At the end of July 2007, I went with Carol to the stylish Glucksman gallery in Cork - which was housing a small retrospective of Gerhard Richter paintings and photographs. I had travelled 300 miles from Dublin just to see this show (well admittedly also so that my girlfriend could catch up with her folks and we could have a little holiday) to say it was a wasted trip is maybe a bit overstated. However, I was heartily disappointed in the exhibition (thankfully the rest of our holiday was great fun.)
The Richter exhibition was a major coup for Cork over Dublin and a sign of the high esteem that the Glucksman gallery was held in. You just didn’t get many other painters in the world in 2007 - which were more revered, Freud, Kiefer, Tuymans and Neo Rauch were the only close competitors. Richter worked in many different styles – blurred photorealism, gesturally abstract, colour field abstraction and more or less conceptual. At auction his paintings had sold for several millions, he was beloved in the art magazines, a hero to many young artists who still wanted to paint, and even conceptualists who hated painting often had time work his work.
But it was with very mixed feeling that I went to the Richter exhibition. I had ambivalent feelings towards his art, which mirrored the ambivalence in his work. I could honestly that I had never really cared too much about his work. I found most of his work very boring.
The exhibition titled Survey featured 27 works - oil paintings (mostly very small by his standards - on canvas, alucbond, plywood, or paper) Cibachrome photographs and offset prints. Both the title and the selection were made by Richter who aimed to give an over-view of his lives work from his blurred photo-realist paintings of the 1960s to his abstract canvases of the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, it was a very minor exhibition of his work, no photo-realist works were present except if they had been photographed by Richter. The title Survey came from an Offset Print he made in 1998, in which (using objective sources like encyclopedias) he listed the most important artists, writers, philosophers, composers and architects who shaped Western culture from 1300 to the 1990s. Richter’s name is listed, fair enough it’s not his opinion but others, but I looked and looked and could not see Anselm Kiefer listed! Oh, how the grand artists spar today, watch out I’ll leave you out of my Offset-Print!
Richter was a painter who worked simultaneously in many different styles each of which seemed to contradict the other. His necrophiliac paintings were made by a man who did not believe in the fictions of photo-realism (photos are not real) or the fictions of abstraction (abstract art is not spiritual) and his life’s work seemed to be a deconstruction of the myths of romanticism that lurked behind the western eye. The trouble was that much of his work was willfully experimental in a rather dishonest way. It was the pointless experimentalism of a callow art student given the endless paint and canvas supplies, mythology, and price tags of a serious academic and art-world-star. Yes, Richter was a very technically accomplished artist, but he had skill without vision, passion, or genius. He was a good painter, but even in realist mode he was nowhere near the genius of Lovis Corinth, Richard Gerstl, Max Beckman, or Otto Dix never mind Casper David Fredrick or Albert Dürer. But in the post-war art world of ignorant and incompetent painters, Richter was like a one-eyed man in the land of the blind, and his GDR old-school skills made Richter seem a far greater painter than he was. He was utterly incapable of inventing an image from his head or working from life, his whole world was a scrapbook. As for his abstracts, they looked like lifeless zombies compared with a Kandinsky, Pollock or de Kooning.
I first became aware of Gerhard Richter’s work at the age of nineteen (1990) as I read Contemporary Art written by Klaus Honnef (Taschen 1988.) When I flicked excitedly over the pages of Honnef’s book, amongst all the bombastic, hectoring, macho and ragged canvases of painters like Baselitz, Clemente and Schnabel, Richter's paintings looked enigmatic, puzzling - yet entrancing. I had never really seen an intelligent photorealist painting before (one that so clearly stated its artificiality and imperfection) most third-rate photorealists try to paint pictures more real that the photographs they are copying, but Richter's photorealist paintings seemed at once powerfully realistic and true but also artificial and constructed. Seeing how Richter constantly avoided painting in one coherent style bolstered my own confidence in my youthful refusal to be tied down to one style. Moreover, when I was young, I utterly adored his large squeegee abstracts with their thick paint, scrapped across with wooden slats, super saturated oil colours, and their intelligent re-interpretations of Abstract Expressionism. Often Richter made small abstracts, which he then photographed in a rather blurred manner, and then repainted the photographs on a large scale, creating abstract trompe l'oeil. His abstracts seemed more like three-dimensional abstracts spaces than an emotional expression of himself, though they did also seem to be a sensual release from his more demanding and deadpan photorealist works.
