Gerhard Richter

In Richter’s best paintings, there is often ambiguity between the image and its unseen narrative. This is particularly true in the paintings which relate to the figures and events in his own history. With Tante Marianne, this tension reaches its pinnacle, for beneath its veneer of childhood innocence lies an unspoken history of great personal tragedy. This was only recently publicly exposed with the much heralded publication of Jürgen Schreiber’s biography, ‘Ein Maler aus Deutschland, Gerhard Richter. Das Drama einer Familie’ (‘Gerhard Richter – A Family Drama’) (fig. 1), which featured Tante Marianne on the cover. Painted from a 1932 photograph depicting the four month old baby Gerhard Richter on the knees of his fourteen year old aunt Marianne Schönfelder, Tante Marianne succinctly embodies his desire to expose the subjectivity of art (photography in particular), and make the viewer aware that the unseen, what is being withheld, is often as important as what we are presented with; a painterly challenge to the clichéd truism that ‘the camera never lies’.

Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter was a few months too young to be called up to actually fight in the war. However he was unable to avoid exposure to its horrors, and experienced first hand its destructive fallout when two of his uncles were killed in Hitler’s army. This included his eighteen year old Onkel Rudi (fig. 2) who he painted in a posthumous portrait of 1965 that is in the collection of the Czech Museum of Fine Arts. Harder to comprehend, and perhaps more tragic, was the story of his Tante Marianne, who just five years after she had posed happily for the photograph on which this painting is based was interned and sterilized for suspected schizophrenia. Ironically, it was the same doctor, Professor Fischer, who had overseen baby Gerhard’s birth that was responsible for Marianne’s sterilisation. Imprisoned at a mental hospital until her death from starvation in 1945, Marianne was buried in a common grave along with thousands of other euthanasia victims. Years later after Richter married his first wife Marianne (Ema) Eufinger, the tragic story of his aunt took another cruel and unexpected twist when it became apparent that his new father-in-law, Prof. Heinrich Eufinger, had been personally responsible for overseeing the mass sterilisation of women at the neighbouring hospital to where Marianne had been interned. Although it is not exactly clear when the details of his father in law’s involvement in Nazi euthanasia became known to Richter, it seems unlikely that the ironic relationship between the pictures Familie am Meer (1964, fig. 3) – depicting a smiling Eufinger on the beach with his family – and Tante Marianne – proudly holding a baby which she was to be prevented from having - was entirely unintentional.

Richter frequently claimed that the sometimes controversial subjects of his paintings were in no way intended as political or social statements, but rather selected more for their compositional and aesthetic value. Although this might be true of the media sourced images he painted of housewives and secretaries, the personal relevance and underlying political importance of Tante Marianne cannot be so readily dismissed. Made at a time when Germany was trying to overcome the collective guilt of its past, the pictures of his Onkel Rudi in his Wehrmacht uniform, Tante Marianne and Werner Heyde, a Nazi neurologist unmasked and arrested in 1959 whilst living in West Germany under an alias, throw his apparent objectivity into question. Unlike the full-frontal drama of some of his earliest, war-related paintings such as Hitler (1962), Bomber (1963), and Scharzler (1964), Onkel Rudi and Tante Marianne take a more indirect and veiled approach, much like the ambiguous moralist stance of his later 1988 Baader-Meinhof series in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. They all suggest that Richter knowingly employed the objective distance and anonymity of these photographs in his paintings as a means of picking at the fragile consciousness of West Germany. Their very power, resonance and meaning derive as much from their purported absence of agenda as from the subjects they contain. It is through their restraint and indifference, through their location in the banal and commonplace, that they establish validity and visceral strength.

Richter’s choice of family photographs also carries a conscious subtext: that of a latent interest in their psychological content. If chairs, tables and other household objects had the status of skulls in classical vanitas pictures, then the equally banal family snapshot was an icon for the contemplation of, and futile battle against, mortality. This is further enhanced by the relationship of the figures here and their obvious similarities to one of the most frequently recurring momento mori motifs in Western art, the ‘pieta’. The aptness of this association for this particular subject would not have been lost on Richter and his eye for composition, and it adds to Tante Marianne’s underlying tragedy and the impotence of life contained within it.

The inherent pathos of family photographs, capturing loved ones before they die and fade into memory unquestionably attracted the artist to these subjects. Although the primary concern of all his photo based paintings was to initiate discussion with the critical issues of painting and with the ambiguous nature of representation, by selecting subjects like Tante Marianne - one whose history and personal relevance was far more than that contained within a single isolated snapshot - he is challenging his audience to question and re-evaluate their perception of the objective ‘truth’ as presented in newspapers and other contemporary media. The fact that Tante Marianne is so heavily-loaded with political, social and personal meaning makes its unwavering sense of objective distance even more compelling. This was important for allowing Richter to expose what he saw as being the false autonomy and objecthood ascribed to photography. He does this by subtly re-establishing painterly control, erasing the clarity of the image to make it seem as if glanced in a fleeting moment, or captured in a blurry photograph. Through his virtuoso and delicate handling of paint, he forces distance between the image and its audience to focus our eye on issues of perception and conception.

The present work occupies a place of seminal importance in the artist’s visual as well as personal history. It embodies the unspoken tragedies of the post war period and their lasting effect on his own as well as Germany’s formative development; histories which are increasingly being seen as an invaluable lens with which to penetrate the escapist, impersonal exterior of his art. Providing a very rare self-portrait of the artist as a young baby, Tante Marianne is one of only a handful of paintings that have been inspired by photographs from Richter’s own family album. Forming an eminent group of autobiographical masterpieces which includes Ema (nude on a staircase) and Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne gives fresh meaning and insight into his investigation into the frequent disparity between form and content in pictorial representation.