Gerhard Richter: Art is Still "Sublime"

Gerhard Richter, Abstrakt Bild (1980)

Gerhard Richter is probably the world's leading painter - not just because of his dazzling technical virtuosity, but for his work's important insights into the nature of seeing and picture-making. Then there's the range of what he's done; there's very little progressive contemporary painting that Richter hasn't already done, implied, or rendered irrelevant. It's like what a friend of mine told me about B.B. King's reaction to Stevie Ray Vaughn's playing: "The kid never runs out of ideas!" 

His output at first glance appears a bit schizophrenic - much of it is polarized between, on the one hand, the hyper-realism of paintings that pretend to be photos and on the other "random" abstractions created by purely mechanical means such as dragging a giant squeegee through the paint.  The constant? the work deceptively appears to circumvent the hand of the artist. But the reality is quite different and at once more comforting and complex: it has everything to do with Richter's "eye" (his vision for painting) and the artist, of course, is always and intensely present. 

Richter's paradoxical practice, always in a sense about the nature of painting now, has succeeded in proving painting's ongoing relevance even as choruses of art world authorities continue to proclaim its death.

Gerhard Richter, Lesende (Reader), 1994

As it has many times over his long (60 year) career,  Richter's work has morphed again into two totally disparate modes: this time, apparently chance-induced paint pouring on one hand and algorithmic digital manipulation based on one of his paintings on the other (for example, see the "Strip" painting below). There's an insightful a little interview and write up in the Wall St. journal on his latest work and the new London Gallery it's put on the map. 

Gerhard Richter, one of the new poured works

Richter says, "Hope and belief are…unique to humans. Animals don’t go around hoping. [Religion] slowly broke down over time. Perhaps starting right before Nietzsche. And nowadays there aren’t many believers. But there’s an unbroken urge to believe—whether in Prada, or some other brand of clothing, or in anything.... "

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting

"Abstract pictures do indeed show something, they just show things that don’t exist. But they still follow the same requirements as figurative works: they need a setup, structure. You need to be able to look at it and say, “It’s almost something.” But it’s actually representing nothing. It pulls feelings out of you, even as it’s showing you a scene that technically isn’t there." -Gerhard Richter

Richter, spry at 82, in front of one of his new "Strips" works.

It's all a glorious, dizzying conundrum. I see abstract painting, if not all painting  as "a secular pilgrimage toward universality," as the WSJ article puts it: "Most of the Ab-Exers shared an impulse to bring the hope of the world into their art." Not Richter. Richter wanted to close the gap between Duchamp and painting, to make objects out of signs without definite referents, confronting us with the inexplicable beauty of our bewildering and often horrific modern lives. 

September, Gerhard Richter

The processes Richter uses to make his paintings are at times themselves a metaphor for human vulnerability, striving, and patient questioning. 

All of Richter's diverse works spring from the same artistic project, namely his 'belief in painting's necessity born of radical doubt in its potential .... a credere quia absurdam' (from St. Aquaina's phrase 'I believe because it is absurd.') Despite his refusal of sentimentality in any form, for Richter art and beauty are humanity's saving graces in the face of often hard-to-bear reality. 

Gerhard Richter, Sphere (note the crouching figure reflected in the steel ball)

As he has said many times, if our better selves are to survive, "we need beauty in all its variations."*  I'm down with that.

Gerhard Richter, Two Fiats

Gerhard Richter, Kerze (Candle), 1982

(*A. Borchdardt-Hume, Gerhard Richter Panorama, p. 174)

Friedrich: The Tragedy of the Landscape

At the same time that Constable was painting the ever-changing skies over England (1820 or 1822 or so), German painter Casper David Friedrich was working on Moonrise Over the Sea (1822). It’s almost a “negative” of a Constable or Dutch coastal painting; it’s night, instead of day; it’s full of shadows, mystery, and gloom instead of clarity, light, and freshness; the figures aren’t minimal yardsticks for scale, they’re large, front and center, projecting well above the distant horizon, and therefore we understand that, instead of just being a “picturesque” window on the world, Moonrise Over the Sea is about the relationship of the figures to the landscape (and by analogy a comment on humanity’s place in existence).

In the terminology of the day, Constable is about the picturesque and Friedrich is about the sublime. These are the two sides of the coin of Romanticism, a word that describes the eruption into European art, literature, and music of emotion, imagination, spontaneity, psychology, madness, the supernatural - the subconscious, dreams, extreme states, altered states, the otherworldly, the unknown - everything, basically, that the tidy, Godly, rational, clockwork world of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment wanted to believe didn’t exist.

I’m reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for a lecture I’ll be giving next month on Romantic art, and I keep seeing images from Friedrich’s work as I read. Compare the following passage with Friedrich’s stunning Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818) (below).

"The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glacier overhung me…. a scene terrifically desolate…. rising like the waves of a troubled sea, descending low, and interspersed by rifts that sink deep. The field of ice is almost a league in width, but I spent nearly two hours in crossing it. The opposite mountain is a bare perpendicular rock…. and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses. Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds."

Full of “a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul,” reveling in the “solitary grandeur of the scene,” the haunted scientist utters a desperate (and mega-Romantic) creed, part death-wish, part prayer:

“Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.”

In this painting, because the figure’s back is turned toward us, the viewer can occupy his place in the landscape. We understand that the scene we’re viewing is being filtered through human sensation.

But this is not the case in The Polar Sea, also known as The Wreck of Hope, (above). Here Friedrich omitted the figure and pushed the sublime indifference of nature about as far as the public could take at the time.

Look carefully: amidst the vast, forbidding desolation and merciless, impersonal natural forces of crushing glacial ice and stone, you can see the stern of a ship trapped in the ice being slowly crushed to pieces. A writer in Time Magazine in 1974 nailed exactly what’s going on in this painting: “"the image he produced, with its grinding slabs of travertine-colored floe ice chewing up a wooden ship, goes beyond documentary into allegory: the frail bark of human aspiration crushed by the world's immense and glacial indifference.” His work is still so powerful that many give him credit for inventing die romantische Stimmungslandschaf the landscape full of Romantic feeling and mysticism.

Friedrich’s paintings channel the same Romantic sublime - the presence of the awe-inspiring (“awful” = awe full) power and vastness of nature, in the face of which one feels “solemnized” as Shelley wrote, aware of one’s mortality jolted from one’s routine personal cares, which suddenly seem petty, insignificant, and small.

"Close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards." Friedrich in his collection of aphorisms (1830).

"Friedrich! … The only landscape painter so far to succeed in stirring up all the forces of my soul, the painter who has created a new genre: the tragedy of the landscape." - David d'Angers.