I now turn to consideration of what might plausibly considered the central account of Gerhard Richter’s painting, that of the German art historian Benjamin Buchloh. As mentioned in Part Zero, Buchloh’s relationship with Richter and his work is unique in the history of art. Buchloh has been writing about Richter’s work for over forty years, and has additionally published a number of interviews with Richter over several decades. Buchloh treats Richter with the utmost seriousness, and views him as uniquely responsive to the social and artistic demands on advanced European painting after World War II. In a manner reminiscent of the art theoretician Thierry de Duve’s treatment of the work of Marcel Duchamp as an inexhaustible resource for reflecting on the nature of art in the twentieth-century, Buchloh seems to find every aspect of Richter’s work to be endlessly interesting, as if every work, every series, every decision, and every procedure reveals something fundamental about the kinds of achievement possible in recent artistic painting. A commentary on Buchloh’s many previous papers and interviews, along with the twenty chapters in this 650-page book, threatens to be a more-than-lifetime project. Here I’ll restrict myself to what I take to be Buchloh’s central points on the most discussed aspects of Richter’s work. In this first post I’ll sketch Buchloh’s general account of the demands upon artistic painting from the late 1950s on, and then consider Buchloh’s lengthy accounts of the formation of Richter’s practice circa 1960. Subsequent posts will consider Buchloh’s account of Richter’s abstractions, and of the series October 18, 1977, consisting of paintings of photographs relating to the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang. Finally, I’ll compare Buchloh’s account with those of the other recent books I’ve reviewed, and offer some reflections that I hope to be, if nothing else, sufficiently novel to merit reading.
A. The Situation of Art c.1960:
Buchloh treats Richter as responsive to a set of strenuous demands that are placed upon advanced artists in the period after World War II. He seems to assume that responsiveness to these demands is a major part of what so much as makes an artist’s work worthy of consideration at the highest level. On this conception, Richter’s most prominent artistic peers are artists whose work embodies some sense of a response to these demands, which for the purposes of this book are Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, Jean Fautrier, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. He sees three kinds of demands upon these artists:
1. All these artists are successors to the avant-garde artistic projects of the first half of the twentieth-century. Accordingly, one demand upon them is to reflect upon those earlier projects and their outcomes, which Buchloh at least thinks were unqualified failures. Seemingly crucial for Buchloh those earlier projects were ‘utopian’, although there is very little in the book to indicate what Buchloh understands by that term. He speaks of ‘utopian promises betrayed’: “some had been corrupted by design, others had succumbed to spectacularization” (p. xxii), which seems to suggest that part of these promises were a promise of spontaneity and individual and collective participation in something—In art? In politics? In life? Buchloh doesn’t say, but elsewhere he also notes without explication “the spiritualist and mystical visions of Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, or the radial sociopolitical visions of Piet Mondrian” (p. 16), suggesting that these visions were ‘utopian’ and were shown over the decades of the twentieth-century to have come to nothing. In any case Buchloh repeatedly asserts that it is a condition of advanced art in the post-World War II to rid itself of any trace of these utopian ‘promises’ or ‘visions’.
2. Having recognized the failure of the early avant-gardists’ utopian promises, the post-War artists must adopt an appropriate complex attitude towards that failure, that of ‘mourning’. Buchloh’s terminology on this point seems to echo Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, as he also says specifically with regard to Richter that the attitude and associated action is ‘the melancholic staging of tradition’ (p. xxv) The key thought for Buchloh seems to be that the artist must not act as if the avant-gardist past and its failure is simply a thing of the past to be forgotten, but rather the artist must in some way embody in her work the acknowledgement of that past and work their way through it.
