Gerhard Richter

Doctor Manfred Leve, Nuremberg (Acquired directly from the artist in 1967)
Jablonka Galerie, Cologne
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter: Image after Image, 2005, no. 22, illustrated in colour
Basel, Galerie Ficher Rohr, A Look into the Universe of Gerhard Richter, 2009, illustration in colour on the cover

Jürgen Harten, Gerhard Richter, Bilder 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, p. 62, no. 145-3, illustrated
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, no. 145-3, illustrated
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit 2011, Vol. I, p. 302, no. 145-3, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality has a blue-grey dimension in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is minor canvas draw towards the top left corner. No restoration is visible under ultraviolet light.
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"I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit." 

 

The artist in: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 37

 

Painted in 1967 Philodendron epitomizes the fundamental concerns voiced by Richter during this early moment in his career: "The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing and in what it informs of, it is my source" (the artist cited in: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 31). Depicting an affluent well-dressed woman proudly showcasing her impressive botanical achievement - the cultivation of an extraordinary Philodendron plant, a tropical species native to the South American rainforests - this work conceptually pivots on the painterly reproduction of photographic verisimilitude, particularly attendant to the artlessness of the amateur snapshot. By faithfully reproducing, yet immaculately blurring, black and white photography in paint, Richter looked to scrutinise and reaffirm painting's relevance within an artistic milieu that had effectively sounded its death knell. Here, captured in the cool grey-scale of Philodendron, Richter tenders the very beginning of a revolutionary idea that appropriated photography for conceptually reinstating the artistic worth of painting on canvas.

 

Born in 1932 in East Germany, Richter received his early artistic training at the Dresden Academy before moving to the West to complete his studies in Dusseldorf, only two months before the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961. Vastly different to the East, the flourishing Americanised Capitalism of West Germany fostered an artistic impetus for a renewed visual expression in line with Pop Art; a breakthrough movement the artist first encountered at the Düsseldorf Kuntsakademie. For Richter however, an appropriation of 'readymade' photography provided a means to paint whilst also permitting a critical distance from the Americana concerns of Pop. While outwardly adopting Pop's embrace of found mass-produced imagery, towards the late 1960s Richter turned to the amateur photograph and family snap-shots for their quality of absolute artlessness as bare bones of the photographic medium. For Richter the immediacy and objectivity of the photographic image removed descriptive function from the realm of painting. As a representation of a black and white photograph, this early work signifies Richter's steadfast dedication to painting whilst illustrating an adoption of the contemporaneous aims of Pop Art and Duchampian conceptualism at the beginning of the 1960s.

 

Influenced by the anti-painterly technique of Roy Lichtenstein's large-scale comic strips, Richter's photo-paintings reject any trace of the artist's hand. Philodendron embodies this anti-artistic impulse: by projecting and tracing a snapshot of a smiling woman posing next to a gigantic tropical plant directly onto canvas, Richter achieved precise, disinterested compositional information. Richter's signature blurring of such paintings, achieved by dragging a brush across the pigment-loaded canvas, affects a suspension of vision. As though reproducing motion blur captured by the camera, Richter's distorted and vaguely decipherable forms arrest the viewer's sight between recognition and un-focus. As outlined by the artist: "I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect" (the artist cited in: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 37). Stylistically distilled to the detached and unscrupulous representational facts of the unpretentious black and white snap-shot, Philodendron invites the disinterested mechanism of photography into the hand-painted work of art. Detached from the necessity of compositional decision-making, Richter innovatively approaches painting as pure procedure devoid of artistic agency. The photograph provided a blank canvas, one that allowed Richter to concentrate on the act of painting: "It didn't have any style, any composition, any judgement; it liberated me from personal experience, it had nothing at all, it was a picture" (the artist in 1972 in: Hans-Ulrich Obrist , Ed., Gerhard Richter - Text: Schriften und Interviews, Frankfurt am Maim 1994, p. 67).

 

Found imagery offered the means by which the artist could empty his practice of the inhibitions closing in on the annals of art history, but in so doing provided him with just the means to engage with that history. Philodendron comes at the height of Richter's taxonomical assessment of the modern world, whereby the accumulation of found imagery, often chosen according to themes (women, biography, childhood, the future) amounts to something poignant. The artist has added: "Do you know what was great? Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture. And then the freedom to paint whatever you felt like. Stags, aircraft, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything any more, forgetting everything you meant by painting - colour, composition, space - and all the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 2002, p. 42). As evocatively redolent within the present work, the diaphanous paint layers lend a poignant ephemeral quality that plants Philodendron firmly within its era; its photographic imagery operates as a visual cue for some half-forgotten memory. Catching the transient glimpse of a fleeting moment, Richter confronts the viewer not only with the manipulation of paint, but also the manipulation of perception itself.