richter polke catalog

7/25/2019 Richter Polke Catalog

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polke/richterrichter/polke


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Essays byRobert BrownFaith ChisholmDietmar Elger

Jill LloydAxel Hinrich Murken

and Crista Murken-AltroggeKenny Schachter

polke/richterrichter/polke


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Published in Great Britain

by Christies International

Media DivisionJubilee House,

213 Oxford Street

London, W1D 2LG

This catalogue was

published on the occasion

of the exhibition

polke/richter

richter/polke

Curated by

Darren Leak and

Kenny Schachter

Christies Mayfair, London

103 New Bond Street

London, W1S 1ST

25thApril 7thJuly 2014

Enquiries:

Darren Leak

[email protected]

T +44 (0)207 389 2025

Jacob Uecker

[email protected]

T +44 (0)207 389 2400

Design by

Micha Weidmann Studio

Christies photography by

Steve Ward

Cover: Sigmar Polke

and Gerhard Richter at

galerie h, Hanover, 1966

Courtesy Gerhard Richter

Archive

Gerhard Richter, 2014

Foreword

Francis Outred

Bed, Bath & Beyond

Kenny Schachter

galerie h

Dietmar Elger

galerie h 1966 polke/richter

catalogue text

Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter

Reflections on Gerhard Richters

Paintings of Human Subjects

Axel Hinrich Murken and

Crista Murken-Altrogge

Richter/Polke:

Nihilism and Alchemy

Faith Chisholm

Gerhard Richter:

Photorealist and Abstract Painting

Jill Lloyd

Kunst Macht Frei

The Art of Sigmar Polke

Robert Brown

Exhibited Works

7

13

17

29

59

71

99

135

167


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We cannot depend on good paintings being

made one day: we need to take the matter into

our own hands!

If someone wants to become a painter, he

needs to consider first whether he wouldnt

be better suited to some other activity: teacher,

minister, professor, manual worker, assembly

line, because only truly great people can paint!

( Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, catalogue textfor polke/richter, 1966 )

The names Polke and Richter, like Picasso andMatisse or Freud and Bacon, are so regularly linkedthroughout art folklore that it is incredible to thinkthat they have not had a two-man show since their1966 exhibition at galerie h in Hanover. Unlike theseother celebrated pairs, Richter and Polke were thebest of friends from the start, forming an instantbond when they met in Karl Otto Gtzs class atthe Dsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1962. They wereborn within seven years of each other (1934 and1941 respectively ) in East Germany as the Naziregime overtook first Germany and then wagedwar in Europe. Polke fled to the West and settledin Dsseldorf in 1953, while Richter did the samein 1961. Growing up in a time of extreme social andcultural disruption, when daily reality was filled withhorror, and developing as artists in a period whenthis reality was being rejected in favour of totalabstraction in the 1950s, the pair came together ata kind of Ground Zero in post-war art history. At thispoint, the movements of pure abstraction in Americaand Europe had virtually run their respective coursesand the obituaries for painting were being written.

However these artists chose this moment to begina complete and utter deconstruction of painting,to strip it back to its bare bones and rebuild whatcould be conceived as the possibilities in painting.From this moment on, both embarked on painterlyprojects which not only completely revived the ideaof painting in the post-modern period but injectedenergy, surprise, enjoyment and intellect into theagenda painting became exciting again. They tookall pre-existing styles in painting and threw them intothe mixer, creating magical works which have becomemore and more influential to the point where it is hardto think of any painter emerging today who cannotcount one of them as a direct influence. Although theirfriendship waned towards the end of the 1960s, theirart would continue to respond to each others overthe next 50 years until Polkes sad passing in 2010.

For me, the annus mirabilis for these artistswas between 1994 and 1995, the year of Richterslandmark retrospective in Bonn and Polkesretrospective at Tate Liverpool. As an art student atthe time, I travelled to see both of these revelatoryshows: to encounter two such rich evocations ofthese artists work in a single year was inspirationaland opened my eyes and mind to myriad new ideasabout the power of painting. Although both artistsstarted from similar foundations of thought, thepursuits of their projects could not have been moredifferent. Along the way a few similarities arise interms of the imagery used: their pursuit of black-and-white in the 1960s for example, whether it bein the Rasterbilder of Polke or the photo-paintingsof Richter, or their gradual merging of figurationand abstraction in the 1980s. It is, however, theirdivergent approach to a similar philosophy over a


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fifty year period that makes the prospect of bringingthem together for this rare exhibition so special.Richter has been the meticulous architect of his owncareer, remaining in virtually the same environmentin Cologne over the entire period, categorising eachpainting and painstakingly cataloguing every workhe makes in his exhaustive catalogue raisonn.Polke, on the other hand, pursued a purposefullyanarchic approach to picture-making, travelling allover the world, getting lost in the 1970s in So Paulo,Afghanistan and Pakistan, using a wide varietyof media alongside paint, such as photography,sculpture and film-making. He has also experimentedwith multifarious materials in his work, from thefabrics on which he paints, to the use of a varietyof chemicals and even uranium as he has pursuedan alchemists approach to the investigation of thenature of paint. Like a chess player, Richter hasalways thought six moves ahead of his next paintingas he mapped out his course, while Polke haspursued his own impulsive and maverick coursepeppered with moments of genius.

The photograph from 1965 of the Richter andPolke families having breakfast together providesan insight into their relationship at the time, bothdressed in a similar suit and tie. Polke already hadtwo children and above the table are two paintingsby Richter and one by Polke. The tongue-in-cheek nature of Polkes Wurstpainting contrastsdirectly with the apparent seriousness of OnkelRudi, Richters painting which would go on to beincluded in the 1966polke/richterexhibition, andwas the only one of Richters paintings includedin their collaborative artists book that served asthe catalogue for the show. Also included in the

exhibition was Richters painting of Sigmar Polkesfamily with him as a child Mann mit zwei Kindernmade from a photograph given to him by Polke.The catalogue for our exhibition has been conceivedas an homage to this original artists book, whichwas smaller in proportions. We have also sourcedtwo paintings from the original exhibition, FlmischeKroneby Richter and Bavarianby Polke. We wouldparticularly like to thank the anonymous lendersof these two works, alongside the many otheranonymous lenders to this exhibition who havehelped to make it so comprehensive.

Taking these two works from the 1966 exhibitionas a starting point, this show charts an almostchronological path for both artists over the past fivedecades. It aims to present juxtapositions betweenRichter and Polke that we hope will stimulate thoughton how these two artists continuously reinventedpainting, incorporating new techniques and mediainto the art form and most importantly usingit as a medium for exploring their philosophicalideas about the role of painting in the post-modernperiod. Aside from the astounding selection of earlywork, where we see Richters black and white blurcast against Polkes dots, I am particularly lookingforward to seeing the installation of the room ofRichters 1980s landscapes and bringing togethera group of PolkesLaterna Magica from the sameperiod. Richters landscapes present the mundanenature of suburban landscape, however his defthandling of the photo-real approach and subtle shiftof light and tone elevate these views to a magicalstate of almost dream-like being. On the other hand,Polkes Laterna Magica, executed on clear resin thatmakes them double sided, create a kind of child-

Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter,at Gerhard Richters house, 1965Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive


Catalogue cover: galerie h, Hanover, 1966Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive

Gerhard Richter, 2014 The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne,

DACS 2014.


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like wonder. Endlessly mysterious, his attempt tocompose multiple layers of imagery through a thintransparent veil invites us to dream in a different way.

We are fortunate that this exhibition has benefittedfrom the collaboration of so many talented individuals.I would like to thank Kenny Schachter, the co-curatorof this show with Christies Darren Leak, for bringingthis project to our attention and for his unwaveringenthusiasm and commitment, as can be seen in hisengaging introduction to this catalogue. He hasbrought an American viewpoint to this show,reminding us of connections to Robert Rauschenbergand Jasper Johns in his text and providing a differentcultural perspective on the work.

I would also like to thank Darren Leak for curatingthis exhibition with an unwavering eye, and also JacobUecker for cataloguing the work and assisting DarrenLeak on every aspect of organizing this show.

We would also like to thank Micha Weidmann forhis beautiful catalogue design and Jill Lloyd, RobertBrown and Faith Chisholm, for their illuminatingcatalogue texts exploring the art and ideas of thesetwo protean painters. Dr. Dr. Murken, a medicalprofessor and art historian and his wife Dr. CristaMurken-Altrogge, also an art historian, have allowedus to re-publish their text on Gerhard Richter. I wouldalso like to thank the poet and writer Michael Hoffmanfor his translations of the German texts.

Dr. Dietmar Elger, the Head of the Richter Archive,generously contributed his catalogue essaydocumenting the original 1966 galerie h exhibitionand the artists book created by Richter and Polke.This essay comes from his catalogue for an exhibitioncurrently on show by the Gerhard Richter Archive,at the Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden, on the

creation of the original artists book from the 1966exhibition. We would also like to, of course, thankGerhard Richter for his inspiring artistic vision butalso for invaluable assistance in the catalogue withKonstanze Ell from the Atelier Richter. Of course, it isextremely sad that Sigmar Polke is no longer with us,but hopefully his spirit lives strongly in this show andit offers an interesting counterpoint to his concurrentretrospective exhibition at Museum of Modern Art inNew York. We would like to thank Michael Trier andhis colleagues at the Estate of Sigmar Polke for theirassistance with the catalogue and shining a new lighton various works in the show.