When in 2001 I saw a handful of his huge oil paintings (each in a totally different style) in the Pompidou Centre in Paris I was awe struck by his technical mastery and professional rigor, they were some of the best paintings I had seen in the whole museum. But, after viewing them, I quickly forgot them, they meant nothing to the way I wanted to paint. My favourite painting was 1024 Farben N. 350/3, a massive, great lacquer painting of his from 1973, which was a huge colour chart (like you might get in a paint supply shop but arranged musically by a budding Paul Klee) made up of hundreds of different coloured rectangles of oil paint. My immediate thought was, Hirst stole this idea from Richter and converted the rectangles to circles! It was just one example of Richter’s importance to and influence on young artists of my day.
However, as the years passed my interest in his art evaporated. I came to dislike the negative persona of his art, his works dance of the seven veils, it’s political and economic hypocrisy and moral neutrality. Richter’s squeegee abstract paintings which I had at first adored, began to bore me as he painted more and more of them. His squeegee abstract paintings began to remind me more and more of pallet-scrappings on a vast scale. And every night, when I cleaned my pallet of unused paint, I would unintentionally create the same strange, streaked patterns of paint. But no one was giving me hundreds of thousands of pounds for my used pallets! The pallet-scrapping oil painting was a slim idea, not worth exploring much, but Richter’s made hundreds of these paintings wasting gallons of expensive oil paint, because they were easy to make, very marketable, and totally inoffensive. Time and again, I balked at buying a book dedicated to Richter, I succumbed only once before this time in Cork (this is from a man with over 300 art books alone.) I just never really cared that deeply for Richter’s art. I found his work increasingly boring and pointless. I did not know what he stood for - or if he stood for anything. After seeing this exhibition, I still did not know, and that for me was the most telling indictment of his art. Warhol had faced similar criticisms, but I think compared to Richter, Warhol was a genuinely honest, political, and socially active artist, and that is saying something! The difference I think lay in Warhol’s honesty which threw into relief Richter’s dishonesty, first and foremost with himself, and secondly with his public. Warhol’s frank admittance that he was a businessman, a voyeur, a sensationalist, a consumer of mass-culture, a capitalist, a Catholic, and a homosexual, stand in direct contrast to Richter’s Post-Modern, Deconstructionist lack of faith in anything and refusal to state any ethical, aesthetic, or moral belief. It was also typical of the worst excesses of the Post-Modern academic.
The argument behind works like Richter’s was that art was ‘an enquiry’ or ‘an investigation’ the artist (much like a journalist) made no attempt to moralize or judge - merely record. But this was a dishonest cop-out and an autistic form of solipsism, every cultural product has a social effect and a political basis, if only in terms of the politics of the art world. Moreover, the whole notion of ‘an objective-enquiry’ I felt was bullshit. Every artist or thinker was motivated by his/her own family, class, social, sexual, political, national, and racial background as well as a dark sea of inner subconscious drives and desires, objectivity I believed was a pure fiction. Having spent my life trying to understand the motivations behind the subjects I choose to paint (if only for my own enlightenment) and then defending my choices in the art world, I found Richter’s Machiavellian evasion of telling questions about his motivations blood-boiling.
Then in 2005 I read Julian Spalding's The Eclipse of Art (2003) in it Spalding pointed out how Robert Storr (in his essay in the catalogue for Richter’s major retrospective in M.O.M.A. in New York in 2002) had compared Richter to Velázquez and Vermeer. But how could that be Spalding asked when Richter had never developed an artistic identity. All of which lead me to believe that Richter might merely be an academic opportunist. One who had wedded his traditional Communist academic skills learnt in the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts - to the Post Pop-Art, Post-Modern and Post-Structuralist concerns of the Capitalistic West.
You see there are some master painters like Rembrandt, Goya, van Gogh, Picasso, or Freud whom I revered, adored, wished to emulate, and nearly cried when I failed. But then there were other painting masters of the academy like Raphael, Nicolas Poussin and Gerhard Richter that left me feeling conflicted and bewildered. The art lover part of my brain was thrilled, the art critic side of my brain was intellectually stimulated - but the painter in me felt antipathy for their work. I could admire their paintings, but at the same time, not take it to my heart.
