BOOKS: American cultural empathy takes on German humour
Robert Storr's Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting
Earlier this year, The Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a major retrospective of the paintings of German artist Gerhard Richter. In conjunction with the show (which is due to travel to several other locations in the States) MoMA also published a lavishly-illustrated monograph Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting by Robert Storr, a Senior Curator in MoMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture whose other works include Philip Guston (1994) and Modern Art Despite Modernism (2000). The result is a big book - a fitting partner to a big exhibition - providing the most thorough English-language survey of the career of one of Europe's most influential and significant living artists.
There is, needless to say, plenty of scope to complain about the way in which the publication of this monograph came to pass. Shortly before his death, the great art historian Frances Haskell warned about the distorting effect of blockbuster exhibitions on art publishing. Now that reproduction rights for art are so expensive, and yet good-quality illustrations (let alone television tie-ins and free publicity) are deemed so essential, serious monographs increasingly come to cluster around one-man shows put on by the more hegemonic museums. Like most things in life, this transaction entails costs as well as benefits, for as Haskell realised, the monograph inevitably remains shackled to the circumstances of the particular exhibition itself, with all the obvious consequences. Here, for instance, we end up reading a lot more about the work that made it to MoMA than we do about the broader corpus of Richter's work. Since the MoMA show is made up primarily of paintings, this not only does some violence to our understanding of Richter's origins - downplaying, for instance, the importance of FLUXUS, a movement of evanescent 'events' and 'happenings', to Richter's work - but ensures that Richter remains inextricably tangled the 'is painting really dead?' debate - a 'debate', incidentally, that becomes more obviously parochial, dated and irrelevant with each passing day. Nor, given the circumstances of this monograph's creation, is it likely that other critics and historians will be able to pile in to fill the gap, at any rate in a full-length, fully-illustrated book, because now that a work on this scale exists, what chance is there that any sane English-language publisher would commission a new monograph this side of Richter's death?
The worst distortion, though, is the tendency of the exhibition, and hence the book, to scan Richter's oeuvre exclusively through the eyes of New Yorker's gallery-goers, a people famously susceptible to crippling degrees of cultural myopia. Storr, to be fair, does a great deal to sidestep this constraint. His often excellent introduction sets out exactly how bad the successive misunderstandings of Richter's work have been - and yet unavoidably under the circumstances, this introduction is both addressed to an American readership, and predicated on the idea that it is important to provide Americans with an adequate account of Richter to replace previous inadequate versions. Thus the cultural referents for Richter's breakthrough paintings turn out to be the AbEx and Colour Field classics he saw at Documenta 2 (Kassel, 1959), Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, John Cage and Andy Warhol. Perhaps Storr can get his head around the idea of an alternative world in which Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Jean Dubuffet, Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Beuys might seem at once more culturally omnipresent and more important, but if so, he does not fully convey this intuition to his readers.
Does this matter? Well, yes. For those - and there are still plenty of them out there, not only in the States - who know little about Richter, a tiny biographical précis is perhaps in order. Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden to a devoutly Protestant, middle-class family. During the war his father and two uncles served in the German army; his mentally-disturbed aunt was killed as part of a Nazi euthanasia programme. Growing up in East Germany, Richter began his artistic career by painting political banners and murals in a sub-Diego Rivera, socialist-realist style. In 1961, after several visits to West Germany, he moved to Düsseldorf and found a place at the Art Academy there. Within a remarkably short period he had begun to create the sort of work which would make his reputation: meticulously-painted yet artfully blurred reproductions of apparently casual photographs. At a time when, for whatever reason, many critics were claiming to have detected painting's death-throes, Richter produced works which both fascinated and frustrated his audience. The work was distant and semi-mechanical - or perhaps intimate and almost sentimental. Who could say? So the critical debate gathered momentum. What did these pictures mean? What were we all supposed to feel about them? Weren't they - well, just too attractive? And didn't the artist owe it to us to explain what on earth he was trying to do?
