It has been two decades since the Tate Gallery hosted Richter’s first UK
retrospective, in 1979. At the time Nicholas Serota – now Director of
the museum group – curated it. Today he shares the task with the British
academic Mark Godfrey, author of Abstraction and the Holocaust.
The result is a significant overview of the career of this eighty year
old artist who, in 1961, left East Germany for Dusseldorf and
subsequently established himself as one of the most important artists of
his generation. The exhibition highlights the willful stylistic
heterogeneity of Richter’s oeuvre and the intellectual continuity that
runs throughout its various facets, showcasing his role as painter of
history, still lives, portraits, landscapes, genre and gestural abstract
works.
In staging this well balanced survey of Richter’s varied output the
curators have successfully conveyed the intensity of the artist’s gaze,
the rigor of his methods and – somewhat counter-intuitively, given these
points – his sensuality. With his abstract and figurative pieces
hanging together it becomes possible to see how the latter is entwined
with the former and vice versa – the monumental squeegee abstracts,
colourful and many layered, give a new sense to his grey figurative
images. Indeed, surprisingly, they seem to illuminate the artist’s
pleasure in dragging dry brushes across otherwise banal images, bending
and smudging boundaries. Conversely, the geological application of
riotous colours in his abstract works – flickering between obliteration
and reapplication only to be scraped away and put back again – is a
meditation on the possibility of meaningful depth not unconnected to the
questions of memory most associated with his historical works. For
Richter, we come to understand, the smear is both generation and
oblivion; a paradoxical itch that no amount of scratching abates – hence
his prolific output.
Beyond the unlikely pleasure principle in Richter’s practice the
exhibition also conveys his intellectual and moral depth. This begins
with his eye, which explores the mimetic and commemorative functions of
surface in a forensic manner. The photographs that are used as the
starting point for many of his paintings seem deployed as evidence. But
of what?–Life as it is? As it was? In either case death looms large and
it seems he is trying to suggest that the act of representation
assassinates the subject. With Uncle Rudi and Aunt Marianne
(1965) we encounter dead family members depicted as living – his uncle
wears a Wehrmacht uniform while posing innocently in front of a wall
and, we learn from a wall text, his aunt was forcibly sterilized and
ultimately killed by the Nazis. Likewise, in his fifteen-part
Baader-Meinhof cycle, October 18 1977 (1988), we encounter the
corpses of ill-fated terrorist revolutionaries. After this meditation on
morbid documentary photography and familial trauma – both personal and
national – through paint another room is filled with his Halifax
series (1978). This is comprised of 128 greyscale photographs of what
must have been colourful impasto paint, laid out in a modernist grid
that harks back to the proto-eugenic typologies of Francis Galton. The
visual content of these photographs is unusually reminiscent of wounds
in medical textbooks, where irredeemably organic features are flattened
by the combination of lens and industrial printing to better serve cold
analysis. With such assured conceptual obliques at his disposal
Richter’s later uptake of the vanitas genre – painting a skull and a candle – seems somewhat unecessary.
Concern with zooming in and out to emphasize concurrent oscilation
between gaining and losing human detail is another of Richter’s key
devices. In paintings and photographs of cities – including Dresden –
that suffered bombing during World War Two erasure is associated with
distance. In reflecting upon this point, and thus highlighting the –
previously – unpalatable concern for his generation’s suffering during
the period, the artist presaged W.G Sebald’s searching and important
book on the same subject – On the Natural History of Destruction – by four decades. Likewise, his Uncle Rudi
– locating a historical moral smear at the central of his own personal
life – performed the type of confessional catharsis that Gunter Grass
would later explore in Peeling the Onion – in which the author
admitted being a former member of the Hitler Jugend. Thusly, Richter’s
painted images with their blurs, and his precise reduction of peopled
cities to mere topography through aerial photography, offer a cold and
unflinching look at what was a heated but unacknowledged region of
post-war German identity; a comment on the distancing mechanisms at work
in the national psyche.
Panorama demonstrates variety and strength in depth. At no point in this
retrospective does one suspect that his Richter flits from style to
style for lack of reason or to satisfy any bogus sub-modernist desire
for novelty. The threads that run throughout the show repay sustained
attention.