We hope you enjoy the exhibition.

Francis OutredHead of Post-War and Contemporary Art,

Europe, Christies

Installation view:Illustrating Mann mit Zwei Kindern

( Man with Two Children ), galerie h, Hanover, 1966Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive



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I remember how close this friendship was,

but also how tough it sometimes was. I didnt

realize it at the time. For us it was just the

natural way of dealing with each other. In

retrospect, Im amazed it was so brutal. All of

us were very unsure of ourselves, and each

tried to cover this up in his own way. I can only

say that thats the way it was. Polke drifted

away into the psychedelic direction and I into

the classical

G. Richter quoted in D. Elger ( trans. E. M. Solaro ),

Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009,

pp.1034.

Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were close in

the early stages of their careers, in the late 1960s.

Jesting photographs show them in bed and in the

bath together. They collaborated on texts, like Polkes

invented interview of Richter in 1964 ( Interview

with John Anthony Thwaites and Sigmar Polke );

exhibitions, such aspolke/richter, 1966, at galerie h

in Hanover; and prints, like Hotel Diana(1967 ) and

Transformation (1968 ). Their paths, both personally

and professionally, diverged, and by the time they

hit their respective strides, they could not have been

more dissimilar in their approach to art-making. They

are responsible for some of the most extraordinary and

covetable artworks ever created.

Although they drifted apart, their early relationship

is significant, and established the basis for a kind of

artistic rivalry that would last until Polkes death in

2010. ( They were less friendly, over the years, than

Matisse and Picasso, but equally as mindful of what

the other was up to.)

The catalogue for the 1966 exhibition in Hanover,

Richters first artist book, was the first and, to date, only

one among hundreds he went on to do that he would

ever collaborate on with another artist. The present

exhibition is the first time in nearly fifty years that the

two artists works have been displayed side by side.

What is revealed in the juxtaposition is a

conversation across disciplines. As their shared

enthusiasms gave way to guarded reticence and

competition, Polke bungee-jumped into a series of

chemical and material accidents. Richter, meanwhile,

seemed to adhere to a rigidly internalised set

of formal rules, even in his missteps. He further

cultivated his interest in realism and its distortions,

on the one hand, and paint-intensive abstraction, on

the other. Polke conducted prolonged experiments

in unpronounceable toxics, incorporating both

representation and abstraction; he cut, pasted and

poured his way into history. Within single frames, both

artists could tell stories as spellbinding as Vertigo, as

enticing as Death in Venice.

In America, they had their analogue in Jasper Johns

and Robert Rauschenberg. Johns, like Richter, became

ever more hermetic in his mapping of t he psyche,

employing flagstones, crosshatches and other formal

means. Rauschenbergs work, like Polkes, seemed

to thrive on chaos and uncertainty. In many ways, the

two artists complement one another. Richters sombre,

unsettling quasi-narratives and colour cerebrations are

offset by Polkes snide obnoxiousness and sly humour,

evident even ( and perhaps especially ) in the s accharine

hues of his disturbingly explicit erotic works from the

early 70s.

Polke relished the unforeseen; Richter, aside from

in his abstractions ( which are deliberate in their own


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The earliest hint of the exhibition of the two youngDsseldorf artists Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richterat the galerie h, which August Haseke was to openin Hanover in November of that year, is contained ina letter that Richter wrote to his gallerist Ren Blockon 6 August 1965: Yesterday Haseke was round( new gallery in Hanover ). Is thinking of putting us onon December 3, but isnt sure yet.1On 17 August, heinformed Heiner Friedrich of the planned exhibition,at the same time calming the anxieties of his Munichgallerist by stressing that it wouldnt present anycommercial competition: It looks as though I mayput on a demonstration exhibition in Hanover ( GalleryHaseke, to open in December ), with Polke andprobably Lueg as well. Thats if the Tartaruga plandoesnt come off, as I fear it might not. There wouldntbe much prospect of sales, the gallery is prettyinsignificant. Itd be a matter of putting on a show,and a piece of paper with pictures and text.2

The young art students Richter, Polke, KonradLueg and Manfred Kuttner met in February 1962at the annual atelier tour at the KunstakademieDsseldorf. The following semester they were allenrolled in the class of the Informel painter Karl OttoGtz, who had taught Kuttner since 1960. Richterhad studied with Ferdinand Macketanz in his firstsemester; Lueg switched to Gtz from Bruno Goller,and Polke from Gerhard Hoehmes class ( to which hereturned for the summer of 1963 ). During their yearwith Gtz, the four painters found themselves brieflyunited under the rubric of Capitalist Realism. At thattime, exchange with friends was particularly importantfor Richter: Contact with like-minded painters I need to be in a group, you get nowhere on yourown. We partly developed our ideas through talking.

Being stuck out in a village somewhere would bea nightmare for me. I need my setting. In that way,exchanges with other artists, and specificallyworking with Lueg and Polke, is important for me,and gives me some of the information I need. 3Butit was Gerhard Richter who was always careful toavoid all appearance of a defined group of artists.In a letter to Heiner Friedrich of January 1965, hecomplained at being thought of as a kind of secondZEROgroup. 4 The exhibition they put on together inMay 1963 in Kaiserstrasse in Dsseldorf remainedthe only time the four artists shared a common cause.There were the rare moments where we would dosomething together, and made a kind of emergencyunion, Richter recalled in 1993, apart from that wewere mostly in competition with each other.5Andso Manfred Kuttner was still a part of things whenthey presented themselves in an improvised frontyard exhibition at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertalin February 1964, six months later; by the time of theactual exhibition, he was no longer in the group. Andat the Living with Popshow in Berges furniture store,Lueg and Richter excluded their fellow student Polke.

What Haseke had in mind was a joint show withPolke and Richter, followed by individual shows fromall three of the Dsseldorf artists. Then, on 18 August,Polke was forced to admit he didnt have enoughmaterial: I hope it doesnt throw your plans out toomuch if I tell you Im in no position to mount a soloshow in December, I dont have enough pictures.But perhaps I can make the following suggestion:a joint show in December, with Richter, as planned,or else put off my solo exhibition to some futuredate. I would do everything in my power to see I hadenough pictures for it.6In the end, the joint exhibition


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Installation view: galerie h, Hanover, 1966Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive


Installation view:Gerhard Richter at galerie h, Hanover, 1966

Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive Gerhard Richter, 2014

1918

of Polke and Richter took place in March 1966.A solo show by Lueg followed in June7.

August Haseke had himself studied at theKunstakademie Dsseldorf from 1954 to 1959, fora time alongside Konrad Lueg, who had introduced

him to his friends Polke and Richter. On graduation,Haseke had moved to Hanover to take up a teaching

job. On 19 November 1965 he opened his gallery onAlleestrasse 14, with an exhibition by the Dsseldorfpainter Gotthard Graubner. There followed showsby Siegfried Neuenhausen and Raimund Girke, bothex-Dsseldorf students as well, but living in Hanover.By favourable circumstances his father-in-lawowned a printing firm the gallerist was able to offerall his painters a small catalogue. The joint exhibitionof Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, from 1 to 26March 1966 was only the fourth in the history of theyoung gallery.

In his letter to Heiner Friedrich, Richter had alreadydrawn explicit attention to the experimental natureof the exhibition, and so made clear that he had nohopes of commercial success with the presentationin the gallery. People like Haseke, he recalled later,they had a job and ran the gallery on the side; itwas for love of art, and the social engagement. Thecommercial aspect didnt matter so much to them.8Richter assembled all four artists for a demonstrationexhibition as early as April 1963; the show ran from11 to 26 May in some former commercial premiseson Kaiserstrasse 31 A in Dsseldorf. In a letter to theNeue Deutsche Wochenschauhe stressed the non-commercial nature of the show, which, consideringthe unartistic venue, was almost a given: There canbe no question of a gallery or museum or exhibitionspace for this exhibition, which is to be entirely

uncommercial.9A few months later, in October 1963,Richter and Lueg put on an exhibition for CapitalistRealism in Berges furniture shop under the titleLiving with Pop, in which they presented piecesof furniture and themselves as living sculptures onwhite pedestals.

What chiefly appealed to him and Polke aboutHanover ( more than a commercial exhibition ) issuggested in a letter from Richter to Friedrich inAugust 1965, when he refers to a piece of paperwith pictures and text10, because that was exactlywhat their joint catalogue was to be. AlthoughRichter at this time could only point to a small foldout catalogue from his show at Ren Block in 1964 and Polke had nothing at all they decided againsta conventional documentary style of catalogue andin favour of something they would design themselves,an artists book. Both were subsequently to attachhuge importance to this catalogue, and even list it intheir bibliographies.11

The foregoing and now in its entirety first-publishedmanuscript edition of the 20-page catalogue clearlydemonstrates the collage nature of the work, with itsarray of sources. Polke and Richter assembled theirpictorial and textual content from staged photographs,original formulations, and found texts in pulp fiction.Above all, they drew on the science fiction seriesPerry Rhodanand the issue of 6 August 1965, entitledAndromedas Guardian. Wed been reading thestuff, and it seemed to fit in with the utopian climateof the 60s, those notions of other planets. The artlessquality of those mags seemed to go really well withphotographs and magazines, and that gave us ourpop content12, Richter said of their weakness for pulpwriting in a 1993 interview.


