Gerhard Richter

Wolfgang Schwartz, Germany (acquired directly from the artist)
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, 12 November 2002, Lot 28
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Jürgen Harten, Ed., Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, p. 226, no. 452-B, illustrated
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, no. 452-B, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is rubbing along the extreme left edge towards the top left corner. Close inspection reveals sigmoid cracking in the lower right quadrant towards the lower right corner. Examined under ultra-violet light there are minute flecks of restoration scattered along all four extreme overturned edges.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Approached from distance, the large scale and gorgeous application of colour in Untitled tricks the viewer into believing that it is apparently a fairly generic abstract painting incorporating a huge swathe of yellow painterly gesture across a textured red and blue background. However, as one draws near to it, it becomes clear that this is not a moment of intense action but in fact a painstakingly built photo-real portrait of an expressionist brushstroke- a moment laboriously re-constructed over a period of weeks. Fitting perfectly within Richter's Post Modern embracement and mastery of a variety of styles, this rare work, executed in 1979, is both an echo of the photo-based paintings of the 1960s and a direct precursor to the more heavily impastoed and complex abstract compositions that have since become an integral element of Richter's work. Just as in many of his earlier series, a photograph serves as the model from which to paint, this creative strategy creates an ironic interplay between modes of painterly and mechanical image making, all the more so in this painting because of the circuitous nature of the process: oil paint, filtered through the mechanical screen of the lens, is returned to the canvas through the agency of the artist's hand.

 

The journey of the expressive brushstroke began with Van Gogh and later the German Expressionist painters of the early 20th century, such as Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka. At this time, philosophers such as Georg Lukacs discussed the ability of a brushstroke to epitomise the human condition and display the whole range of emotions that society was going through during the First World War and its aftermath. These writings were built upon by the American Abstract Expressionist painters of the 1940s, such as Pollock and Rothko, who began to create abstract images in which the paint almost dictated the composition and the artist was merely a vehicle for a higher state of being. It was not until the mid 1960s that artists began to question these notions and use these assumptions as the basis for a less emotional, more conceptually rigorous investigation of society. When the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein took the theory of the brushstroke, isolated it and re-presented it as a carefully studied schematised form, he was ironically presenting Abstract Expressionism as a 'brand', in one of the first forms of Appropriation art.

 

A decade later, Gerhard Richter approached the same subject with an entirely new approach. Instead of a 'brand', Richter was breaking down painting into a whole range of 'styles' and attempting to master each with the aim of creating a connectivity and interaction which would earmark the ultimate Post Modern painterly project. Thus, this painting embodies figuration in its depiction of a real, pre-existing photographic image; expression, in its depiction of an expressive brushstroke made by the artist himself; and abstraction, in the fact that the image is fundamentally abstract. Richter's painting is all the more potent because it appears at first to employ the same rhetoric as Abstract Expressionism; however, through his illusionistic depiction of the gestural brushstroke he subverts their notion of the body as the agency for the spirit and frees painting from pure formalism. For Richter, while abstraction cannot claim to embody the absolute - as it did for Kandinsky and Malevich - it can lend substance to otherwise elusive elements of our makeup. Richter sees his Abstracts as analogies to the unknown, the incomprehensible and the infinite; fictive models for the reality which evades direct address, eludes description and conceptualisation yet which resides inarticulate in our experience.

 

This impenetrable quilt of colour, the apparently unmappable forms which cascade across the wide, engulfing canvas, are indeed enlarged, exaggerated seams of pigment - small sections of a photograph blown up to a gargantuan scale and abstracted beyond recognition. The loving attention he pays to the their depiction can be seen in the luxurious flatness of the painted surface, animated by a feathered texture which is achieved by the blurring of the image which he achieves by brushing over it at the last minute. Richter has a "fascination with things trivial, with tinted paste and the miracle of coincidence, as well as with constellations of form and colour," this leads him to a "source image which the detailed photograph develops into the subject for a painting. In the painting, this subject is then monumentalised and translated into a stunning image" (Helmut Friedel and Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter, Red, Yellow, Blue, Berlin 2007, p. 13).

 

Earlier in his career, Richter had explored the opposite scenario in the Stadtbild paintings. While the Strich and Ausschnitt series depict enlarged brushstrokes the Stadbild series focuses upon aerial shots of urban areas.  Figurative from a distance these aerial shots appear abstract up close.  The Stadbild series "explore the possible ways of seeing, models of how to look. Only from a certain distance is the viewer able to gather the many brushstrokes into figuration. These "geometrical compositions... [tread] the borderline between abstraction and figuration" (Exhibition Catalogue, Humlebæk, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter, Image after Image, 2005,  p. 39).

 

Richter's technique of enlarging sketches is reminiscent of Franz Kline's chance projection of one of his drawings onto a wall, a revelation which inspired all of his subsequent paintings. Finding that their lines, when magnified, gained abstraction and sweeping force, he turned the miniature drawings into monumental canvases with bold, sweeping brushstrokes which physically inscribe the presence of the artist in the picture plane. Richter's intention, however, is altogether different.  In re-embracing the abstract tradition in the late 1970s, he is much more knowing than the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s. A post-Informel painter, he is acutely aware of the loaded semantic connotations of re-embracing the abstract tradition after the period of crisis that followed the assault on its ambitions and meanings by the Pop artists of the 1960s. Unlike his predecessors, there is no space for spontaneity in Richter's painting, no room for fortuitous accident. Richter proceeds with the passivity, purpose and caution characteristic of analytic enquiry, unlike the Abstract Expressionists whose écriture automatique was seen to involve a short circuit connecting the psyche and the canvas. While his predecessors had systematically squeezed out the last vestiges of illusionistic space from painting by increasingly stressing the flatness of the picture plane and the material character of the paint, Richter enriches abstract discourse by disrupting this two-dimensionality and reintroducing the illusion of space, a possibility that was anathema to the formal and spiritual imperatives of Abstract Expressionism.

 

Richter's innovation signifies a line of pictorial enquiry which has influenced a host of subsequent artists stretching to the present day, particularly the intricately illusionist paintings of Glenn Brown. Brown creates this illusion of thick ridges and highly textured surfaces meticulously rendered in minute detail on a flawlessly flat, highly polished surface making it look almost photographic. Borrowing, for example, the work of Frank Auerbach, he completely flattens the image, drawing out the layers of thick texture which appear to encompass and convey expressive meaning.

 

Strich, one of two monumental works from the same series, was executed a year later in 1980. A mural-sized painting in which Richter depicted a vastly enlarged horizontal brushstroke, a cresting wave of pigment running the length of a twenty metre picture, these works are now widely seen as two of his most important. Therefore for the breadth of its art historical tradition, the grandness of its concept and the impact that it has had on subsequent generations, Untitled can rightly be seen as not just a landmark in Richter's development but a milestone in twentieth-century abstract discourse.