arbitrary. Klinger asserts that the works resolve, or rather perhaps sustain, this antinomy between (total) determination through convention and arbitrariness by creating a ‘binding power’ (Verbindlichkeit), by creating and sustaining the possibility of ‘communicability’ and ‘connectivity’ in their individual and collective reception. Richter thinks he achieves this by beginning the artistic process with chance elements—this or that whatever, be it figurative or abstract--, then working his operations until he recognizes a sui generis ‘rightness’ embodied in the work. It seems to me that Klinger struggles mightily to articulate what this rightness consists in, but perhaps this a problem that is not unique to Richter but is rather a general issue in attempting to give a non-reductive explanation of artistic originality.
As Klinger notes (84), the third tension is difficult to state. He calls it “the tension of deficiency and redemption”, and his explication of it seems to attribute to Richter a pessimism about this world of ours so total that it seems like something from the imaginative world of Arthur Schopenhauer. The deficiency is this: what is given to us merely is; it calls for nothing; it seeks no meaning; it induces no transformation through further practical, cognitive, or imaginative activities. Moreover, what is given is painful; our world, unjust as it is hopeless, consists of unrelieved strings of cruelty and crime. (86) Such a world calls for redemption, but neither Christian salvation nor Platonic ascent to timelessness provide viable models of redemption for the modern world. To sustain and overcome this third tension, Richter (according to Klinger) recurs to the concept of form, and in particular the pragmatist sense that the artistic reaction to the given is a transformation of the given. The artistic transformation of the given is a non-utopian improvement of the given. So art in Richter’s hands replaces the strict dichotomy of fallen and redeemed with the differential sense of relatively worse and relatively better. This strikes me as the least convincing of Klinger’s three major analyses; here, and not only here, Klinger seems to try to solve a problem or dissolve a tension simply through re-definition or re-description.
There is a great deal more to Klinger’s densely argued book than I have the space to address here. Additionally, I must note that in my account I have largely avoided using Klinger’s own technical vocabulary, and with it some of his qualifications and elaborations that are specific to that vocabulary. I would think that Klinger would accept my account as only very partially summarizing his book, although I hope to have accurately characterized the core of the book, Klinger’s analysis of Richter’s four ‘operations’ in the service of producing artistic form.
As I shall return to the evaluation of Klinger’s account after reviewing three other recent books on Richter, here I restrict myself to some brief general remarks. 1. As I noted early on, Klinger largely restricts himself to endorsing and elaborating Richter’s own remarks. At only a couple of points in the great many dozens of quotations does he suggest that Richter’s understanding of the relevant issue might be only partial or awry. Klinger also stresses that Richter’s conception, though in a very general way is drawn from the same poetic resources as the conceptions of Duchamp and especially John Cage, is unique. Part of the effect of this manner of investigation and analysis is to secrete the sense that Richter’s work is literally incomparable. But one might think that if there are no significant continuities between Richter and other advanced contemporaneous practitioners in the arts, and between Richter’s oeuvre and modern art, and painting as an art generally, then the sense in which Richter’s practical conception is an artistic conception becomes obscure. 2. As noted, Klinger’s account of Richter’s dealings with the third tension seem paradigmatically pragmatist: a dichotomy is set up and expounded, and it is addressed pragmatically, which in part means that a dichotomy that had seemed fixed and unbridgeable is replaced by a differentiated spectrum of possibilities, especially potential ways of acting. But the sense that something is achieved, in thought if not in practice, by the pragmatist re-description depends in part on the seeming compellingness, the cognitive salience and social institutionalization of both elements of the dichotomy. But as noted the third tension depends initially on the plausibility and attractiveness of the quasi-Schopenhauerian picture of the world as deficient, aimless, and meaningless. But nothing speaks for this picture; and if not, then the motivation for the pragmatist re-description dissolves. 3. Similarly, the very motivation for Richter’s restriction to photographs as material is of a piece with his pessimistic diagnosis; photographs are always and only ways of rigidly registering the things of this (bad) world. But is this remotely plausible? One evident implication of Richter’s view is that there is no such thing as an art of photography. But how then do we make sense of Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Jeff Wall, and so many others?
Working towards the present in the literature on Richter, I turn in my next blog post to Christian Lotz’s The Art of Gerhard Richter.
References:
John Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925)
Florian Klinger, ‘to make that judgment; the pragmatism of Gerhard Richter’, in Judgment and Action: Fragments Toward a History [BF447. J832]
-----Theory of Form: Gerhard Richter and Art in the Pragmatist Age (2022)
Jed Perl, ‘Saint Gerhard of the Sorrows of Painting’, in Magicians & Charlatans (2012)
Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Writings, 1961-2007 (2009)
Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (2002)