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Exhibition poster: galerie h, Hanover, 1966Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive


DACS 2014.

2120

The catalogue presents itself with a double titleon front and back of the red cover, that reads now

polke/ richterand now richter/ polke. The unusualopening does more than prepare the reader forthe unconventional contents. Richter advancesanother, pragmatic justification for the twofold title:Alphabetically, I come second, but I did more ofthe work, and thats maybe why I suggested it. Butprobably the real reason why it came out like thatwas just to make the catalogue look more unusual.13When the reader opens the catalogue at bothends, his eyes are greeted by two short biographieswith lists of exhibitions, and the black and whitereproduction of a work in the show. With Polke, it isthe large-format raster-dot painting Bedroomfrom1965, and with Richter his also recently finished painting Uncle Rudi. Not for the first time, Richtergives his place of birth as Waltersdorf, though in facthe only moved there at the age of 11 in 1943. Lateron, he justified the false information by claiming thatthe name sounded more interesting and mysteriousthan the place he was actually born, namely Dresden.14

Gerhard Richter had worked with readymade textsbefore. On the occasion of his very first opening inautumn 1962 ( a joint exhibition with Manfred Kuttnerin the Galerie Junge Kunst in Fulda ), he played a tapeof himself reading the beginning of the story of TheEmperors New Clothes, with a surprise twist lateron.15At the private view of his first solo show at RenBlock in Berlin on 21 November 1964 ( when Richterwas not able to be there ) the visitors were alsotreated to his taped readings. Half a year later, Blocksuggested a larger publication, juxtaposing Richterspictures with banal texts.16On 20 June 1965, Richterput forward various ways of sourcing such texts,

including the following: pick a 70 pfennig true crimemag, which is reprinted in full, interspersed with thepictures. Any cuts to be made by me ( question ofspace, evidently ). Then the Krimiwould become mywork.17By the time Block was forced to cancel thepublication in November18, Richter and Polke werealready hard at work on their text-picture montagefor the Haseke catalogue. Many years later, Richterrecalled the collaboration with Polke in conversationwith Hans-Ulrich Obrist: We met up, and had awonderful time. We were cutting and pasting, andlaughing ourselves silly the whole time. We took a lotof pleasure in the provocation. Everybody else wasdoing serious catalogues, and we were taking the

mickey.19And Richter said elsewhere: At the time wewere working on the texts, I was as close with Polkeas Id ever been with anyone.20

While the printed catalogue masks all traces ofthe collating, smoothing over the different sources,they are clearly visible in the manuscript edition. In aformat of 40 27 cm, the manuscript is almost twicethe size of the printed version. In January 1966, Polkeexplains this in a letter to Haseke in terms of thesize of typewriter lettering: We had to make it [thecatalogue] that big, because typewriter letters are somuch bigger than type.21Polke and Richter preparedtheir montage for typesetting with great precision.With the readymade texts, they counted the numberof characters per line, and noted the lines per column.The passages they copied out on typewriter followedthe line-length of the readymade text. Their originalcontributions are clearly distinguished because Polkeused a lighter shade of paper. Richter also copied outseveral extended passages of text on his typewriter.Via coloured marks in the margins, these quotations

( marked in green ) can easily be distinguished fromtext originally by, or in some cases adapted by, theartists ( which are marked in r ed ). The illustrationswere stuck down by the artists in the places theywould occupy in the catalogue, and their dimensionsmarked for the printer.

The textual collage begins with a few remarks byRichter about the sizes of his paintings; it is followedby a childhood memory of his sister, and then switchesto a short story, in which Richter takes a found text,changing a phrase here and there. There follows along extract from the Perry Rhodan adventureAndromedas Guardian which goes into a text byPolke, on the subject of his raster-dots: Believe it ornot, I see the world in dots. In some parts of the cata-logue, because of the refusal to separate or attributethe sources, passages from Perry Rhodan, othermagazine fiction, jokes and personal information fromthe artists flow seemingly indistinguishably into oneanother. Most strikingly, this happens when Polke andRichter inject themselves into the Perry Rhodan ad-ventures. Then all at once, one reads: Perry Rhodan,Polke and Captain Richter strode through the spacethat was left by the two lines of Epsalic commandos.1

The catalogue is also the source of some of thebest known statements of both artists. Richtersclaim that painting is a moral act is still often quotedtoday, and stands like a motto at the head of hisoeuvre. Polkes statement, We cannot depend ongood paintings being made one day: we need to takethe matter into our own hands! is printed in splendidisolation on the catalogue cover for his 1984retrospective in Zurich.

The collage text is accompanied by elevenphotographs, in which the two artists are shown


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Exhibition poster: galerie h, Hanover, 1966Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive


DACS 2014.

22 2322

in various stunts and poses. More than fortyphotographs were taken for the project; the negativesare in Richters photographic archive.22The unusedpictures show alternative or corresponding situations.Thus the large-format group portrait of the Polke and

Richter families is supplemented by shots of them atthe tea-table. Polkes ironic pose with the seductiveball-thrower on Graf-Adolf-Platz has its pendantwith Richter in the f. The used photographs can beput in three groups: portrayals of apetit bourgeoisfamily idyll; shots of the two painters, apparentlyfeaturing in a detective story of some kind; andprovocative stunts in front of the camera. Larkingaround, was Richters subsequent comment onpictures like the one of him naked, in a lambskin.As had been his plan for the book project with RenBlock, pictures and text are juxtaposed in absoluteirrelation. At the time he asked Block in a letter of 4May 1965: Should you and the publisher go aheadwithout me, Id like to ask you to select and arrangethe texts in such a way that theres no relation at anypoint. Do you understand I want them neither tofit in with the pictures nor be in opposition to them. 23In the galerie h catalogue it was only the portrait ofthe two artists families standing outside Richterscouncil house on Bensberger Weg 10 that wouldcounter the fantastic interstellar adventures of PerryRhodan and Co.

Their artist statements, the found texts and thecontrived photographs form three separate butintertwined narrative strands that give meaning tothe work, such as the texts by themselves do nothave, and the pictures alone do not show. Polkesand Richters adaptations of other originals and theintegration of these into artistic montages of text

Installation view: galerie h, 1966Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive


and image parallels the use of media images in theirart. Nonetheless, the artists lay claim to the othertexts as their own. Then the krimiwould becomemy work, Richter had said at the time of the never-realised project with Ren Block, claiming authorshipof quoted material for himself.

On 18 January 1966, Sigmar Polke sent thecompleted dummy to August Haseke in Hanover.The artists had worked on the project together rightto the very end; page 17 of the manuscript namesJanuary (I/ 66 ) as the date of completion incontrast to the October 1965 that appears in thetext. In his accompanying letter Polke writes ironicallyabout it, but he is clearly proud as well: Here isthe design for our catalogue. We think its verysuccessful, and will certainly gain a lot of attentionof all sorts ( I reckon its the best catalogue thats everbeen made till today, anyway )24

At the exhibition opening on 1 March 1966,August Haseke read from the catalogue. Richtershowed thirteen pictures in all, among them The Tiger

( No. 78 ), Uncle Rudi( No. 85 ) and The Swimmers( No. 90 ), which at DM 2400 was the most expensivepicture in the exhibition. Polke had in addition toThe Bedroomin the catalogue other large formatcanvases, including Bavarian, Dublinand Family I.Polkes exclusive concentration on his raster-dotpaintings, and Richter on his grey photographpainting bore out the demonstrative character of theexhibition: both artists presented techniques andsubjects that had their orientation towards anobjectified and mechanically-reproduced mediaworld. While Polkes raster-dots imitated cheap offsetprinting, Richter went for photographic qualities:the documentary black and white, the amateurish


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small Curtain (4815 ) for DM 180, and he boughtfor himself Richters Chair in Profile ( 98 ), which waslisted at DM 800. The reviews ( three in total ) wereall favourable, with the conversion of photographicsubjects the focus of attention.29All painters shouldpaint from photographs30was the title of RudolfJdes review in the Hanoversche Rundschau, and hequoted a short extract from the textual collage withoutreferring to the catalogue. The other two reviewsmade no mention of the publication that had beenso important to Polke and Richter.

Dietmar Elger,Head of the Richter Archive

Translated by Michael Hofmann

out-of-focus and the refusal of artistic composition.He made photographs by other means, not paintingswith the quality of photographs,25Richter said in a1972 interview on the translation of photographyinto painting in his work. Polkes coarse dots and

Richters softening and blurring of contours produceda continual indecisiveness and ambivalence.