Figuration, though, came shackled to another interpretative issue. As with Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and indeed every other German post-war painter associated however distantly with figuration or symbolism, being German always seems to have been an issue for Richter - something he either addressed through his art, or which critics anxiously sought to read from it. One painting (Uncle Rudi), based on a family snapshot, depicted a favourite uncle showing off his new uniform only months before he died fighting for the Wehrmacht; a series of paintings of American bombers, painted with all the rancour of an Airfix illustration, seems linked forever in most critics' minds to Richter's childhood in the countryside near wartime Dresden; his aerial views of cities (Townscape Madrid) ditto; even his apparently casual landscapes (Meadowland, Barn) solicit criticism along these lines, as if there were something intrinsically worrying about the implicit romanticism in such an image - as if Germans somehow could not be trusted to think innocently about forests and farmyards.
And this, clearly, is important, if for no other reason than all the obvious problems following inherent in having an American explain to an audience of Americans what lay behind a German's decision to paint certain works, presumably primarily for a German audience, in the 1960s and onwards. Or to put it another way, if the main critical problem with Richter is understanding his tone - not what he is depicting, exactly, but the inflection behind the delivery - then one is left wondering as to what's being lost, elided, misunderstood, forgotten, or wished away. To repeat a point made earlier, it would be ridiculous to expect the MoMA show that accompanies Storr's book to deal otherwise with such issues - the purpose of the show is, of course, to introduce Richter to an American audience - yet at the same time, it is possible to wish for a slightly different sort of account of the context in which Richter's best work has been created, and of the response of his audience to it at the time, without having to make recourse to contemporary critical writing, much of it in German and little of it as lavishly produced as this very handsome book.
Is this unreasonable? I don't think so, and it is not hard to locate one specific instance in Robert Storr's monograph which underscores my point about the extent to which this book looks to Manhattan when it ought to be looking a little farther afield. First, though, a tiny bit of history is in order. In 1988, Richter painted a series of fifteen works which, like so many of his paintings, were slightly dreamy photorealist transcriptions from journalistic sources. The series was titled "October 18, 1977". Does this mean anything to you? Well, for a German reader it almost certainly would. Crucially, its subject was the arrest, detention and violent deaths of three members of the so-called Baader-Meinhoff Gang, key members of the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group which had shot and bombed and murdered its way around Germany since the mid 1960s. Imprisoned in 1972, the three killed themselves in Stammheim Prison near Stuttgart in 1977. These events - the terrorists' violent actions, the repressive laws established to fight terrorism, the long legal process and imprisonment, and finally this grim ending to an unpleasant and complicated narrative - unsurprisingly elicited a complex and often ambivalent response in Germany and elsewhere. Richter's works seem to share that ambivalence. They seem to convey accurately how one feels when seeing faded news photos of something that seemed catastrophic, tragic, even life-changing a decade or more before, but which has now acquired the patina of age and distance and partial disengagement. Children of the 9/11 generation, take note — nostalgia never hits where you expect it to.
Asked about the paintings, Richter has said all sorts of semi-predictable, art-worldly, sometime almost self-contradictory things, condemning terrorism while admiring the terrorists' energy, determination and 'absolute bravery'. Yet the terrorists per se are not really the point of the works:
The deaths of the terrorists, and the related events both before and after, stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my efforts to suppress it.
And indeed, to see how far these paintings diverge from work that somehow 'glorifies' or 'glamorises' terrorism, all one has to do is to compare them with Richard Hamilton's "The Citizen" (1981-83) - hanging in our very own Tate Modern, by the way - a technically inept and formally uninteresting work which uses clunking obvious art-historical references to conflate an IRA prisoner, in the midst of a 'dirty protest' no less, with Christ. (In a related work of similar subtlety and charm, "The State", a patrolling soldier has a sort of SS-type skull in place of a face.) Hamilton provides an easy, if witlessly irresponsible gloss on his chosen topic - IRA prisoners are Christ-like martyrs whose suffering, such as it is, is as regrettable as it is redemptive. Richter, on the other hand, evokes those strange totemic glimpses that remain scarred onto our consciousnesses long after the news bulletins and cheap commentary have faded away - the sort of scars that separate one generation from another, a nation from its neighbours, one cohort of experience from all the rest. They don't have all the answers, any more than we do. You could hurt yourself on their rough edges. But is that not a sign of their honesty, their sharpness, their success?