I knew full well the importance, technical genius, and Devine precocity of Raphael but he represented everything in art I was against, order, harmony, idealism, purity, and devotion. I had been stunned into silence by the beauty of many of his canvases - but had never wanted to emulate him.
Similarly, Poussin had all my life left me cold, I found his art like a dead fish. I saw no pleasure in the handling of paint, no passion in his compositions, and no humanity in his antiquity. But I also knew that to many painters, my comments would have come as a sign of the highest ignorance and Expressionistic prejudice. To them Poussin's restraint, order and emotional stoicism was admirable in the extreme.
Finally, there was Gerhard Richter, somewhat a God for the art world of my day, but I wondered how his reputation would live after the cynical Post-Modern, academic, theory-bound, Mannerist and disjoined period of art had ended (I did not believe that art was dead - art could never die.) But for his era Gerhard Richter was the Poussin of the snapshot, it was his cold repressed cynicism and emotional detachment that not only caught the early Post-Modern Zeitgeist but also stayed its course the longest. Personally, I found his work necrophiliac, autistic, solipsistic, academic, dishonest, pretentious, and posturing. I had never seen any so called ‘great painter’, work with such contempt for his medium or with so little passion for its makeup, paint, colour or the imprint of the brush mark. You see modernism could and did happen without the likes of Richter and his necrophiliac postmodernist buddies, but Richter could never have made art without modernism. His work was a purely reactionary counter punch to the melee that was modernism. Like a parasite on the corpse of modernism, he stripped the whole modernist legacy (which was profoundly anti-academic) of all its idealism, energy and creativity, in order to bolster the power of the new Post-Modern academy.
The old academy, the one rebelled against by Courbet, Manet, Monet, Degas, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and Polock was fetishistically obsessed with craft, against any modernization and narrow mindedly concerned with an idealized kind of figurative art that stretched back to Raphael. It was caught up with tedious and unrealistic mythology, uninspired detail, and painting pictures with a moralizing story. It over emphasized near photographic technical skills at the expense of personal vision, emotional authenticity, and intellectual complexity. It was the bogey man in all the histories of modernism - but if those artists thought the old academy was bad, they should have seen the one of my day! Firstly, the academy of my day was a thousand times larger, more powerful, and detrimental to real art, than anything in the ninetieth century. In my era, in the academy it was a sin to have a manual skill. Those who could draw or paint or sculpt with passion, craft and panache were seen as elitist demons and a reactionary element in the Post-Modern circus. Art history was seen as something to sneer at - rather than learn from. Art was thought of as a form of hippie self-realization rather than craft to be mastered. Very quickly the art students of my day learned the two most important lessons of the art world, how to bullshit, and how to arse-lick. They thought they were rebels because they turned up to class late or told a joke about a tutor - yet had no idea just how brainwashed and conformist they really were. For every hour taken from the life room, one was given over to theory. The art student of my day was expected to be more than a maker of art interventions – he/she had to also be a philosopher of existence! Or rather, a philosopher of the small bits of fluff in his/her navel, and how it related to the cotton trade, the slavery of the African Americans and the power of the western elite. It was this shabby academy - with all its pretentious, politically correct, PO-Mo, Post-Deconstructionist, Post-Feminist, and multi-cultural bullshit, that Richter was the godfather to.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 one year before Hitler took power. Typical of many Germans of their generation, Richter’s relatives were involved in the Nazi movement; his mother's brother, Uncle Rudi died a young Nazi officer, while Richter's mentally disabled aunt was imprisoned in a euthanasia camp. As a youth Richter was part of the Hitler youth – though this was not uncommon – most of the young German population (girls and boys) were indoctrinated in this manner. Richter was thirteen when the Allies bombed Dresden in mid-February 1945. Over 25,000 people lost their lives in the resulting firestorm. Dresden “the Venice of the North” was wiped off the map. Had Richter been only a couple of years older he might have been enlisted to fight in the foxholes against the Russian steamroller. But according to Gerhard Richter it was all great fun to be young at the time. He must have really loved being in the Hitler Youth! But, by thirteen the war was over, however he lived under occupation by the Soviets until he left to live in Düsseldorf in West Germany in 1961. That means that he spent the first thirteen years of his life under Nazi manipulation, propaganda, and delusion, and then spent the next sixteen years under East German communist manipulation, propaganda, and delusion, before living in West Germany and lived under our Capitalistic manipulations, propaganda, and delusions. Despite the national slaughter, tragedy, grief, and enslavement that he witnessed in his nation all around him, his art is surprisingly controlled and unemotional. But, having seen just how brutal and sadistic ideologies can be, he seems to have taken the stance of impassive reporter.