In one of his rare interviews in May 1966 Polkeexplained his interest in raster-dots as a pictorialdevice: I like the impersonality, the neutrality,the industrial quality. Raster dots are a system,a principle, a method, a structure. It breaks up,scatters, organizes and equalizes. Then I like the waythe enlargement of the image creates a commotionin the dots, a quick change between identifyingthe image and not being able to identify it, theindecisiveness and ambivalence of the situation its openness. I like it because I think it correspondsto me.26Richter then had more time for some ofPolkes other work, and as he confessed in a letter tohis gallerist Heiner Friedrich on 17 December 1964:Polke: I think hes very gifted, much more than Lueg.But I think his Polke dot paintings are awful, hehas picked up my difficulty with transcribing images,enlarges photographs one dot at a time ( a processI like very much on account of its absurd dull-wittedness ), but the outcome is decoration and arts-and-crafts. His varnish paintings, on the other hand,which he is carrying on with, I think are excellent,artistic and original.27Since then, he has revised hispremature judgment on Polkes raster-dot paintings,and sees their painterly qualities.

Two days after the opening, Richter wrote toFriedrich: Hanover was great. The show looksterrific. No sales.28Later on, Haseke would sell the

Opposite:Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter

at galerie h, Hanover, 1966Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive



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Text originally published in the exhibition

catalogue, for the exhibition polke/richter

at the galerie h in 1966.

A lot of my pictures are 150 200 cm, a lot are130 150 cm, or 130 140 or 120 cm, some aremuch sma ller, maybe 40 30 cm, or even 18 24 cm;to date my biggest pictures are 200 190 cm MaybeIll only paint little pictures in future, or only middle-sized ones and a few big ones, I cant say.

A childhood memory: I let my little sister toboggandown the hill, without thinking that she was bound tocrash into an iron railing at the bottom. The result wasa deep wound on her forehead; it required stitches,and I got a beating.

Carlton watched the front gardens, the birds andthe women, and then it suddenly dawned on him he knew he would never be able to copy all that. Heasked me for a cigarette, and took his leave.

Amidst the roaring of the unleashed nuclearthrusters, the massive space globe lifted off the greysurface of Sexta. The blinding bursts of energyspewed out by its goal-sized engine-maws were likelittle suns, and glowing waves of debris raced acrossthe plain ahead of the radiating roll of fire. The men atHQ didnt feel much of it. A few of them glanced attheir dead screens; the rest of them were inured tothe spectacle.

Perry Rhodan sat in the command position fromwhich he could survey the whole control centre, andwhose curiously-shaped desk had its own intercomand telecom connections. His wife Mory had satdown on one of the surrounding chairs, as hadMelbar Kasom though he r equired a special seat and Atlan. Guckys hammock was empty.

The beavermouse wasnt around probablyscurrying around the spaceship somewhere.

Rhodan managed to give his wife a curt nodas they took off. During the mission, they would becomrades, no more no less, comrades in a fightwhose end might be found somewhere in eternity.Their emotions had to take second place to theirresponsibility for mankinds space-empire.

The Halutians broad mouth split into a grin.His large red eyes sparkled. His nodding seemedalmost human. Could have been worse, he saidcalmly. The biggest mistake was mine. I shouldhave given the storage sector of my plan brain myknowledge of spores Believe it or not, I see theworld in dots.

I love dots. I am married to many dots. I supporthappiness for dots.

The dots are my brothers. ( I am a dot as well.)We used to play together, today we have gone ourseparate ways. We meet at family occasions andask each other: hows it going?

You know, Elly, he said perfectly calmly, weare only allowed to love things that have no style,e.g. dictionaries, photographs, nature, me and mypictures! I sighed: How right you are. Style is anact of violence, and we are not violent, and and we dont want war, he ended for me, nomore wars! When I met the love of my life, I wasso much in love with her that I would have marriedher on the spot. But there was something we had incommon as well as our great love: looking after ourrelations. She had lost her father early on, and waslooking after her mother and sisters. I was lookingafter both my parents. So we were in the same boat.The time flew by, and we were terribly happy.


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Its good that they report on it. Although theyshould point out that what is at stake here areindividual destinies.

I want to be like everyone else, think whateveryone else thinks, do what gets done anyway.

The heavy armoured bulkhead of the airlock slidalmost inaudibly into the hulls of the vessel. PerryRhodan, Polke and Captain Richter strode throughthe space that was left by the two lines of Epsaliccommandos. Rhodan stopped at the opening ofthe airlock.

Whos in charge here? One of the by humanstandards extraordinarily well-built Epsalsstepped forward.

Lieutenant Afg Moro, sir!I need one of your men!Sir, INot you. You stay here and await further

instructions!Lieutenant Moro spun round. Sergeant Man

Hatra, escort the Senior Administrator!One of the Epsals, 1.60 meters tall but almost as

wide, stomped up with echoing strides and stoppedin front of Perry Rhodan. He wore the standarduniform, but was carrying an unusually heavydisintegrator as well as an impulse blaster; anearthling would have needed both hands to carry it.The Epsal had it in a special holster, while the equallyheavy disintegrator was stuck casually in his armpit.

I have a great deal of time on my hands becauseI am alone. My husband died two years ago, and mytwo sons are both married. My life revolved aroundthose three men. When there were still the four of us,life was full and beautiful. What would become of mewithout values I can live my life by today? As before,

duty stands at the pinnacle. I have widened thesphere of my duties a little, to take in others. Classicalmusic which used to connect me and my husbandinternally now hurts me to listen to, but I find Icannot do without it, it is life itself to me. Good books,nature, and not least visits with my beloved childrenand my adorable grandchildren are a cornerstoneof my existence. Following lively and stimulatingpastimes, I like to meditate. I sit very still and relivethe wonderful times I had with my husband and sons.Even a 61-year-old woman can be life-affirming.

We cannot depend on good paintings beingmade one day: we need to take the matter into ourown hands!

Nonsense! chipped in his logic sector. Tolotis in the same fix as we are. If he ever wants to getout of here alive, he will have to support us. Atlanset his shoulder to the wheel.

We need to act, he said resolutely. He couldhear Henderson breathe a deep sigh of r elief. A smilecreased his face.

In all my life I have never snored, no matter whatthe tape machine claims. I know that good paintersdont snore.

My intelligence has no limits. Presumably theexcitement was still upon him. It was it wasterrible! Sherriff Beatty had to sit down. Do youmean to say the driver of the car turned and wilfullyran over the girl a second time? Smiles nodded.Thats exactly what happened. Beatty lit a cigarette.And why has it taken you till now to come forward,Mr Smiles? Why didnt you tell us what you sawstraight away?

Smiles gave a nervous laugh.I would like to have a lot of children, I would like


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to walk down the street, and have all the childrencall out Daddy, and I would lay my hand on the headof one and say, whats your name, how old are you,be a good boy, say hello to your mother.

My wife is 4 cm shorter than me, but since I walkwith a stoop, it looks as though I am only 1.68 cmas well. My mother-in-law is very small.

The aspect of the yellow-grey sandy slopes andthe jagged mountain peaks filled Perry with dismay.Without having to take recourse to scientific analysishe understood that such a world could not havecome about by natural means. Someone must havebuilt it. He had kitted it out with a sun, and gravity,and a breath-taking atmosphere. Why that wasneither here nor there. The oppressive part of thiswas the notion that men would have to put in anothercouple of millennia on earth before reaching the statewhere they were able to construct a planet.

Today he has many friends. They want to give thisintelligent man a job in the pharmaceutical industry,

just as soon as his English gets a little better. A majorpublisher is interested in his memoirs.

In wild despair, the Nomad Scout leaped up andhurled himself against the locked airlock of the craft.He rebounded, returned to his senses. The alienguard was still watching him. Crash-Ovaron wasstaring at him. What a creature! He supposed hecould take on the best hunters in the city.

The alien made a move. He pointed in thedirection of the city. It was a threatening gesture,all right. It commanded Crash-Ovaron to withdraw.

I need the craft, said Crash-Ovaron distinctly, butat the same moment he understood that his wordswere but unintelligible sounds for the guard.

The guards arm pointed implacably in the

direction of the city. Crash-Ovarons body wasracked with pains. The time to lay was approaching.Even before the chase was over, he would have tohave found a place, or else he and his brood woulddie together. Slowly the alien came up to him. Helooked resolute.

Crash-Ovaron understood that there was onlyone chance left for him to change the situation in hisfavour. He had to take down the para-block, and askthe stranger for help.

Crash-Ovaron shuddered. He vowed that theywould all die because they were forcing him to castoff his dignity.

All painters and everyone else should be madeto paint from photographs. And in the same waythat I do ( which means the choice of photographsas well ). The resulting paintings should be exhibitedeverywhere and be put up on walls in flats, andrestaurants and offices, in stations and churches,I really mean everywhere. Then big painting contestswould be organised, and the judges would weigh upchoice of theme and accuracy and speed ofreproduction, and hand out medals. Every day therewould be reports on radio and TV about the latestpaintings. After a while, laws might come intooperation to punish people who hadnt paintedenough photographs. This would go on for maybe fourhundred years, and at the end of that time, the paintingof photographs would be banned in Germany.