3. Finally, an advanced artist c. 1960 must acknowledge the contemporaneous conditions and character of ‘spectatorship’. By 1960 the advanced artist lives in “spectacle culture” and “a totalitarian administrative order”. (ibid) Further, there is only one appropriate kind of relation to this reigning cultural order: the artist must ‘negate’ it in her work. Although the word ‘negate’ occurs many times in the book, Buchloh nowhere says what he means by the term; what Buchloh means by it emerges, as shall be seen, in his descriptions of Richter’s practice. One way in which Richter ‘negates’ the reigning order is by doing something very different. So if the contemporaneous culture routinely uses colored depictions, Richter will instead use black-and-white. The other major manner of ‘negating’ something is through po-faced parody: if the culture treats some phenomenon, say the possession of an automobile, as part of a joyous life, one ‘negates’ this false image by presenting the image of the car in as determinedly downbeat or at least expressionless manner possible. Since in the visual arts ‘negation’ cannot be a linguistic act, what will count as ‘negating’ some phenomenon is presenting that phenomenon as tainted and/or offering a productive alternative.
Such, then, are according to Buchloh the demands upon advanced art c. 1960: to renounce recent, prominent illusions and failed ideologies associated with the arts; to acknowledge and work through these failures in one’s work and therein to exhibit the appropriate attitude of mourning; and to respond critically (through ‘negation’) to the central, novel cultural, social, and/or political conditions of one’s society. For Buchloh Richter is outstanding even among his peers in continuing and sustaining the practice of artistic painting in ways that are relevantly similar to pre-existing practices. By contrast, some advanced artists like Rauschenberg and Warhol will invent new artistic media and techniques; others like Pollock and Newman will practice the traditional artistic medium of painting, but with novel kinds of materials and techniques. Richter will instead maintain contact with the artistic tradition of representational painting in his renderings of photographs, and of avant-gardist painting with his abstracts. Buchloh suggests that Richter, more than any of his peers, “truly became the painter of the “dialectic of enlightenment”” in the sense proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer in the late 1940s in their book of that name. Again Buchloh fails to give any explication whatsoever of what that phrase meant, and contents himself with noting that the book “had in fact had a tremendously formative philosophical influence on the artist and had focused the thought of subsequent generations.” (p. xxv)
B. The Two Foundations of Richter’s Art:
Like every writer on the painter, Buchloh follows Richter himself in treating the painting Tisch (1962) as the inaugural work of Richter’s mature artistic practice, and devotes the second chapter of the book to it. But Buchloh uniquely thinks that an earlier, little-known series from 1957, Elbe, provides key insights into the formation of Richter’s practice and that Tisch itself represents a continuation of artistic ideologies and methods already at work in the earlier series:
1. Elbe is a series of 31 ink drawings on paper, most of which (on the visual evidence of the examples printed in the book) seem to show a kind of late-modernist version of the sublime landscapes of beach, ocean, and/or sky familiar from early German Romanticism, in particular many works by Caspar David Friedrich. In most of the instances the paper is largely covered with ink; in the first three members of the series one or two small figures, again evocative of Friedrich’s manner, can be made out. One printed instance (p. 29) shows by contrast a largely beige and unstained ground, unpeopled but with splotches of ink uncertainly suggestive of conifers. Buchloh treats the series as an instance of ‘deskilling’, wherein an artist assumes a kind of normative background of a certain level of mutually conditioning skills and expressive aims, and then intentionally violates the relevant norms in offering relatively unskilled and/or relatively inexpressive marks, compositional strategies, and evaluative criteria of achievement. As ‘deskilled’, Elbe meets Buchloh’s three stipulated demands upon advanced art: (i) The series assumes a kind of continuity with avant-gardist and modernist near-abstractions while relieving Richter’s work of the utopian promises of the earlier work. Further, the restriction to black ink is evocative of the traditional use of grisaille, which Buchloh claims repeatedly (though without evidence) is characteristic of a European tradition of mourning pictures. (ii) In its semi-mechanical handling of ink, the series represents a kind of disenchantment of the earlier personal expressiveness of modernist paint-handling, and so works through the failure of the earlier utopian painterly aspirations. (iii) In its use of small pages and in its semi-abstraction, it embodies a rejection of the prevailing contemporaneous artistic ideologies of Socialist Realism and broad public address through murals that marked Realist works. In its non-expressiveness and rejection of prevailing artistic ideologies, Elbe announces some of the foundational features of Richter’s artistic practice.
