A collector’s private jet would probably have been ready to transport Gerhard Richter from Cologne to New York, but in the end the doctors said “No”. Probably the most important living artist is 88 years old and not present at the opening of his triumphant exhibition in the New York Metropolitan Museum. It is said that he absolutely wanted to come, because this is once again about Richter’s life question, which he has been exploring for sixty years. For a long time, the public did not even know what this question was, because the painter had veiled it for decades. Gerhard Richter had always asked of his work that it speak for itself, that it does not require any further explanations from the sender.
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In retrospect it is for an artist who was born in 1932, who was part of the youth organization of the Hitler Youth, who fled the GDR shortly before the Wall was built and who became a global star in West German West, in Düsseldorf and Cologne – of course, for such an artist this is the question how to portray the horror that German history had to be for a member of this generation. After ending up in the midst of all the West German avant-gardists at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf in the early 1960s, Richter claimed that the choice of his subjects was random.
The Wehrmacht soldier “Uncle Rudi”? Copied from an accidentally discovered photo. The family by the sea? Anybody. The girl with the child? A “Aunt Marianne”. He could not give any further information.
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“That was the then very typical modernist apathy against biographical explanations,” says Benjamin Buchloh, who, in close collaboration with Gerhard Richter himself, is one of the curators of the exhibition. Buchloh has been friends with Richter since 1972. The two met almost 50 years ago in Düsseldorf, today Buchloh teaches art history at Harvard University. Buchloh says that he too did not notice the abysmal level of the images at the time. “Nobody asked why the picture was called ‘Tante Marianne’. The provocation of the works lay in their supposed insignificance.”
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In reality, the Wehrmacht soldier was Richter’s own uncle, the family by the sea was that of his father-in-law, the girl his aunt, the child himself, everything copied from family photos. He had asked his mother to send them to him from the GDR. The dreadful entanglement in which these photos were with each other did not come out until forty years later through the journalist Jürgen Schreiber: the man who would later become Richter’s father-in-law and who can be seen in the painting with his wife and two daughters by the sea , as a gynecologist and SS man, was jointly responsible for the euthanasia program of the Nazis during the Third Reich. His aunt Marianne, shown in the painting with Richter himself, was killed by the Nazis in 1945 because of alleged mental illness. The man who was partly responsible for this became Richter’s father-in-law a good ten years later.
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Nobody should know about the biographical and emotional
The exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum begins with these pictures from 1964 and ’65, including another picture, “Mr. Heyde”, which shows the head of the euthanasia center when he was arrested in 1959, the model for which, by the way, was a photo from SPIEGEL.
Gerhard Richter had tried to process German history in his works before 1965, but he failed. The results felt hollow and pseudo-critical. Only when he added his own biographical entanglement did Richter seem to recognize a kind of truthfulness in the pictures. But the biographical and emotional, nobody should know about it. For decades, Gerhard Richter was considered a cold artist – in reality nothing was further from the truth.
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In the last room of the exhibition, one floor below, you can see the probable end of Richter’s engagement with German history. 50 years, a whole life and an entire work lie in between. It consists of four photos, four oil paintings and four digital prints of the oil paintings and dates from 2014, when Richter was over 80 years old. He called it “Birkenau”.
Again it is the case that without this additional information the viewer would have difficulty assigning meaning to the oil paintings and their digital copies. After it was completed, Richter initially showed it in Dresden without the title and without the original photos. The photos show scenes from the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp that a prisoner was able to smuggle out. Two of the photos show burning corpses.
Even sixty years later there is no salvation
The gray and red streaks typical of Richter can be seen on the oil paintings. They arouse threatening feelings, but that’s all. Beyond that, they don’t say anything. Under the layers of oil are allegedly the sketches of the photos that Richter tried to transfer. But nothing can be seen anymore. Richter painted them all over. Apparently, even sixty years later, there is no salvation for judges.
If the pictures say something, then they speak of the fact that the Holocaust cannot be represented. And across from them hang their digital clones. So the unspeakable is not even unique anymore. It can be reproduced.
It is to the great merit of “Painting After All”, as the exhibition title says, that Gerhard Richter’s already unique work between these two poles – German history from the point of view of 1965 and German history from the point of view of 2014 – is sensibly attached: His tragic family story, the horror of German history, in the end it remains painting. Painting after all.
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