The wail of the sirens stopped him in his tracks.Colonel Carl Rugo gave a shout of dismay.Reflexively, Rhodans glance brushed the controlsthat were nearest to him. What he saw there toldhim about the full dimensions of the approachingcatastrophe.


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All the nuclear engines of the CREST II were failing.That meant CREST II would fall. B ang in the

middle of the battlefield outside the city.I am averagely healthy, averagely tall (172 cm ) and

averagely attractive. I mention it because you haveto look like that to paint good pictures. Paintings aremade following a recipe. Their manufacture musthappen without any inner participation on the partof the painter, the way streets are paved, or house-fronts painted. Making paintings is not an artistic act.

Harskin looked in the direction indicated andspotted a giant monster. It was like a sort of livingisland, a cross between a turtle and a dinosaur. Themighty skull was protected with armour plating, butthe expression of the eyes was not at all hostile orbloodthirsty. Round the monsters neck was a kindof basket, with three Gnorphs sitting in it. The threescaly creatures looked with curiosity and compassionat three beings swimming in the water. Evidentlya rescue party. The girl looked at the photographintently, then pointed at a man with her red-varnishedfingernail. Thats him! she said excitedly. And nopossibility of a mistake? asked Jo. The girl shook herhead energetically. No, Jo, Im not mistaken aboutthis. Thats the man I saw Mabel with. Jo folded upthe newspaper clipping, and put it away. Youve beena big help, Dolly, he said.

Perry stood on the terrace, sipping at his drink,and said softly, his voice slightly quaking: See thisbeetle here on my sleeve. And he pointed to a littlebeetle that was on the point of flying away. Youmustnt disturb them, you must never disturb them,leave everything the way it is, not plan anything,not make up anything, not add anything, not leaveanything out He hesitated before going on: It is

this state of wise modesty that allows us to growbeyond ourselves, to do something that exceeds ourown intelligence, that we can only appreciate with ourhearts. I dont mean it requires passivity, but witha subtle smile he watched the beetle fly off butit will be a form of action less noisy than we are usedto, but much more powerful and comprehensive,transforming our being in a way that will make usshudder His gaze lost itself in the infinite space ofthe room, and we understood that at that moment hehad given us the gift of the cosmos. We stood therefor a long time in silence, till Icho Tolot, the powerfulcheerful Halutian, brought us fresh wine.

If someone wants to become a painter, he needsto consider first whether he wouldnt be better suitedto some other activity: teacher, minister, professor,manual worker, assembly line, because only trulygreat people can paint!

The last patient left at half past ten. Unfortunatelythings had transpired in such a way that they went tothe surgery on Saturdays as well. The doctor took offhis white tunic and washed his hands. As he did so,he looked at himself in the mirror.

When Paddy awoke from deep sleep, the craftwas floating through space. He took a look out of theporthole. The eternal cosmic night surrounded him.Behind them shimmered Schaet, on their left hungthe golden orb of Alpheratz, and in front of them thestars of Androeda Adil, the body, Mirach, the loins,Almach the shoulder.

I have to scan now! Icho said in Intercosmo.The language had proved easy to learn. He masteredit flawlessly. The only thing that gave him trouble wasthat he couldnt speak as loudly as he was used to,otherwise the walls would have shaken.


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There was not much furniture in the room. Threeof the items were comfy chairs. I just need to scan!he said.

It was eleven oclock. I was sitting with my fatheron the terrace of the Carlton Hotel under a big sunumbrella. In contrast with the wide blue sea, and thecurls of white foam, the crazy events of the night justpast seemed like something from a dream Or anightmare perhaps Shining blue-and-white stripedsun umbrellas along the beach.

Smell of the sea. Happy babble of swimmersvoices up and down the four kilometres of beach.Mingled with the calls of ice cream sellers, mermaidswith slender naked forms dipped into the water andsurfaced snortingly. Marvellous, I said. My old mandidnt have a moment to answer. He was just openinghis breakfast egg.

They were strapped into their moulded seats,racing towards the inferno. The opalescent liquidbegan to surge, pushed its way into their mouthsand noses and gave a feeling of drowning. Icho Tolotwas writhing screaming on the floor, while Rhodan,Richter, Redhorse, Polke and the three mutantslooked on helplessly. Finally its last scream echoedaway and the thing happened that Rhodan hadhoped for almost fervently: namely that the Halutiangot over the shock and regained control over hismetabolism. That was rough, wasnt it? But I thinkthere was no other possibility.

Wherever theres a point, theres somethinghappening. Point basic concept of geometry,intersection of two lines, with no area. Punctuationmark as well, offered the Halutian. The two-metre-fiftytwo-eaded mutant Gorachin grinned with Ivanovitchsface. Ivan himself didnt have the time. Ivan saw

his objective, and liberated his intellect streams,causing calcium and carbon compounds to explode.

I got up, hesitated briefly, and switched onthe screen. It was a shock when I saw the face ofa Kirijene. It was an impressive, intelligent face, witha long, flat nose and a high brow. The blue face wasunusual, as was the head framed in a curly blackastrakhan pelt.

Welcome to Kanor. I am the ambassador of mypeople. Erg Vata! The thin-lipped mouth pulled intothe semblance of a smile. The multiple-jointed armappeared on the screen with its sixty-two fingers.

It was a flame or something of the kind.A trembling, shining shape floating in the air,executing strange movements. It seemed to dance,sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, thenfrom side to side, and up and down. The colour ofit was pale, and if it moved too fast, Fed could nolonger see it for a moment.

One day we will have no more need of paintings,we will just be happy. Because we will know whateternity is, and our knowledge will make us happy.Life after death will have been investigated, and willgive us models for how to behave.

I paint my pictures on primed canvas ( syntheticemulsion as a binder for titanium dioxide ), whichI purchase in Dsseldorf at 8 DM per squaremetre. I use the very best oil colours, to guaranteepermanence.

The squat, green-feathered Epsal hoveredbeside the beavermouse, which was not distractedand worked steadily on. The painting was almostfinished. The Epsal looked at the model, an archivephotograph of the meeting of Perry Rhodan andKroa-Mhakuy on planet Quinta. He compared it

to the painting and said, as though to himself: its just as well youre conventional, Gucky, and dontmind painting beautiful pictures! You are as closeto Rafael as to the Surrealists, the Impressionists,cave-painters, Zero, Picasso, Fluxism and the millionsof poor devils who take snapshots of their families.Thats your greatness Did you say something?asked Gucky. No, doesnt matter. For a while longerthe Epsal hovered in the room, then it teleported itselfsilently to the command centre of the craft where itgot started on the repairs to the field generators.

Whats better: to collect art or boozing andsleeping around? Everything at its own time.

All hell broke loose. The screens showed flamesoverwhelming the shields. The craft jerked around.The anti-gravity was no longer able to absorb therapid sequence of shocks. The enormous commandpost was collapsing in rubble. The cries of thewounded were audible among the wailing sirens.Ferro Kreysch had been flung from his seat, and tooksome time to pick himself up. The blood ran downhis face, blinding him. It was the end. Ferro couldfeel no fear, only rage and disappointment that it hadall happened so quickly. He had been cautious, andnevertheless had underestimated the enemy. For thealiens the MOHICAN was like a plaything. Ferrosfury turned into a towering rage. They had him wherethey wanted him. Just then a fresh impact shook themassive frame of the craft. But he would show themit was no easy matter to defeat an earthling.

To me, some amateur snapshots are betterthan Czanne. Its not a question of painting goodpictures, because painting is a moral act.

Perry studied the positrons display that showedthe flashing control lights in a bewildering storm.


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Could he stand to remain where he was and workout a problem whose solution might not even impactthe situation? Was it correct to base a hypothesison just two analogical processes? The button of theoverall prom line flashed green. The machine wasready to accept the new instructions. Perry clenchedand unclenched his fist. Then he punched the buttondecisively. The green light went out. Problem, saidPerry hoarsely, establishing the structural parametersof two six-dimensional force fields. Guidance: theforce fields in a synchrotronic particle accelerator

Within seconds, the machine was grappling withthe problem.

If it was up to her, all policemen would wearwindowpane uniforms, and they would replace thebird of state with plaid. Everyone would carry spottedhandkerchiefs.

There were three of them, shimmering in theintense blue. For aeons, they had been floating overtheir world, that was dipped in dark red light. Theirflight was silent, although they were enormous.They didnt follow any particular course, only theirappearance over Kroo, the biggest city of the world,was predictable. One hundred and twenty times theywould appear singly, and then they would appearall three together.

My husband likes a drink. I put it in such a wayso that you can see I have a sense of fun, and dontmind the occasional tipple myself. Only the way myhusband drinks, thats deleterious to his health. Hesforever finding an occasion to celebrate and drinkingto other peoples health. Thats what makes him sopopular among friends and colleagues but less sowith me and his family. Because he pays for this habitof his in time, money, cosiness and finally also health.

