In the spring of 1961, Gerhard Richter, a young East German artist noted mainly for his portraits and socialist wall paintings, slipped through the last chink in the Iron Curtain—West Berlin—and fled to the Federal Republic of Germany. A few weeks later, he justified this move in a letter to his former teacher at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts: “My reasons are mainly professional. The whole cultural ‘climate’ of the West can offer me more, in that it corresponds better and more coherently with my way of being and working than that of the East.”
Richter, 29 at the time and deeply impressed by the works of Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock, which he had seen during a visit to the contemporary art exhibition Documenta in Kassel two years earlier, wanted the same stylistic and thematic freedom of those artists. He intended to settle in Munich. But an old friend from Dresden, the sculptor Reinhard Graner, who had moved to the West before Richter, strongly advised him against it, saying: “No, for God’s sake, Düsseldorf is the city of art!”
Graner was right. Munich represented a venerable but conservative tradition in artistic terms. The Rhineland was where it was all happening. It was Düsseldorf, as capital of the federal state of North-Rhine-Westphalia, where, one year after Richter’s escape, the soon-to-be-legendary Werner Schmalenbach would start amassing an exquisite collection of modern artworks for the state, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, which to this day has few equals worldwide. In 1956, art dealer Alfred Schmela had opened his own gallery in the city, which became, in the following decades, one of the most important for contemporary art in Europe.
Joseph Beuys was appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Academy in 1961. The artist group ZERO, whose members included Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker, declared a fresh start in post-war German art with their kinetic light objects. Düsseldorf and the Rhenish post-war avant-garde started to reconnect a young Federal Republic with the international scene and, above all, helped attach it firmly to the West.
Richter recognised the vitality of the place. He moved into a room at Kirchfeldstraße 104, collected the first monthly state allowance of 350 Deutschmarks, which he would be entitled to for the next two years as a so-called “Republikflüchtling” (GDR refugee), and enrolled at the academy. With characteristic bluntness, he called his first teacher, Ferdinand Macketanz, “a harmless realist”—Richter’s own blurred realism already anything but harmless back then. He himself would serve as a professor of painting of the academy from 1971 to 1993.
After he had burned his entire artistic output towards the end of 1961, so as to start again from a blank slate, he began to work in earnest on his West German oeuvre, producing paintings that prefigured much of what would make him such a seminal figure.
This development can now be witnessed in a new exhibition at Düsseldorf’s municipal museum, the Kunstpalast, which will run until February 2025. Dedicated to Richter’s relationship with his new home and, crucially, its affluent community of gallerists and collectors, it is aptly titled Verborgene Schätze (Hidden Gems). What makes it special is the fact that the works shown are, without exception, from private and corporate collections of the region. Many have never been seen in public before. They usually hang, sometimes incongruously framed, above sofas or dining tables or, in at least one case, a guest toilet. Many of the collectors prefer to remain anonymous. Some, such as the photographer Andreas Gursky, are happy to be known. Gursky, a famously hyper-realistic photographer, opted for an abstract canvas and cites it as a major influence on his work.
The 120 artworks shown encompass Richter’s whole production, starting with his first paintings after photographs, which he would become famous for—a series of minimalist, almost trompe-l’oeil pictures of half-closed doors—through a series of completely grey canvasses and cloud paintings to his colour-card works and consciously garish “doctor blade” paintings in which he “sculpted” the paint on the canvas.
Richter had his first solo exhibition at Schmela’s gallery as early as 1964. Chocolate manufacturer Peter Ludwig, after whom the most important museum of modern art in the neighbouring city of Cologne is named, acquired Richter’s paintings early on. A circle of collectors in Aachen, largely consisting of doctors and civil engineers, bought his works because they were fascinated by the systematics of his catalogue raisonné, the meticulousness with which he organised his young oeuvre and his insistence on wresting something new from painting. Duisburg-based property developer and collector Hans Grothe called Richter in 1973 and asked him for a selection of a dozen paintings.
Exploring the relationship between Richter, a native of Saxony, and his adopted Rhenish home throws up some remarkable anecdotal facts: Richter did not consider it beneath him to design papier-mâché figures for floats in the Düsseldorf carnival parade (a boar and six piglets) to subsidise his studies. He made a series of—initially—inexpensive portraits based on passport photographs that people had him. Together with his colleague Konrad Lueg, he performed as a “living statue” in Joseph Beuys’s sitting room.
After a recent €50m refurbishment, the Kunstpalast itself has started presenting a particularly fascinating piece of Richter-related local history. In the 1960s, there was no hipper place in all of Germany than the “Creamcheese”, a Düsseldorf bar named after a Frank Zappa song, which many painters helped design and where Richter’s friend and fellow artist Blinky Palermo worked as a bartender for fun. This Rhenish equivalent of Andy Warhol’s New York club “The Dom”—with its mirrored, slatted backdrop designed by Heinz Mack and wall of cathode-ray tube TVs—closed in 1975. For decades, its interiors lay stored in the Kunstpalast’s depot. But now a meticulous and lively Creamcheese reconstruction serves as installation by day and working club by night. Richter’s painting “Pin-Up”, a huge greyscale nude made for the club, runs across an entire wall. It would be a real challenge to overestimate its market value, were it ever to be sold.
Talking about Richter, one usually does end up talking about prices. He is, after all, the only painter to be represented twice in the current top ten list of the most expensive living artists. In 2013, his “Domplatz, Mailand” (1968) fetched $37.1 million (£24.4 million) at auction in New York and made him the most expensive living painter at the time. That was topped two years later, when “Abstraktes Bild (599)”, which he had painted in 1986, was sold for $44.5 million (£30.4 million).
But the tendency to measure an artist’s significance by their market value—dismissed as “silly” even by Richter, an indisputably business-minded man—often threatens to overshadow the work itself. At the same time, although he officially stopped painting in 2017, Richter’s very longevity—he is now in his 93rd year—has contributed to his almost mythical status among some German critics and curators, who regard him as an international “saviour” of painting at a time when the art form had supposedly run its course.
Which is why Hidden Gems is a welcome and timely reminder that artistic production is rooted in time and place. It shows emphatically that this artist could not have reached his current status without either the aesthetic testing ground or the fertile financial soil offered by the Rhineland.
‘Gerhard Richter: Hidden Gems’ is on at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf until 2nd February 2025
