Arte: This is high on the Richter scale
Gerhard Richter: Paintings From Private Collections, National Gallery Complex, Edinburgh, until 4 Jan
- guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 30 2008 00.01 GMT
What is wrong with this picture? A family in old-fashioned swimming trunks and rubber hats poses cheerfully among the waves. It looks straightforward enough. Maybe it is a little hard to tell whether the adults are parents or grandparents; there are some peculiar elisions - the man's invisible legs, the girl's right hand. Come to think of it, a lot of detail is missing. But that is only what we would expect from a painting of a photo, is it not?
That the subject is a snap and not a living scene is obvious enough, given the black-and-white paint, the rendition of contrast and glare. But there the straightforwardness ends. The waves are strangely blurred, the sky a blank and yet the man's face is heavily overworked. The painting comes and goes, inconsistent as a dream in all its phases.
And definitely not a faithful copy of a photograph in any way, as the image on this very page confirms. For when Family at the Sea is reproduced, you will note, it does not revert to a photograph.
Eerie, vast, remote; standing in front of the painting in this superbly concise retrospective, you find yourself wondering about both the picture and the artist. This is probably Gerhard Richter's most peculiar trait. For his images look so neutral - a wall of pure grey, a colour chart magnified to the size of a cathedral window - as to deflect all attention from their maker and yet they direct one straight back to his mind as with few other living painters.
Born in East Germany in 1932, crossing to the West in the 1960s, Richter began making images transcribed from photographs while producing abstract paintings at the same time. No fixed style, no observational truth, no expressive gesture; this has been his creed through an astonishingly varied career. Not that anyone could mistake a Richter, especially not his distinctively blurred photo-paintings: distanced, ungraspable, even somewhat tremulous at times, challenging the viewer to discern what, if anything, is true or even knowable about a realistic painting.
Because Richter is so technically versatile - a man of many hands, you might say - as well as monastically reclusive, his art has always seemed to arrive out of mystery. Every painting trails its own question: what did Richter think about the Baader Meinhof gang when he painted the famous images of Gudrun Ensslin hanging from the bars of her prison cell? Why did he paint his Uncle Rudi grinning proudly in a Nazi uniform? Are his paintings of candles - too soft to be photographs, too luminous to be paintings - meant as votive icons or memento mori? Or just beautiful kitsch? What can painting actually do?
This show offers an unusual perspective on Gerhard Richter because the works are all borrowed from private collections. Since people have actually chosen to live with them, these paintings tend to be richer and warmer than the more austere Richters favoured by institutions and they even include a rarely shown early work that amounts to a kind of giveaway.
For nobody looking at Party, based upon a magazine spread of a Sixties crooner surrounded by adoring dollybirds, could really be in much doubt about Richter's attitudes to this scene given that the canvas is gashed, torn and nailed, blood-red paint dripping from the singer's mouth straight into his cocktail. What a violent and sardonic picture it is, guying the stage-management of such paparazzi snaps while rejecting the postwar economic miracle that the image is meant to represent.
Uncharacteristic as it is, Party sets the tone for the whole exhibition and not just because Richter never takes any image lightly. It is more that the work, made in 1963, already shows his acute sense of a painting as both an object and an image, a thing in the world that is supposed to represent that world, yet with such a queer disparity between them.
Some people find nothing but glum and irritating enigmas in Richter's art, but this survey shows him at his most feelingful and, quite possibly, at his most accessible. The artist once said that all paintings are analogies, not just representations, and the wisdom of this truth is made beautifully apparent.
Take Mirror, a radiant sweep of grey that contains strange lights and halations. It reflects nothing back: the quintessential mirror at rest. Or Forest, a frightening mass of blacks and greys that seems to get deeper and more complex as you look, indecipherable as the natural phenomenon.
What can painting achieve remains an evergreen question, especially in the photographic age, and Richter frames it in so many ways.
How far can abstraction get from figuration? No distance, as the lushly squeezed ocean-green waves in Abstraction (Sea) declare, as much as the title itself. How still and flat can a painting be? Hardly at all, as the deadpan rectangles in his colour charts prove, glowing and setting off internal undulations completely without the intervention of the artist (their configurations determined by computer).
How far can an image defy objective analysis? Almost completely is the answer suggested by one of the most captivating works in the show. A wintry landscape wavers through layers of paint like a memory that is already waning, despite the dark branches and the fence that seem to peg the image to the canvas. Look hard and you may see some sort of building through the haze; look again and it has gone. The painting performs its equivalent of a mysterious white-out.
Forests, mountains, snowbound valleys, fairy-tale castles and shuttered suburbs, the autobahn, the postwar miracle: German history runs through all 40 years of Richter's art. Even the smiling girl in Family at the Sea turns out to be a relative gassed by the Nazis. Never believe that Richter's images are chosen at random, nor that his neutrality signifies indifference. He might work from others' photographs, and maintain a scrupulous distance from his sources, but there is grandeur in his solemnity. Over the years, Richter's careful, equivocal restraint has become a point of principle, as well as a deep visual trait: the medium as moral expression.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/nov/30/gerhard-richter-national-gallery
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