As a vegetarian teetotaller myself ( though I dontmind a laugh ), my role is difficult. Can you understandthat? People smile when I raise objections, evenif theyre fully justified. Thats why Im turning to youfor support now. Maybe you can make my husbandsee sense, I know hes a great admirer of yours.I know that for a fact. Perhaps you can raise it withhim some time. Someone who is in difficulty or hasa screw loose shouldnt paint, he should seek outa psychiatrist. Painting should be reserved for healthypeople. The newlywed Inge says: The things myfather gives away rarely have much in the way ofvalue. Thats true, growls her husband. Youre thebest example of that!

S. Polke and G. Richter, October 1965

Translated by Michael Hofmann

All archival images courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive Gerhard Richter, 2014


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Installation view: galerie h, Hanover, 1966Courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive


Sigmar PolkeBavarian ,1965

acrylic dispersion on canvas159.4 124.5cm

on loan from a private collection


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Gerhard Richter

Flmische Krone,1965oil on canvas, 89.5 110cm


Gerhard Richter

Kleine Tr, 1968oil on canvas, 50 50cm

Sigmar Polke

Freundinnen II,1967gouache and silkscreen offset on card

47.8 60.5cm


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Sigmar Polke

Don Quichotte,1968dispersion on canvas, 80.3 60.5cm


49

Gerhard Richter

Kleiner Parkplatz, 1965

oil on canvas, 28 58cm

Gerhard Richter

Stadtbild Ha,1968

oil on canvas, 180 150cmon loan from a private collection


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Gerhard RichterWolke,1969

oil and graphite on canvas, 99.9 80cm

Sigmar PolkeUntitled,1966

watercolour on paper, 94 124cmon loan from a private collection


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At the 1972 Venice Biennale, in the main hall of the

German pavilion, which was given over to his work,

the then-forty-year-old painter Gerhard Richtershowed forty-eight portraits of noted authors,

composers, philosophers and scientists. Richter hadchosen these four-dozen famous men, all of them

born in the nineteenth century, and all of them imbued

with something of its spirit, and had painted theirlikenesses with great care, all in the same grey, the

same slightly out-of-focus manner, and in the sameformat ( 70 55 cm ) from encyclopedia photographs.

The resulting sense of uniformity was intensified

by hanging the pictures at the same height onwhite walls.

People, Landscape, Aeroplanes

The thematic range of Richters work as painter

and graphic artist, in which so much of our dailylife is reflected, makes art-historical classifications

much more difficult. He has always paintedpeople, but there are also animals, landscapes,

clouds, townscapes, buildings, furnishings,

aeroplanes and cars. One could almost make a listof subjects in chronological sequence, but there

are repeated overlaps, and sometimes a subjectwill find itself picked up afresh under different

painterly conditions. Richters landscapes from

1968 to 1971 have been put through an exhaustivestylistic analysis.

57

Gerhard Richter

Portrt Schniewind,1965oil on canvas, 120 88cm

Gerhard Richter

Vierwaldsttter See,1969oil on canvas, 120 150cm



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Gerhard RichterHelen,1964


6362

It is possible to read Helga Maturaand relatedworks of Richters (Coffin Bearers, Wee Girls,Spanish Nudes) as a sort of contemporary Vanitas,or picture of warning, comparable to the DemoisellesdAvignonof Picasso ( 1907 ) in a tradition that goesback to the Middle Ages.

The blurred grisaille technique, that only threegenerations previously was deployed to lyrical effectby the French painter Eugne Carrire, signals theemptiness and uninterestingness of human wishes inGerhard Richter. The endlessly soft gradation of greysbespeaks a depressive, hollowed out sense of life.

Group Portrait of Nurses

On the poster announcing Richters first exhibitionin Zurich (1966 ), which uses a photograph takenby the artist, individual characteristics similarly fallaway. The white overall and the two signs on theright gate-post permit only a vague guess as to theactivity of the man thus depicted. It could be a doctoror health worker, one thinks, standing in front ofthe premises of a clinic. In fact, the building is theophthalmological department of the polyclinic inBurgstdt, East Germany. The original photographcomes from the files of Dr. Eufinger. The flattening,the suppression of casual details is compensated forby the professional stature of the person in question.

In contrast, the painter made portrait heads ofthe Eight Student Nursesin the same year, carefullyfollowing press photographs of the young Americanwomen who were all stabbed to death by a madman.The photographic model was supplied by Timemagazine of 22 July 1966.

Here, the identifiable individual features, accentu-ated by their racial characteristics, have once more

Gerhard RichterEight Student Nurses, 1966



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Gerhard RichterUecker,1964


65


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Gerhard RichterFrau in Hollywoodschaukel, 1968

oil on canvas, 95 115cmon loan from a private collection

66 67

been voided by lack of context and identical presenta-tion. The memory, blurred over time, of an unspeakablecrime allows these heads to become those of anyrandom assortment of young women. The monoto-nous, eight-fold repetition, the refusal of any narrative,are enough to disable from the outset any efforts by thespectator to respond to the eight portraits individually.

Serial Monotony

The reductive principle of the uniform series isimpossible to ignore in the case of the 48 Portraitswe began by discussing. An early inkling of it waspresent in the Eight Student Nurseseight yearspreviously. The row of portraits of famous men fromour recent past, in whom, on account of their differentachievements and fields of endeavour we should reallyexpect a maximum of characterisation, ends up boringus rigid at first blush.

The uniformly grey painting technique with thetypical blurred contours we have seen in other Richterpictures equalises all subjects to just one or Man.Only the names continue to evoke important writers,composers, physicists, chemists, philosophers,psychologists and doctors. No painters among them,not one.

But even if we look at a picture from this line-up onits own, we find ourselves missing the artistic char-acterisation we have become accustomed to in theworks of Czanne, Gauguin, Paula Modersohn-Beckeror Ernst Kirchner. Richter attaches little value to an arti-ficial form of language or to emotional expressiveness.

The Richter Portrait

Gerhard Richter covers over everything typical orexpected that one might otherwise cling to with

a smooth, masking veneer of grey paint. As anelement in a greater ensemble, any face, no matterhow markedly spiritual, is in danger of becominguninteresting to the eye. Something of the effectmay be experienced in a gallery of old familyportraits, even though some of these will continueto differentiate themselves by details, posture, colourand intensity.

The painstaking, quasi-directorial presentationof the portraits at the Biennale in 1972, or in theexhibition catalogue, gives one a sense of walkingpast or leafing through different views of the samemodel in a film book; from an en facepicture(Alfred Mombert) to right and left profile and thenthe next en face(John Dos Passos). Where the Popartist Andy Warhol achieves variety through the useof colour in his identical silk-screen prints of MarilynMonroe ( aligning him with the classical tradition ofExpressionism ), Gerhard Richters series of famousmen does something of the opposite.

In the face of a series that mocks the school-textbook-like pantheon of greats, Rilkes hallowedassertion, You must change your life (1908 ) becomesnothing but an empty slogan. There are no illusions inthese paintings, just the endless iteration of humanlife. The ground-notes are despair and agnosticismtowards the possibilities of a positive view of the world,

just as they are in the critical theories of the empiricalsciences: Around us are pseudo-events to whichwe adjust with a false consciousness adapted to seethese events as true and real, and even as beautiful.In the society of men the truth resides now less in whatthings are than in what t hey are not ( R. D. Laing ).

Pictures of human beings are a substantial partof Richters work, but still only a part: they are among


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a host of subjects and methods that Richter hasfollowed. But, as in the case of Czanne, formalconsiderations and painterly analyses of reality giverise to magnificent portraiture.

Richters own uncertainty as he interrogates hispredecessors is propelled by a soberly scientific,questing attitude: There is no clearer statementthat I can make about reality than my own relationto reality, and that is informed by blurring, uncertainty,provisionality, partiality and what have you, saysGerhard Richter. For that reason he favoured inhis paintings of ordinary people and other realisticsubjects the second hand photograph, which is seenas a picture, without all the baggage I connected withart. Emotionally freighted disturbances are thereforeexcluded from the very outset.

It seems likely that this is why almost alone amongartists Richter has never painted a self-portrait .

In attempting to summarise Richters portraits, onemight put it this way: that, while avoiding traditionalformulas, they are clear, painterly definitions of thepeople of our time. A hundred years ago, GerhardRichter might have become a writer, composer,philosopher or scientist. Maybe thats why he didntinclude a painter among his forty-eight cultural heroes.

Contemporary cutting-edge art pictorial art is, to use the now celebrated dictum of the Americanconceptual artist Joseph Kosuth: art after philosophy.Or, to leave the last word to Richter himself:Seeing as there are no more philosophers andpriests, artists are the most important people inthe world.

Axel Hinrich Murken,medical professor and arthistorianand Crista Murken-Altrogge, art historian

Gerhard RichterMdchen auf einem Esel

( Girl on a Donkey ), 1966 Gerhard Richter, 2014


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The art historian Robert Storr has described theconnection between Gerhard Richter and SigmarPolke as one of the most beneficial exchangesbetween two first-rank artists in modernisms history.1He harks back to the reciprocal influence that existedbetween Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, orRobert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, to underlinean aesthetic dynamic that profoundly impacted on

the course of contemporary art and postmoderndiscourse. The careers of Richter and Polke twoluminaries of painting were entwined by biographyand circumstance. Their relationship and the impetusfor their art largely originates from their experiencesas refugees from the former East Germany. Richterattended art school amongst the rubble of Dresdenspast and under the stifling authority of Socialism. Hedefected to the West in 1961, two months before theBerlin Wall was erected, in search of creative freedom.The family of the younger Polke was expelled fromtheir Silesian village in 1945, and fled the repressionof East German life eight years later. The pair united asfriends at the avant-garde Kunstakademie Dsseldorfin 1962, where they were drawn together by theirshared outlook and status as outsiders.

