In 1964, inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, Gerhard Richter painted a toilet roll. What could be more prosaic? And yet, the painting, currently on display at the Tate Modern, is beautiful, almost hypnotic, with its straightforward composition and delicate balance of light and shade.
Few painters, modern or ancient, have the range of Gerhard Richter. From blurry photorealism to dazzling abstraction, this exhibition of his work shows paintings of fighter jets, next to bland landscapes and pretty still lifes, next to the Baader-Meinhof gang. Most painters work within one genre; Richter excels at everything. Yet he makes no claims to virtuosity. In 1985, he wrote, “Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever accomplishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture or even knowing what such a thing ought to look like. But then I always have the hope that, if I persevere, it might one day happen.”
The Tate's intelligently-curated Richter retrospective explores the thesis that all of Richter’s varied paintings stem from a single obsession: to uncover the purpose of painting in the modern world, now that its traditional functions of reverence and representation have become obsolete. (Sebastian Smee writes in last month's Prospect that Richter, like Degas before him, is "deeply conscious of photography" and what it means to go on painting in the age of photographic imagery.) Each of the 15 rooms reinforces this notion by examining a particular moment in Richter’s career.
So when we first enter the exhibition we see that after Richter escaped from east Germany in the early 1960s, he copied banal photos that wouldn’t merit a second glance in magazines, in order to see whether turning them into paintings made them more worthy of regard.
In 1973, after seeing Titian’s Annunciation in Venice, Richter bought a postcard of the religious painting, took it home and recreated it, a number of times, in soft focus. He said at the time that it proved the age of Old Master painting was long gone and yet, his Annunciation after Titian series walks the line between representational and abstract painting–and is gorgeous at both.
By the 1980s, hoping to subvert the notion of the heroic artist whose every brush stroke is a conscious choice, Richter made large abstract paintings using a squeegee, creating shapes and colours outside his control. In 2009, he painted a still life of flowers and then destroyed it (again using a squeegee), thus transforming a representational painting into an evocative abstraction.
Throughout his career, this exhibition suggests, Richter has made painting harder for himself, by embracing the unexceptional, the everyday, the ready-made, the tedious, the monochrome, the banal, the random. And yet, somehow, despite or because of these self-imposed constraints, his paintings are some of the most striking and powerful of the last century.
MORE ON RICHTER:
Photography in motion - Edgar Degas and Gerhard Richter were born almost 100 years apart, yet their work demands comparison, argues Sebastian Smee. Two major new exhibitions reveal the artists’ shared obsessions
