Being able to do something is never an adequate reason for doing it. – Gerhard Richter
There’s an bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London that specialises in art. Often over-sized and ridiculously over-priced, the titles it shelves are the usual flash-in-the-pan fadwagon-jumping cash-in’s or hefty overly-reverential tomes designed to further establish The Canon of artists we’re all supposed to give a monkey’s toss about. As depressing as it is, I always make a point of calling in when I’m passing, just to get some measure of what’s going on these days, and one artist whose work is always on display in there is Gerhard Richter. I’d overlooked him completely before, but now realise that I’ve seen examples of his work produced many times before, least of all on the cover of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, and never bothered to enquire further as to who he was as I’d assumed that the soft-focus slightly-fuzzy still life’s were just manipulated photographs. Upon realising that these images had actually been created using paint I was forced to look at them with fresh eyes.
Richter is German, and grew up during the rise and fall of the Third Reich. His family were affected by the Nazi movement, with one uncle joining their ranks while a mentally-disabled aunt of his was shunted off to a death camp. These experiences would have had considerable impact on his worldview, an impact that critics have been arguing about for decades, but Richter has largely let his work speak for him, only occasionally uttering opaque statements such as “I believe in nothing” which only serve to confuse matters further.
Whatever the case, by his teens Richter knew what he wanted to do with his life and began studies at Dresden Art Academy, by that time part of Communist East Germany. As the foundations to the Berlin Wall were being laid, Richter and his wife escaped to Dusseldorf where he continued his art studies through the early 1960’s. There he was working alongside the likes of Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz, who later acquired fame and fortune by the “genius” route of hanging his paintings upside down. Eschewing Baselitz’s deliberately-provocative approach, Richter joined the Capitalist Realist group of artists and had his first solo exhibition in 1963. Using photographs as his primary reference source, Richter deliberately blurred the image on the canvas, emphasising the technique involved and placing primary importance in the image itself as opposed to the supposed statement it was making, an approach quite at odds with the emergent thinking of the decade.
By the 1970’s, Richter has expanded his range, producing grey monochromes, straight-forward portraiture, evocative landscapes, and established the style of soft abstraction that you now see on the walls of many a corporate lobby. He’s rarely deviated since, and has always remained true to his early calling. Over the years he’s seen the “Death of Painting” declared several times, and yet it’s never quite happened. Fads for pop art and the conceptual installation have come and gone, but I think at the heart of Richter’s enduring popularity is the simple fact that he gives people something that they can respond to. They do not need an education in art theory to be able to enjoy one of his paintings. They can appreciate the skill required to create them, and the results of the finished image themselves. He does not alienate his audience, but rather invites them in to share in his sombre and contemplative perspective upon the world.
I like this quote from Richter, which really sums up how I feel about my own work and why I bother: “One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do.” I think that also neatly explains why I usually walk out of that bookshop on Charing Cross Road with a heavy heart. Much of what I see in there is work lacking utterly in commitment and obsession, unless of course that commitment is to making money quickly and with the least effort involved. Richter has undoubtedly benefitted from the art world’s patronage, but I get the sense that if he’d never “made it” as such, and had to work as a bank clerk or a road sweeper for a living, he’d still be painting in his spare time, and be just as committed to his vision. That’s my kind of artist.
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There’s an awful lot o’ pop culture out there, as we’ve both noted, but it’s getting a little bit odd just how much my bucket o’ pop culture spills into yours and vice versa. Richter is one of my half dozen or so favorite painters, and possibly my favorite from the past 40 years or so. (Polke is another, who you also mention.) Even made a point to go see his retrospective at the NYC MoMA in spring of ‘02. (A trip I’ll always remember b/c we were advised to buy bottled or mineral water everywhere b/c the water supply was still questionable from 9/11.) My personal fave painting is ‘Betty’, of his daughter. (I have a ‘daddy’s girl’ daughter, so I’m a sucker for such things.) Anyway, no point to this note other than to confirm that we both have remarkable taste in art : ) And thanks as always for providing my brain something good to chew on just about every day.
Richter’s work I came to late, probably long after everyone else, but that’s how I prefer it. I got to take the work on its own terms, and it was only in researching the man did I come to understand the extent of his body of work and how highly he’s regarded by the high art mob. As I said in my posting, I think he’s one of the few artist who you can tell would still be producing work even if they were a postman or a janitor. It’s just something they have to do, whereas many currently employed in the arts are quite clearly only in it for the money and the crap glamour of media attention. Richter’s work is what you’d like to hope future generations would use as a gauge of our times and recognise that, despite all the evidence to the contrary in the mass media, we were still evolving. I’d like to get one decent book on his work, but there are too many to choose from and they’re all prohibitively expensive. Taschen should stop peddling the same old irrelevancies to us and offer a Richter book for £5, but unfortunately he’ll probably have to die first before he’s given that kind of treatment.
If I had the time I wouldn’t mind writing a blog dedicated to passionless, indifferently produced art. A jaded activity, for sure, but probably a satisfying one, too. One shooting-ducks-in-a-barrel approach would be to identify the individuals graduating from the top 10 or so allegedly elite art schools and track what they produce. Most of them are going to play it safe to ensure an income stream and/or make art that references and only makes sense to other artists. (I used to subscribe to Frieze and Artforum in the ’90s when I was trying my hand with painting, and I gradually grew more and more depressed with what the ‘art world’ was producing. What is the opposite of inspirational? ‘Cos that’s what those magazines were. But they were oh so pleased with themselves. Haven’t touched one since 1999.)
Back in the early days of the blog I did a few posts about art and artist that I thought were, basically, taking the piss, but after a while I got tired of my own complaining and gave up. I realised the best response I could offer these charlatans and no-marks was to simply ignore them, even when the temptation to vent spleen proved to be nigh-on irresistible. The occasional barbed aside does slip through, but I’d rather spend my time praising the work that I find inspirational.