During the summer of that year, Richter, Polke andtheir friends Manfred Kuttner and Konrad Lueg ( laterthe gallerist Konrad Fischer ) joined the class of theInformelpainter Karl Otto Gtz, where they formeda tight-knit circle of somewhat competitive allies.

As a Dsseldorf native, the well-connected, well-informed Lueg became their leader, and it was hewho introduced the group to American Pop art via anall-important January 1963 issue of Art International.Seeing reproductions of Roy Lichtensteins paintingswas a revelation; they had discovered an art

that circumvented inherited and prevailing artisticmovements and referred directly to images of modernlife. This was the way forward that they had beencollectively searching for. They saw in Lichtensteinswork a kind of conceptually driven anti-art and wereimmediately driven to further develop their nascentexperiments with mass media imagery. The youngartists set about creating equally individual andoriginal styles that acknowledged many of theinfluences forming West German culture. Havingexperienced life during both Nazi and Communistregimes, and now a society essentially occupiedby American military and cultural interests, Richterand Polke assumed an attitude of wry cynicism andpoliticised detachment in their art. Their practicerejected all dogma or narrowing of the truth and theywould both become defined by their own uniquebrand of aesthetic indifference.

Richter began to copy found black-and-whiteamateur and photojournalistic snapshots, whichhe regarded as having no style, no concept, no

judgment.2Among these early paintings, themonochromaticTable(1962, private collection ) hasbeen cited as the template for much of his subsequentwork. The image of a designer table was copieddirectly from an advertisement in the Italian interiorsmagazine Domusand then partially erased with broad,sweeping strokes of paint. The chosen motif canbe seen as a reflection on the consumerist cultureRichter now found himself living in ( a testamentto the post-war Wirtschaftswunderor economicmiracle ), but the overpainting interferes with theillusion of representation and makes plain its statusas a painterly construct. The conflicting modes offigural and gestural painting opened the way for


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Richters further exploitation of banal, everydayphotographs, as well as the objective examinationof pure abstraction, which stressed the physical actof painting itself.

For Sigmar Polke, the example set by AmericanPop art provided the stimulus for a similar focus onconsumer products and appropriated imagery.Yet his faux nave paintings of goods such as socks,sausages and biscuits displayed a decidedlysardonic overtone that contrasted markedly withRichters dispassionate methodology. Polke wouldalso delve more noticeably into the techniquesof photomechanical reproduction by recreatingthe raster-dots used to print halftone images. Hisadoption of the raster dots ( similar to the colouredBenday dots mimicked by Lichtenstein ) allowedPolke to treat the whole surface in the same way like Czanne and to treat all subjects in the sameway: a horse, a woman, an ass, etc.3For his firstexperiment, Polke selected a newspaper photographof Lee Harvey Oswald and manually replicated theimages individual dots by dipping the rubber tip of apencil into ink and using it as a stamp. This painstakingprocedure allowed no space for personal expressionor emotion, but the subject was clearly a loaded one:earlier in 1963, President John F. Kennedy made adeclaration of solidarity with West Germany in Berlinand was assassinated several months later. Polkewas thereby following the quintessential Pop strategyof evoking tension between a hot subject and itscool delivery.

The Rasterbildpaintings that followed typicallyreplicated far more mundane subjects, showingnameless people and unidentifiable places,although the subtext of Polkes chosen motifs

Gerhard Richter,Tisch ( Table ), 1962Private collection


Sigmar Polke, Raster Bild( portrt von Lee Har vey Oswald ) Raster Drawing

( portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald ),1963Private Collection

The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne,DACS 2014.

remained an important aspect throughout. Thesepaintings disrupted the precise, uniform nature ofraster-dots by enlarging and blurring areas, and bywelcoming errors in the original print or mistakes ofPolkes own making. The images therefore becamedestabilised, inviting the viewer to question itsreliability. In the same way that Richter was blurringhis paintings of photographs to create an ambiguity atthe heart of his imagery, Polkes trademark raster-dotsassert the essentially abstract nature of all images aswell as the inscrutable nature of reality.

Polke and Richter first exhibited together in May1963, alongside their colleagues Kuttner and Lueg.All four artists were looking for gallery representationand had decided to take matters into their own handsby renting a vacant shop for a show. Richter wrote toa newsreel company to explain the trailblazing natureof the exhibition: For the first time in Germany, we areshowing paintings for which such terms as Pop Art,Junk Culture, Imperialist or Capitalist Realism, NewObjectivity, Naturalism, German Pop and the like areappropriate. Pop art recognises the modern massmedia as genuine cultural phenomenon and turnstheir attributes, formulations and content, throughartifice, into art. It thus fundamentally changes theface of modern painting and inaugurates an aestheticrevolution Pop art is not an American invention andwe do not regard it as an import though the conceptsand terms were mostly coined in America and caughton more rapidly there than here in Germany. This art ispursuing its own organic and autonomous growth inthis country; the analogy with American Pop Art stemsfrom those well-defined psychological, cultural andeconomic factors that are the same here as they arein America.4


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This statement was the first use of the termCapitalist Realism, a parody of East Germanysstate-imposed style of Socialist Realism and PopArts rootedness in a capitalist consumer society.Of all the isms listed in Richters letter, this wasthe one to which he and Lueg returned later thesame year with their exhibition and performancepiece, Living with Pop: A Demonstration forCapitalist Realismin which they appropriated theentirety of a Berges department store in Dsseldorf.Throughout the shop were installations, objects,paintings and actions, Richter himself sitting ona sofa on a pedestal, reading a detective novel witha documentary on the television in the background.Other props included the works of Winston Churchilland antlers from stags supposedly shot between1938 and 1942. Polke did not participate in the eventdue to a minor falling out with Richter, but they didstage two further group shows under the CapitalistRealism banner: Neo-Dada, Pop, Dcollage,Capitalist Realism at Galerie Ren Block, Berlin in1964 and Capitalist Realism: Richter, Lueg & Polkeat Galerie Orez, The Hague in 1965.

According to Robert Hughes, Capitalist Realismwas about objects of desire, seen from a distance.The things Polke started piling into his paintings cake, liverwurst, plastic tubs, etc. wereexcruciatingly hackneyed, with none of the gloss andglamour of American Pop, but they also had a muffledpolitical dimension ... they were precisely what theGermany he had left behind did not have; and thesplit between East and West, for ordinary Germans,lay along the ruts of consumption rather than thepeaks of rhetoric.5Neither Richters muted photo-paintings, nor Polkes ironically crude pictures blare

Gerhard Richter, Oswald, 1964Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg


at us with the energy of advertising. Instead, theystrip away the veneers of consumer iconographiesand its methods of conveyance, undermining them ina deliberate and subversively understated way. Thiswas Pop enacted on a personal and domestic scale,and it is through this that they offered a critique ofcontemporary value systems and the hypocrisy of asociety that seemed to blithely ignore its dark past.

Richter and Polkes Capitalist Realist artworksgave Pop art the sharp political edge that was usuallyonly tangentially apparent in the works of their Britishand American counterparts. But Richter would laterregret inventing the name, as he had not joined forceswith Polke to start a movement and he did not wishto be confined by an overriding conceptual agenda.Both artists wanted their work to remain open,ambiguous and unaffiliated to any ideology, programor style. Towards this end they operated within thegap that opened up between the photographicimage and the subject it represented. Neitherabstract nor figurative but existing simultaneously aseither, neither or both, Richter and Polke found a wayto expose and challenge the conventions of seeingand reading an image.

The pair had an intensely close friendship duringthis period and, as their public profiles graduallyincreased, they began to collaborate on sideprojects together. These included a falsified interviewaddressing the stigma of being a German artist in thepost-war era;6a print edition entitledTransformationthat ostensibly shows a mountain being turned intoa sphere; and a series of photographs that amountto performance documents. Perhaps their mostimportant collaboration was the book they co-authored six months before their first and only joint

exhibition in March 1966, which contains a jarringmontage of text cobbled together from a popularsci-fi series and provocative artist statements suchas Paintings must be produced to a recipe. Themaking must take place without inner involvement,like breaking stones or painting house-fronts.7The absurdist narrative acted as a self-deprecatingdiversion tactic, channelling something of theFluxus anarchist spirit they had been exposed toat the Academy, while dissembling any literaryinterpretation for their paintings.

