Gerhard Richter

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Prato, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Gerhard Richter, 1999 - 2000, p. 145, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter, 1998, no. 835-1, illustrated in colour
André Comte-Sponville, Ed., Pensées sur l'amour, Paris 1998, p. 53, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Düsseldorf, K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Gerhard Richter, 2005, no. 835-1, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly lighter and more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultra violet light.
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Executed in the same year that Gerhard Richter was awarded the prestigious Arts Prize for Painting from the Wolf Foundation in Israel, Jerusalem represents the most significant use of an identified landscape in the artist's entire canon. For Richter the titles of artworks are a profound matter. Always unfailingly accurate, they serve as empirical labels. They detail the truth of his paintings: nothing more and nothing less, because the truth needs no further explanation, no promotion, and no excuse. For instance, virtually every single canvas in his epic cycle of abstract paintings over the past three decades carries the exact same title, 'Abstract Painting'. By stark contrast, in 1993 he painted the present work, the masterpiece Jerusalem. For an artist obsessed with the veracity of a title, there is perhaps none more iconic than this: Jerusalem. The four syllables signpost a place, a history and a dream and every connotation is sublimely brought together on this canvas.

Frequently and justly cited as the greatest painter of this era, Richter has committed the fifty years of his extraordinary career to interrogating the nature of perception: visual, emotional, psychological. Within the context of this investigative project it is Jerusalem that provides the masterstroke subject for his ultimate analysis. Confronting an entity of unique impact that inevitably triggers powerful cognitive reflexes in each viewer, this painting begins where others can only hope to end. Challenging the agencies of representation, perception and understanding, Richter's Jerusalem asks what we really know of a landscape, a city, or a place, and thereafter by implication, what we really know of ourselves. Indeed, this masterwork even surpasses Richter's lifelong commitment to truth in the name of questioning our ontological concept of who we are and how we understand the world around us.

The pioneering Jerusalem that foreshadowed a subsequent version now in the Frieda Burda Collection, this sublime landscape emerges through layers of ethereal brushstrokes that serenely cast diaphanous veils of light across the epic panorama. A veritable master class in focus and light manipulation, Jerusalem is the mature culmination of decades of Richter's figurative photo-painting that epitomizes the aesthetic genius of his iconic series: from the monumental Sky and Seascapes, to his 48 Portraits, to the celebrated Candles. Indeed, like the Candle paintings, the sensational painterly symphony of Jerusalem conjures an otherworldly atmosphere that exceeds the actual subject to become a meditative focus in itself. Extending a tradition from Turner to Monet to Rothko, with Jerusalem Richter asserts his preeminence as a painterly master of light.

Of all the landscapes that have been forged by humankind, there can be few that are as loaded with narrative and suggestion as Jerusalem. The city's extraordinary history extends back to the Fourth Century BCE, ever since when it has been a crucible of competing theologies and societal evolution. Its epic story has been primarily communed to our contemporary era through the stones, bricks and mortar of its ancient buildings, eminent walls and narrow streets, constructing a remarkably evocative atmosphere of both material precedent and historical character. 

With a clear blue sky, arid landscape, deep green Cyprus trees and sandy architecture the atmosphere conjured in Richter's Jerusalem is precisely characteristic of the Israeli capital. The horizon dissects the composition into two halves: the sky shimmers with pink and orange hues, reminiscent of the rising heat waves of urban pollution, where it curves to meet the arid plane of land that stretches into the far distance. The landscape is treated throughout with gradual tonal variation and sfumato brushwork that eradicates outline but emphasises contour. Indeed, the portrayal of light across the scene, from the foreground foliage to the far horizon, lends a sculptural quality to the compositional elements which loom towards the viewer into three-dimensional focus.

As the pre-eminent figurative subject of his phenomenal oeuvre, landscape is central to the art of Gerhard Richter and accounts for his place among masters of the genre from Claude and Poussin, through Constable and Turner to Caspar David Friedrich. Of course, fundamental to Richter's imagery is the additional interpretative layer of photography: the artist reports his subjects via the camera lens for subsequent analysis. With a self-conscious combination of dispassionate assessment and subjective editorship, Richter has analysed urban, land, sky and seascapes as relayed through the photographis lens, and by painting the photograph rather than the subject itself he posits key ideas about perception and comprehension.

Richter's source for this painting was a photograph that he had taken the day after his exhibition Atlas had opened at the Israel Museum on 19^th September 1995. This photo shows a view of Jerusalem's Old City from the south, looking towards the city walls and Christian Quarter across the area of Yemin Moshe. The foreground of Richter's work describes the rigid demarcations of urban planning: a car park and regimented tree-planting; and suggestions of urban shapes appear in the middle distance as the shadows of elegant brick arches at the left and angular architectural intersections at the right. However, at the centre of the canvas the focus of the painting is an expansive plain tinged with green at its edges. Thousands of years of Jerusalem's history, communed to us today through the Temples, Mosques, Churches, Abbeys, Monasteries, walls, pavements and streets, which so evocatively narrate the history of this extraordinary place, are swept aside by Richter's brush in streaks of arid landscape that wind the historical clock millennia back to a time before history was built. The artist recounts the urban landscape of Jerusalem up to the walls of the Old City but thereafter strips the city of its human abduction, eradicates the metropolis and returns the landscape back to Nature, evoking the monumental shadow of Caspar David Friedrich that had loomed so dominantly in his earlier portraits of Nature. At the heart of Jerusalem Richter exchanges the banalities of topographical accuracy and transient exteriority for the emotional charge of phenomenal atmospheric effect.

Richter's urban portrait is thus open to a plenitude of interpretation: simultaneously refuting the souvenir picture-postcard and the exoticism of a mysterious city as well as daring to redefine the physiognomic identity of the metropolis. This work is material proof that his figurative painting is not ubiquitously the project of dispassionate documentary as once he claimed. Rather Jerusalem evidences the central importance of landscape in Richter's output, not only as a vehicle to take on questions of perception and visual communication, but in this exceptional instance provide the platform to address themes of a wider politico-social context. With this landscape that is so charged with issues of both the past and the future he invents a truly unique, intellectual and contemporary take on History Painting. In the year of this transcendent work Gerhard Richter joined the likes of Marc Chagall, Yehudi Menuhin, and Frank Gehry by being conferred the Wold Foundation's Art Prize. By way of conclusion the most fitting tribute to Jerusalem is provided by the written commendation of this prestigious award:

"Despite History and in conjunction with it, Richter is reinventing Painting for today, transcending its very laws in order to dare to impose Beauty...We must dare to talk of Beauty gained over indifference, of Painting as an act of faith. By doing so, Gerhard Richter introduces the problem of representation and the representable, of history and politics, in the specific context of post-Auschwitz Germany, of Germany beyond the Wall."