Gerhard Richter

Private Collection, Kapellenbos (acquired directly from the artist)
Faggionato Fine Art, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Antwerp, Internationaal Cultureel Centrum; Charleroi, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Biënnale van de Kritiek/Biennale de la Critique, November 1977 - February 1978, cat. no. 38, illustrated
Prato, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea, Luigi Pecci, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Prato, Gerhard Richter, October 1999 - January 2000, p. 79, illustrated in color
Naples, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donna Regina, extended loan, October 2009 - February 2012

Exh. Cat., Venice, German Pavilion, 36. Biennale, 1972, cat. no. 269, p. 72, illustrated
Jürgen Harten, Gerhard Richter Bilder 1962-1985, Cologne, 1986, cat. no. 269, p. 120, illustrated in color
Angelika Thill, et. al., Gerhard Richter: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, cat. no. 269, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Sakura City, Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art, Gerhard Richter: Atlas, 2001, p. 98, illustrated

This painting is in very good condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is framed in a blonde wood strip frame.
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Incontestably beautiful, Wolken (Clouds) is a majestic and overwhelmingly desirable painting. Its peaceful composition and familiar subject matter of soft passing clouds filtering the sunlight of a calm blue sky is immediately inspiring, but as such, the painting belies the artist's more complex aesthetic intent and practice. Indeed, German artist Gerhard Richter's distinction as one of contemporary art's most important and revered painters is predicated on the intellectual qualities as well as the visual pleasures of his art. Richter's nudes, still-lifes, landscapes and skyscapes are conceptual constructs at their core, allowing Richter to interrogate the purpose and practice of painting in its essence. Wolken (Clouds) exemplifies Richter's complicated merger of abstraction, realism, painting, photography, nostalgia and contemporaneity.

As Richter began to receive artistic recognition and commercial success in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he painted a small series of 18 romanticized cloud paintings. The hyperrealism characterizing these works is a palpable effect of the artist's involved process: Richter begins by taking a series of photographs, which he catalogues in the publication titled Atlas - his mammoth compilation of "image models" - and from which he chooses specific photographs to render in paint. The present work, Wolken (Clouds) of 1970, displays an astonishing likeness to its photographic incarnation, yet Richter's pursuit is not one of mimesis or exacting duplication. In fact, in his writings and statements, he openly questions the ability of two dimensional art forms to capture the reality of a three-dimensional object or figure. His subdued abstraction and barely discernible brushstrokes anchor the work in the painting tradition but he specifically sources from photographs to avoid the traditional notion of painting "from life."

Notably, in his softly beautiful landscapes and skyscapes, the artist's treatment of natural phenomena is in accordance with Western art history's long and rich legacy of landscape painting. Wolken (Clouds) vividly calls to mind Romantic imagery such as J.M.W. Turner's emphatic depiction of clouds in the painting Entrance of the Meuse: Orange-Merchant on the Bar, Going to Pieces (1819). Billowing, colorful clouds against a daytime sky and above a maritime scene demand the viewer's attention in much the same way Wolken (Clouds) requires the viewer to solely contemplate the sky. More akin to Richter's cropped image of clouds is a collection of preparatory studies by Turner's contemporary, John Constable. Cloud Study (circa 1821) is particularly comparable to the present work in reference to its orientation. Constable's clouds are enlivened and appear to be passing over the artist's head while the Romantic's vibrant color palette and fictionalization of converging clouds clearly exaggerate nature. Like Turner's masterpiece, Constable's painting is marked by imagination and emotion, heightened and interpretive qualities noticeably absent in Richter's painting. As a faithful adaptation of photography, Wolken (Clouds) depicts a steady blue sky and rather ordinary clouds with a cool distance, so as to accurately repeat the photographic image and attribute any innate beauty to the natural occurrence itself.

Though Richter's objective portrayal thus distinguishes him from Romanticism's emotional embellishment, his work is nevertheless often understood in relation to another Romantic, Caspar David Friedrich. In Friedrich's paintings Sea Shore in Moonlight (1835-1836) and Der Monch am Meer (1808-1810) the viewer is presented with expansive natural vistas, which in the latter case overwhelms the meager lone figure of the monk, evoking profound existential notions of mortality and mysticism. Critic Robert Storr has differentiated Richter's work from that of Friedrich by noting, "[Richter's] pictures are as beautiful as their natural subjects and beautiful as painted artifacts, but they withhold any invitation to empathy. Whereas romantic paintings generally meet viewers halfway - usually by means of a surrogate figure in the landscape that intensifies their associations and emotions while offering to lift them out of themselves - Richter's paintings of this type are indifferent to the viewer's needs, acknowledging by that pointed indifference that the viewer and his or her needs exist. Thus they portray natural phenomena without symbolic amplification." (Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 2002, p. 53).

Richter's technique of painting from mechanically reproduced photographs was a timely, nuanced and sophisticated exploration of artistic mediums, past and present. In the face of 1970s Minimalism and Conceptualism, Richter's decision to paint natural imagery, on the one hand, contested the moment's trends and advocated for a medium that had been largely disinherited by his peers. On the other hand, Richter's approach to painting was not merely a "return" to the medium, but a revolutionary new perspective that was guided by contemporary technology and imaging advances.

The artist's passionate interest in the interplay between objectivity and subjectivity, as generated from the act of painting from a photograph, is perhaps best explained in the artist's own words: "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." (Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2002, p. 176).