For a future Post-Modern academic his training was impeccable. First, he studied in The Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, learning the skills of ‘reactionary’ figurative Socialist Realism. Then he studied at The State Academy of Fine Art in Düsseldorf, learning all about the latest trends in abstract, figurative and Pop art. No doubt, it was his schizophrenic training, which led him to such an objective mix - of the traditionally realistic and crafted oil painting - and the concepts of Pop art and the mass media.
In 1962, Richter made his first paintings based on family snapshots and photographs taken from newspapers, magazines, and books, only six years later did he start to take and use his own photographs though he also continued to use mass-media images. What position that put him in terms of copyright restriction (or any other artist, including myself, who used other people’s photographs) I did not know.
The key painting in this early series of work was Uncle Rudi 1965, his commemoration of a family photograph of his beloved, charming, and handsome Uncle Rudi (Richter’s account of his mother’s account of her brother who died early in the Second World War.) But what we the viewers see is a German Lieutenant in peaked hat and trench coat and smiling brightly in front of what looks like a military barracks. The painting is blurry and in parts illegible. Although the actual painting was not in the show - a Cibachrome photograph of it taken by Richter was, creating a mirage of a colour photographic copy of a mirage of a handmade painting which itself was a copy of an old black and white mechanical snapshot which itself was only a mechanical counterfeit of nature. These were the stupid games of the simulacrum that the artistic academics of my day loved– but to me it was just a snide money-making scheme.
The basic notion of simulation or simulacrum was that the real world had been replaced by the trillions of ‘hyper-real’ duplicated images of itself, there was no such thing as ‘reality’ or ‘authenticity’, everything was pre-mediated. Cultural products produced through photography, film, video, TV, or the internet, were forgeries of reality which themselves had been duplicated and reduplicated, making them part of an endless hall of mirrors, images reflected in images upon images into infinity. But what did this all mean in the art world? Well, it meant that old-fashioned notions about the individuality, authenticity, passions, and the brushstrokes of the artist (even if they were ‘torn from the body’) all amounted to a hill of beans in a cynical Post-Modern art world which had only one role – to deconstruct and plagiarize the edifice of modernism and Western Culture in general.
Long ago, back in the 1970s conceptualists liked to prattle on about the commercialism of modernist painters. They liked to pour scorn on the doodles Picasso drew on napkins and were then sold for thousands, seeing it as indicative of the craven, reactionary and capitalist actions of old-school oil-painters. But what even ‘serious’ conceptualists like Richter had proven was that they too could be as mercenary. By making photographs of his well-known works, exhibiting them in Perspex boxes, (which show you more of yourself than the artwork), Richter had basically just done the conceptual equivalent of a doodle on a napkin. But at least a doodle on a napkin didn’t come with a sanctimonious lecture on simulation, appropriation, and Post-Modern reproduction.
Repeatedly, Richter had stated that there was a difference between the subject of a painting and its meaning, a topic, and its depiction. His paintings were not based on the real world but on the reproduced world of photography. He was not painting his uncle Rudi he was painting a copy of a photograph of his uncle Rudi. That is why Richter was probably the preeminent painter of my day, for in his moderately skilled and moderately intelligent works he stripped bare the mechanisms of photographic ‘reality’, ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’. At the same time, he exposed the fiction of the painted canvas, which promised a counterfeit of reality and its myths of artistic vision, subjective emotion, and creative soul. Finally, he stripped bare the mechanisms of abstract painting, and its myths of spontaneity, expressiveness, and spiritual depth. All this, he delivered in a deadpan way that would have put Buster Keaton to shame. Why I wondered was it nearly always men who came up with philosophical notions like this? Neurosis I realized came in many different forms, not all madmen were raving lunatics, some were autistic solipsists with no concept of the real resistant world around them. They thought like small boys that the world was theirs to state into being. They were not creators, they were dissectors.
