What does it mean for an artist to declare, as Gerhard Richter did in 2017, that their painterly output is “complete?” It means we can identify a beginning and an end, with an implied trajectory in between, supported by the fact that Richter subsequently numbered his catalog of paintings from 1 to 952.
This is how a vast retrospective that just opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris unfolds, with 275 pieces — spanning sculpture, drawings and paintings — across 34 rooms. The exhibition covers six decades of work by the artist who was born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, where he lived under fascism and then communism before fleeing to study art in the West, in Düsseldorf. Today, the artist’s practice is devoted to drawing, but it is his work as a painter that remains unparalleled.
In spite of the implication of orderly lineage, Richter’s work defies a straightforward sense of artistic evolution. The only constants in his oeuvre, which takes in every traditional genre — portrait, landscape, history painting, still life, abstraction — are change, relentless curiosity and, perhaps most of all, an insistent question: What is an image?
His painting “Tisch” (1962), has the daunting catalog position of painting No. 1. It introduces the trademark blur and use of found photographic imagery for which Richter is now well-known. Based on an image sourced from a 1950s edition of Domus, an Italian design magazine, the large canvas shows a modern white table in a slightly compressed picture plane, its angular legs almost floating against a plain background of dark and light grays.
The scene is, however, obscured: A roiling mass of sweeping, agitated strokes hovers over the center of the image like a cataract, or an accident, or an exasperated defacement, or all of the above.
A wall text tells us that the artist originally painted the table as it was, directly from the source image; dissatisfied, he smeared the magazine photograph with solvents and then reproduced the result, in which the table has all but disappeared. Just by looking, we would never know which came first: the table or its obliteration. Time is scrambled by a maelstrom of gray that tells us in a few fell swoops that painting, in Richter’s work, is always an intervention in reality.
More works in grisaille tones follow, based on a range of found images, including newspaper clippings, studio portraits and family photographs: a raft of American planes bombing Dresden in 1944, eight Chicago nursing students who met grisly deaths, an Uncle Rudi who was killed early in World War II, an empty wooden chair.
Richter painted these figures and objects with photorealist exactitude, only to blur them by dragging a dry broad brush across the still-wet paint on the canvas — not so much erasing as displacing what was depicted and adding another layer to the final work by emphasizing its painted surface.
“The blurring is an opportunity to express the fleetingness of our ability to perceive,” Richter said in a 1972 interview with the writer Rolf Schön. This “ability to perceive” applies to great historical moments, and also to everyday ones.
Rather than flatten the subjects of these paintings, Richter’s treatment requires that we see how history, particularly of the conflict-ridden 20th century, lives in the smallest, most incidental details. We are all part of its relentless flow and, while we may freeze this instance or that, no single image will suffice.
Richter’s encyclopedic approach is at once precise and beguiling. For the German pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale, the artist painted 48 black-and-white portraits of great men — composers, writers, scientists, philosophers. You may only recognize a few (I got six), but that’s the point: A neutral collection of faces loom, imposing an official history that is now obscure to most.
Around this time, Richter was still painting in grays, though often laid on thick. He zoomed in so close on his subjects — the moon, the Himalayas, aerial cityscapes, clouds — that the canvases verge on abstraction. He also extended his blur technique to colored landscapes that look like everywhere and nowhere.
This mode of painting continues through the 1980s, while Richter was concurrently making works about color and, sometimes, its absence. (I may not have recognized Anton Webern in “48 Portraits,” but I certainly remember Richter’s famous “Candle” from the album cover of Sonic Youth’s 1988 “Daydream Nation.”)
In “1024 Farben” — a series that continued, in various configurations, from the 1970s to the 2010s — a grid of 1,024 randomly sequenced color squares dance across the canvas in an image made of hues alone. Three works from 1972 to 1974, all titled “Gray” are just that: large canvases painted in a single tone — one matte; one stippled; one shiny, like lacquer. Gray, Richter is quoted saying in the accompanying wall text, “has the power to make ‘nothing’ visible.” These paintings we stand looking at are “pictures of nothing.”
Other times, we are looking at something that is at once represented yet not quite visible: not unseen, but perhaps unseeable. In 1988, while working on vividly hued abstractions made by blurring thickly painted surfaces with a giant squeegee, Richter returned to gray and realism to make a cycle of paintings called “October 18, 1977.” The title is the date on which four members of the far-left Baader-Meinhof terrorist group killed themselves in a south German prison, and the paintings blur and distort newspaper images from the time.
The news media printed stark images of the group’s young members when they were arrested and after they were dead, as well as the sympathizers who mourned them. Richter’s paintings are likewise startling: A woman lies dead, in triplicate, with a dark bruise visible on her neck from the electrical cord she used to hang herself. A figure hangs from a noose in a cell. Each painting is just blurred enough that, if you didn’t know what it depicted, you might not guess — but the sense of something ominous is overwhelming: Representation of some subjects must remain incomplete or implied, like a question without an answer.
Richter has said that he wanted to avoid the obvious, sensationalized images of these young people’s deaths, but found himself inexorably drawn to them.
The same is true of a series of images that form the basis for a cycle of four monumental canvases titled “Birkenau” (2014). In an essay by the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, the artist came across four photographs taken secretly by prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Richter has said that he originally intended to reproduce them on canvases, but found his strategy inadequate. So he began to cover the images with paint, using the squeegee he had employed for his abstractions to mix hues of black, white and gray, shot through with green and red.
The original images are now invisible but not diminished; they are beneath the surface, just as history undergirds the everyday. (Though not always installed this way, the original photos hang nearby at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, along with four large gray mirrors that reflect the viewer as a witness or bystander.)
Yet history is not all horror; Richter says that its flip side, joy, defines his relationship to making art. In his first cycle of paintings, “Annunciation After Titian” (1973), four canvases based on a 1535 work by the Italian Renaissance painter show the angel Gabriel coming down to Earth in a radiant beam to tell the Virgin Mary that she will give birth to the son of God: A new world beckons. Each painting in the cycle is blurred to varying degrees, so that some are just richly hued abstractions in red, gold, ocher.
The artist, the wall label says, first wanted to make a copy of the work just because he thought it was beautiful and wished to have a version for himself. Isn’t that what images are like? Richter remains one of the greatest living artists because of his devotion to the complexity of images, to always asking what we are looking at and how we might remake it, again and again.
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