Lot 41
  • 41

Gerhard Richter

Estimate
2,500,000 - 3,500,000 USD
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Description

  • Gerhard Richter
  • Waldstück
  • signed, dated 1987, and numbered 628-4 on the reverse
  • oil on canvas
  • 28 1/4 x 40 1/4 in. 71.6 x 101.8 cm.

Provenance

Galerie Fred Jahn, Munich
Private Collection, London
Sotheby's, London, November 29, 1995, lot 47
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Literature

Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné: 1962-1993, Osternfildern-Ruit, 1993, cat. no. 628-4, illustrated in color

Catalogue Note

With feathery brushstrokes and haunting romanticism, Gerhard Richter's Waldstück, from 1987 is an extraordinary example of the artist's journey into landscape paintings.  Although he began his explorations of this traditional genre for his own pleasure, it was also a defiant gesture towards his contemporaries who believed that the genre was no longer valid or in favor.  Undoubtedly influenced by the German Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Richter's landscapes have a sense of order and accuracy. Yet despite the apparent serenity and reality of the present work, the viewer becomes lost in the painterly time and space of the work and is caught questioning the truthfulness of the representation of nature. 

In Waldstük, Richter manipulates his paint to such an extent that the shapes of the landscape gently move in and out of focus.  While the painting remains close to the source photograph's original composition, there is now a more spirited interplay between depth and recession; between hue and shade that serves to create an almost transient image.  Richter concentrates his (and subsequently the viewer's) mind on the construction of the painting itself, placing great importance on such painterly concerns as brushwork, color and composition.  The viewer is invited to explore the different levels of pictorial space.  Richter's focus on landscapes reinforced his connection to the German Romantic tradition, particularly the work of Caspar David Friedrich.  There is much of Friedrich's atmospheric beauty and poetry to be found in Waldstük.  Richter states "If the Abstract Pictures show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.  This is a grossly oversimplified, off balance way of putting it, of course; but though these pictures are motivated by the dream of classical order and a pristine world - by nostalgia, in other words - the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality." (Hans-Ulrich Obrist, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962 - 1993, Gerhard Richter, Cambridge, 1995, p.98)

The execution of the painting itself is subordinated to photography - that mechanical abbreviation of the process of looking.  Richter used snapshots and media clippings as his subjects in many cases and Waldstük has the pictorial quality of a postcard.  The subject of the forest is easily recognizable and inviting, creating tensions for the viewer between a desire to escape to a wonderfully imaginary place and the actuality that this space is a painting.  There is a pull between beautiful nostalgia and impossibility.  This painting comes late in Richter's series of landscapes and just before the artist's important powerful shift into Abstract paintings.  Both the landscapes and the Abstract paintings share Richter's desire to stop the eye at the surface of the paint and push the viewer back into their actual space.

Richter's seductive landscape paintings intensify a desire and then deflect it.  This is entirely Richter's intention with the series.  Based on photographic snapshots of typical romantic idylls, Richter plays with the viewer's perception of reality in such a way as to ultimately refute it.  "Every beauty that we see in landscape, every enchanting color effect or tranquil scene, or powerful atmosphere, every gentle linearity or magnificent spatial depth or whatever - is our projection; and we can switch it off at a moment's notice, to reveal only the appalling horror and ugliness.  Nature is so inhuman that it is not even criminal.  It is everything that we must basically overcome and reject - because, for all our own superabundant horrendousness, cruelty and vileness, we are still capable of producing a spark of hope, which is coeval with us, and which we can also call love.  Nature has none of this.  Its stupidity is absolute." (Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting, London, 1995, p.124)  Richter is both ambivalent and diabolical about nature.  Nature seduces him and leaves him longing to revere it, yet ultimately he is abandoned by it.  The strength and richness of Waldstük and the landscape tradition adds to the force of the theme in Richter's work.