Both the publication and the exhibition at galerieh in Hanover were given the egalitarian titlepolke/richter/richter/polke. At the time they made the text,

Richter remembers being closer to Polke than Ihad ever been to anyone.8Polke was nine yearsRichters junior and he was every bit as talented,but the creative sparks thrown between them wereas exasperating as they were stimulating. Thecompetitive streak that helped spur them on togreatness would eventually drive a wedge betweenthem. I remember how close this friendship was, butalso how tough it sometimes was, recalled Richter.I didnt realise it at the time. For us it was just thenatural way of dealing with each other. In retrospect,Im amazed it was so brutal. All of us were veryunsure of ourselves, and each tried to cover this up inhis own way.9

The exuberant and impulsive younger artist seemsto have brought out the devil in the restrained Richter,but their different temperaments eventually took themdown separate paths. Somebody once said thatI am Goethe and Polke is Schiller; or I am ThomasMann and he is Heinrich Mann said Richter in 2001.When asked to explain what this distinction means


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to non-German audiences, he replied: The classicalis what holds me together. It is that which gives meform. It is the order that I do not have to attack. It issomething that tames the chaos or holds it togetherso that I can continue to exist. That was never aquestion for me. That is essential for life I can onlysay that thats theway it was. Polke drifted away intothe psychedelic direction and I into the classical.10

Richter, reflective and deliberate, continued torepresent disparate motifs from photographs andintroduced purely abstract paintings. The rigorousphoto-based works propose that all painting isabstract if one looks closely enough, and theabstractions ( originally based on photographicdetails ) became sensuous exercises in chance andmovement. These contradictory facets, broughttogether for the first time in Table, reveal Richtersparadoxical relationship with painting, a practicethat was denigrated as obsolete throughout muchof the 1970s. Richter is a painter acutely aware of

the limitations of his vocation and simultaneouslyenthralled with the process. With his abstractpictures, he has embraced these self-same limitationsand worked within them in a new ecstatic way. Yetthey still maintain his distinctive air of detachment.During an interview with Benjamin Buchloch in1986, Richter fervently distanced himself from thetranscendent ambitions of the earlier generation ofAbstract Expressionists, claiming his paintings arean assault on the falsity and the religiosity of theway people glorified abstraction, with such phonyreverence.11Clearly Richter has found a meansof operating within the constraints of his mediumby exploring the futility of oils and the futility ofrepresentation, working through these issues in

a very considered way. This is painting for paintingssake, an endeavour reminiscent of the composerJohn Cages famous statement, I have nothing tosay, and I am saying it.

The quixotic Polke meanwhile embarked on aconstant stream of experiments. His art sought totalfreedom, with frequent and abrupt changes of style.No constraints mattered; if everyone said paintingwas dead, that gave him all the more reason topush at its boundaries. Nonetheless, Polke did stoppainting for a period in the 1970s, turning instead togroundbreaking experiments in photography. He alsodelved into film and video and travelled extensivelywith a camera and camcorder, capturing imagesthat he later recycled in unexpected ways, usingthem to explore curious juxtapositions. Many of hislater paintings continued to utilise the raster-dotand appropriated imagery in addition to engaginga more mechanised means of production. Known asthe alchemist, his subjects investigate the spiritual,cosmological, scientific, and sociological and engagea bewildering array of unusual materials, includingpatterned textiles, fruit juice, arsenic, meteor dust,resin and purple dye derived from snails.

Polke built an oeuvrebased on simultaneousand multiple views of existence that coalescewithin the fixed environment of the picture plane.The physical complexity of his work and its layeredimagery can evoke the consciousness-expandingquality of psychedelic drugs, whereby the ordinarysuddenly becomes surprising and mysterious.Whatever substances may have helped to inducethese humours in Polke, they stayed with him;mushrooms are a recurrent motif in his art, andhis photographs feature the opium dens that he

visited in Pakistan during the 1970s. The artist alsoattributed his collision of images directly to theevents of his past, stating: I pile everything up, allthe accumulated material all the things from mytravels and when the room is filled, I lock it up andmove on to an empty one I have done this all mylife. When I was seven the war broke out and thevillage I lived in was right on the Russian front. Wehad to leave immediately and left everything behind.I still remember the drawer of my table with all mythings in it: pieces of wood I carved, stones, seeds,a stuffed owl all left.12

Despite their marked differences, Polkesand Richters art is underpinned by intersectingphilosophical standpoints and sensibilities. Theirpioneering use of photomedia prompts criticalquestions regarding objectivity, manipulation,authenticity, and pictorial clich. Their appropriationtactics and elevation of the banal deflated theutopian pretensions of modernism and heralded thereturn of history and narrative as vital subjects forpainting. They both question the visual experienceof reality and favour intuition, avoiding responsibilityfor the resulting image and its interpretation. Bydrawing attention to the methods and processesof image-making, they also blur and subvert thedivisions between figurative and abstract art. Bothartists embody a peculiar combination of nihilism,hope and Romanticism: they actively embracedoubt yet manage to find a well-spring of potentialin the supposedly moribund art of painting, whetherthrough Polkes energetic hybridity or Richtersdeadpan gravity.

The artists have both been recognised incontemporaneous public commissions for the

Sigmar Polke,Polke als Astronaut

( Polke as an Astronaut ), 1968.Private Collection, San Francisco.

The Estate of Sigmar Polke,Cologne, DACS, 2014


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1R. Storr, Gerhard Richter:

Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat.,

Museum of Modern Art, NewYork 2002, p. 30.

2 G. Richter, quoted in

Interview with Rolf Schn,

1972, ibid., p. 73

3 S. Polke, quoted in

Sigmar Polke: Works on paper

19631974, exh. cat., Museum

of Modern Art, New York,

1999, p.16.

4G. Richter, Letter to a

newsreel company, 29 April

1963, reproduced in Obrist,

op. cit., p. 16.

5R. Hughes, Germanys Ironic

Trickster, Time, December 1991,

p. 80.

6 S. Polke, Interview between

John Anthony Thwaites and

Gerhard Richter, October 1964,

reproduced in Obrist, op. cit.,

pp. 268.

7G. Richter and S. Polke,polke/

richter richter/polke, exh. cat.,

galerie h, Hanover 1966, text

reproduced in English in Obrist,op. cit., p. 49.

8G. Richter quoted in

D. Elger, Gerhard Richter:

A Life in Painting, Chicago1992, p.100.

9ibid., p.103.

10 G. Richter quoted in Interview

with Gerhard Richter, 2001,

reproduced in R. Storr, Doubt

and Belief in Painting, New York

2003, pp.1734.

11 G. Richter quoted in

Interview with Benjamin H. D.

Buchloh, 1986, reproduced

in Obrist, op. cit., p.141.

12S. Polke quoted on object

label, Walker Art Centre,

Minneapolis, www.walkerart.org/

collections/artworks/frau-herbst-

und-ihre-zwei-tochter-mrs-

autumn-and-her-two-daughters

( accessed 25 March 2014 ).

Reichstag building in Berlin and large-scale stainedglass windows at the Cologne Cathedral andZurichs Grossmnster respectively projects thathighlight their antithetical qualities and their sharedinterests. Their impact on global art is irrefutable:Richters works are among the most sought-afterpaintings of all time, commanding the highest pricesfor a living artist, while the reclusive Polke is finallybeing honoured with an expansive, long-overdueretrospective at that will tour New Yorks Museum ofModern Art, Londons Tate Modern, and ColognesMuseum Ludwig. Sadly, the sudden death of Polke inJune 2010 robbed the art world of one of its greatestinnovators before the retrospective could be realised,but his legacy will undoubtedly live on to inspiregenerations of artists to come.

Faith Chisholm,freelance writer, editor and researcher,

Art Gallery of New South Wales


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Sigmar PolkeUntitled, 1973

acrylic and silver bronze on paper, 100 70cmon loan from a private collection


gouache and enamel on paper100 70cm

80 81


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8382

Gerhard RichterAbstraktes Bild,1981

oil on canvas, 50.5 70.2cm


acrylic, artificial resin, lacquer and dispersionon printed fabr ic, 199.5 160cm


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acrylic and gouache on paper, 69.2 99cm

Gerhard RichterBen,1983

oil on canvas, 95.2 100cm

84 85


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Sigmar Polke

Untitled, 1986enamel, artificial resin and dispersion on canvas

40 50cm

Sigmar Polke

Katastrophentheorie II I,1983acrylic, dry pigment and resin on canvas

160 200cm


oil on canvas,120.4 80.2cm


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9190

Gerhard RichterAbstraktes Bild, 1986

oil on canvas, 81.9 67.6cmon loan from a private collection


acrylic on card , 100 74.5cm


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Gerhard RichterAbstraktes Bild, 1987

oil on canvas, 120 100.2cm


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94 95




acrylic, dispersion and artificial resinon printed fabric, 90 70cm


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Sigmar PolkeUntitled, 1986

acrylic and gouache on printed fabric, 90 75cm


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Gerhard Richters focus on his vibrant abstract

painting over the past decade, together with thesuccess that this aspect of his work has achieved,

has diverted attention from the artists conceptualorigins. In this sense the tribute paid by richter/

polkeat Christies Mayfair to the originalpolke/

richtershow, held at galerie h in Hanover in 1966,is a timely reminder. For Richters roots are

richter polke catalog

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