Objectivity without emotion was often a quest in a Richter oil painting. For example, I doubt the bomber in a Royal Air Force Lancaster or American B17 Fortress bomber over Dresden, could have painted less emotional paintings that Richter made in 1968 (not in the show) of bombed out German cities. Then how could a German after 1945, express the thoughts that were going through his or her mind. How does any nation deal with that kind of collective shame, guilt, and inner anger? Many adopted the role of self-censorship and self-repression, and Richter was one of them. But spiking out of his work came images from his childhood nightmares, British Spitfires and American bombers. As an Irish man my first split second thought coming from a childhood saturated in Hollywood films is, “oh there are the heroes’ planes”, or “those are the good guys”. But to a German child, who saw his beautiful and cultured home burnt to the ground and 25,000 of its citizens, killed by bombs, incendiaries, and then firestorms, well what would you think? Even some of those in Allied countries were later to believe this had been an Allied war crime.
How do you deal with that? Especially if you know that your suffering in historical terms was seen as a necessary evil to end an even worse regime. Ground like grain in a mill the German population were bombed into the ground, a revenge for Coventry and London. Yes, the German's voted for Hitler, yes they fell for his lies, yes they fought and died for him on the battle field in their millions, yes thousands of SS sadists killed six million Jews, and up to five million others; Roma Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, physically disabled people, mentally ill patients, homosexuals, communists, Catholic priests and nuns, political agitators, artists, writers and journalists. But in many ways, they too were victims of one of the most cunning, manipulative, and sadistic regimes the world has ever seen. The tools of propaganda, policing, censorship, and brutal beatings the Nazis either invented or adopted from Italian Fascism or Russian Communism were so powerful on a fragile democracy and naïve population that it is fair to say that most where hypnotized into National delusion, racial prejudice, and maniacal faith in Hitler. How else can one explain the suicidal deaths of young boys of the Hitler Youth (only a few years older than Richter at the time), who still believed Hitler would reverse the course of the war with new wonder weapons, as Berlin was being blasted into oblivion by Russian artillery. I knew that some people would have looked cynically at the German people and this defense of it – but had things changed that much? Young men in their millions still fought for regimes and ideologies they were convinced were on the side of the good in a war against evil.
After the war the philosopher Theodor Adorno famously wrote that: "After Auschwitz writing poetry is barbaric," (though he subsequently added that "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.") But artists are born to make art, no matter what their nations crimes, so art had to be made. In the 1950s German artists adopted the abstract mannerisms of French L’art informel and American Abstract Expressionism, it was a cop out.
Then from this toxic dump of history a few great artists emerged in Germany in the early 1960s. First the godfather to everything since, an inventive sculptor, an inspired draughtsman, a teacher, a spiritual healer of wounds, a social worker, a mystic, a bibliophile, an activist, a social-sculptor, and a liberator, Joseph Beuys. He showed that art could become a way of reconnecting with a deeper, older German history, one that had either been brutalized or censored by the Nazi historians.
If Beuys was the Wiseman of German art, Baselitz was the adolescent thug, that brutally crashed against taboos and raised iconoclasm to a pitch not seen since Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1906/7 (the ultimate iconoclastic, “Everything We Think We Know About Painting Is Bullshit! Let’s Start Again!” canvas of the Twentieth century.) Baselitz's upside down paintings are thought of as a gimmick. I don't think that does them justice. Baseltiz's work was always about thuggish rebellion - he made that clear in his adolescent penis paintings like The Great Night in The Bucket 1962-3. But he only began turning his paintings upside down after first slowly fragmenting and metaphorically tearing them. The upside-down paintings were a rebuke to painting yet paradoxically like many iconoclastic gestures it made the viewer look more closely at paintings and how we understand them. By 2007 Baselitz’s was not talked about much, it was a shame I felt because I thought him a far greater artist than Richter.