2. As described in my previous posts on the recent scholarly literature on Richter, Tisch shows an undistinguished table with curved scumblings partially obscuring the figure. And again, Tisch is treated, first by Richter then by all commentators, as the inaugural instance of Richter’s mature artistic practice. Buchloh’s distinctive interpretation (if I understand it; the discussion is exceptionally difficult and digressive, with much of the relevant chapter ranging over discussions of twentieth-century German history and brief accounts of contemporaneous works by a number of other artists) seems to be that Tisch is best understood as a kind of ‘memory image’ (p. 88), one produced with a high degree of calculation at a cultural moment of ‘memory crisis’ (p. 86), the crisis of the inability of Germans to work through their own horrific recent national past. Buchloh claims to follow Siegfried Krakauer in thinking that what makes a memory image is not just its depiction of or reference to something, but also some sense of what is excluded from that reference. Richter’s painting, then, is a memory image in the sense that, along with the table, it presents something of the forces that shape the image of the table. How so?
Buchloh’s starts by noting that Richter expressed great interest in Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1963). What Richter took from Rauschenberg was the artistic practice of photomontage. Buchloh laments the choice of Rauschenberg, though not the choice of the practice, for on Buchloh’s account the practice permits the confrontation of traditional painterly concerns with photography; alas, Buchloh sighs, with Rauschenberg as with all other practitioners of photomontage except John Heartfield, the iconographic reference of the photographs included in the work is lost in favor of the heightened awareness of the artistic manipulation and juxtaposition of images. In preserving some sense of the referent, Richter presents (so Buchloh seems to argue) something that is typically excluded in photomontage as an artistic practice. It is accordingly straightforward to see how Tisch qua memory image meets Buchloh’s three demands: it de-mystifies the practices of painterly representation and abstraction (Demand #1); it provides the materials for working through the recent history of artistic painting (Demand #2); at it responds and ‘negates’ (in the sense of providing a relevant alternative) to standard contemporaneous artistic manners (Demand #3).
As with my reviews of other recent works on Richter, I postpone an evaluation of Buchloh’s account until I have considered its full range, including in particular his account of Richter’s abstraction and Richter’s major series on the so-called Baader-Meinhof group. Provisionally I’ll make only three general remarks:
1.Buchloh’s account is afflicted with a range of cognitive vices wholly typical (in my estimation) of academic writing on contemporary art. For example, terms that play a large role in the explanation of the art are never defined or explicated; instead the author seems to assume that the terms carry some univocal meaning that is widely understood and accepted. Here the most prominent such term is of course ‘negation’ or ‘to negate’. Additionally, no rich descriptions are offered of the works discussed; no alternative accounts are considered; and the author offers no sense of what might count as a counter-example to his account. 2. Likewise, Buchloh offers not so much as a single sentence in justification of his particular conception of the demands upon contemporary art c. 1960. If an alternative account or some artist outside of the major ones Buchloh proposes is so much as mentioned, they are simply dismissed as phenomena characteristic of the malign social structures and phenomena—late-capitalism, technocratic industrialization, spectacularization—which are on Buchloh’s view rightly targeted and ‘critiqued’ by the major artists. 3. An especially peculiar feature of Buchloh’s account is his restriction to a kind of ‘great man’ view of recent artistic history, wherein a very small number of major artists single-handedly battle the nefarious forces of capitalism. Buchloh evinces no interest whatsoever in popular arts or in arts outside of the North Atlantic elite artworld. This is particularly odd in light of Buchloh’s seemingly neo-Marxist account (although very much in line with Adorno’s interests).
In my next post I’ll consider Buchloh’s account of Richter’s abstraction and the ways in which it allegedly meets the three great demands upon the art of Richter’s time.
References:
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)
Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (2022)
Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp (1996)
-----Aesthetics at Large: Volume One: Art, Ethics, Politics (2018)
Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917)
John Rapko, ‘Review of de Duve’s Aesthetics at Large at https://www.academia.edu/49515950/De_Duve_Critical_Review