I would have argued that Anselm Kiefer was by far the greatest artist and most important painter Germany had produced since the heydays of Kirchner, Nolde, Beckman, Dix, and Grosz. In fact, I thought he was greater than Beuys his teacher or Richter, Baselitz, Polke, or Kippenberger. Only Kiefer took radioactive Germany history head on and established a mode of understanding, healing, and re-birth. On a technical level I also found his complexly constructed canvases (plastered with unruly oil paint, woodcuts, clay, broken ceramic, lead, barbed wire, or straw and filled with all kinds of images of Germania and the Jews), the only successful slayers of these ghosts. Unlike Richter, there was nothing repressed or cynical about Kiefer’s work, it was straight ahead polemic in paint.
Like all good academics from old, Richter was technically very good in oil paint and watercolour in abstraction and photorealism. Looking at his photorealist canvases the tawdry incompetent and brain-dead nature of so many also-rans of photorealism became apparent. It was not just his skill that elevated him above them - for that would not be enough to defeat Richard Estes’ brilliantly inter-composed photographs rendered with such panache. No, it was his cold calculating intellect, his willingness to confound people’s expectations and challenge their commonplace faith in photography as an objective record of the world. Richter proved that photographs were just one millisecond captured in time but made by a human with a history and a prejudice towards the world. Moreover, once in the media arena, they forced people to take a stance, aesthetically, sexually, politically, historically, or racially.
But time and again I was baffled as to what Richter felt or thought about the subjects that he painted. On the one hand, they could appear random, but on another, they were politically, historically, or sexually charged. For example, he had painted some soft-core porn (including some of his first wife), yet I am unsure that he ever had a lustful thought over any of these images or any other soft porn images. He painted members of the Red Army Faction (also known as the Baader Meinhof Gang) in particular Ulrike Meinhof, lying dead after she had hung herself (a verdict strongly denied by others who believe she was murdered by the state.) But how could a multi-millionaire artist with no political allegiances to left or right come to want to paint and memorialize communist terrorists whose group had killed numerous people and wounded many more? Nostalgia, did he understand their warped idealism? Approval, did he approve their goals if not their crimes? Perhaps he respected their attack on ex-Nazi’s who had gone on to major posts in German government and business and a cultural of historical amnesia. Maybe as some suggested he sought merely to increase his own notoriety. Alternatively, maybe as a classic iconoclast he wanted to spark debate and contemplation of what place paintings based on mass media photographs have within a cultural debate.
Nostalgia was a constant theme of Richter’s oil paintings as it was with all old photographs. Nostalgia is a fanciful and poetic reinterpretation of history, one that removes the pain of the event and replaces it with wonder and awe, that it was lived through. I am reminded again of Richter’s interview with The South Bank Show, in which he recalled his war years as exciting and trouble free! Where it not for the fact that I had been recently watching the great documentary Hitler’s Children on The History Channel, I would have swallowed that hook line and sinker. However, listening to those now old men and women (many Richter’s age) describe the delusions of grandeur and hate they believed living under the Nazis, and how guilty and ashamed they felt in old age - I didn’t believe a word of it. What was it that old veteran soldiers (of every nation) said again and again: “Any man who says he was not frightened in battle – is a bloody liar!”
At the same time the Glucksman gallery was staging a second exhibition entitled ‘Overtake (The Reinterpretation of Modern Art)’ the show contained work by Bernd Behr, Andrea Büttner, Kerstin Cmelka, Annelise Coste, Tacita Dean, Carsten Fock, Iain Forsyth/Jane Pollard, Wade Guyton, Bertrand Lavier, Mark Leckey, Sean Lynch, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Jonathan Monk, Falke Pisano, Tilo Schulz, Mario Garcia Torres. I have only ever heard of a few of these dolts, but I was sure they were big men on campus somewhere in the bloody world. Most of these artists were inspired by the ideas of appropriation art from the 1970s and 1980s. ‘Appropriation’ is an art world term for ‘stealing’. Their link with Richter was in their mutual fascination with the mediated world of images that surround us and the nature of reality. All the work in their show was based on observations, thoughts, or parody of others artist’s work. I suppose it was all about how art influences other artists work, the kind of thing art students are supposed to fill their sketchbooks these days with, childish handwritten observations and sketches around pasted in postcards of art works they like. Personally, I found the whole Overtake exhibition pointless, stupid, and yet again hopelessly Post-Modern, cannibalistic, and impotent.