All of which illuminates Storr's strange, and yet strangely ineluctable decision to devote so many pages to what were, after all, fifteen works out of the 'more than 113' paintings in the show, let alone the entirety of Richter's oeuvre. Part of the reason for this emphasis on "October 18, 1977" is the work is owned by MoMA, having been acquired for the museum amid some controversy in 1995. The decision to acquire these works and to accord them prominence in the museum has been attacked by a number of American critics, not least Hilton Kramer, who in January 2001 launched a powerful assault on this particular work, on Richter, on Robert Storr, on Storr's account of Richter, and on MoMA more generally) in The New Criterion. Discussing Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, Kramer writes
As political analysis, much of the text is a tendentious humbug, for it repeatedly exalts what it pretends to find ambiguous in both the so-called ideals and the real-life crimes of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. And as art criticism it is similarly tendentious in pretending to find problematic what is plainly evident to the naked eye: that Mr. Richter has produced a series of paintings that attempt to aestheticize the politics of terrorism. To take refuge from that reality in the looking-glass world of moral ambiguity is itself an act of moral evasion.
As it happens, I entirely agree with the first part of this - Storr's account is reprehensibly 'ambiguous', if not downright celebratory, when it comes to the activities of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. To my mind, Storr also gives a slanted account of Richter's own stance on their activities, making him sound more 'sympathetic' to their 'idealism' than his own words on the subject tend to bear out. As for the latter point, as much as I shrink from arguing with a critic of Kramer's stature, I am not so sure, simply because I cannot help but read these works as addressing the viewer's view, as it were, of the events to which Richter alludes. For that reason, I don't think the works 'aestheticize the politics of terrorism', if only because I don't think they are about the politics of terrorism. As for the last sentence of the material I have quoted from Kramer, it is true beyond all argument - but I would also say that really, it is principally in the real world that one needs to take up moral stances against terrorism, and that what the real world projects back upon ambiguous paintings matters more than any permanent unequivocal meaning that might be thought to adhere to the works themselves.
Storr, as I have implied above, is in every sense an apologist for the degree of sympathy he thinks he detects in Richter's account of the deaths of these Red Army Faction members. And yet - to return to the principal theme of this review - here, too, his own cultural myopia gets in his way. Remember, the Richter exhibition opened in New York in the early spring of 2002, only six months after the terrible events of 11 September. Newly sensitive, perhaps, to the charge that Richter is somehow soft on terrorism, Storr devotes a remarkably foolish few paragraphs to an attempt - not very effective - to square this circle.
'The reality of terror and its dynamics are [sic] anything but remote,' we are told. Really? The analogy, surely, is stretched far beyond breaking-point. For all its horror, 11 September was, in effect, an attack by foreigners (different countries, different languages, different religion), condensed into a couple of unforgettable hours in two specific locations. The Red Army Faction, in contrast, not only disrupted everyday life in Germany for more than a half a generation - shooting, robbing, kidnapping, hijacking, murdering - but worse still, the 'enemy' was a small core of radically discontented, mostly middle-class German youth whose actions led, however inadvertently, to more than a decade of unsightly legal wrangling, increasing oppressive legislation, and the sort of societal soul-searching that comes from seeing one's society attacked not by outsiders, but by - well, people just like you, except that they are more than willing to kill people just like you, too. By the time the events alluded to by Richter took place, everyone in Germany must have been familiar with the terrorists' names, faces, backgrounds, stories, pronouncements, victims, and self-justifications. And remember, all of this came only two decades after defeat in a massively destructive war, much of the latter part of it fought on German soil, the partition of the country, and an enforced central role as the battlefield on which the Cold War might well have turned hot. Is this whole picture of terrorism and its context 'anything but remote' from the experience of New York gallery-goers? The fact that Storr apparently believes that it is - and that he can write some of the witless things he does about the need to draw out 'sympathy' for terrorists from the 'conflicted individual' - casts doubt over other interpretative strategies in the book that might, otherwise, look perfectly plausible.
It would be wrong to suggest that there is nothing to commend in Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting. The colour plates make a remarkably successful attempt to capture Richter's subtle colour, those all-important tonal shifts, the luminous nature of some of his best work. Remarkably - shockingly - there is no index, which does serious damage to the book's value as a reference work. On the other hand, there is a very helpful chronology (including an exhibition history) that compensates for some of the stranger meanderings of Storr's interpretative text. Storr obviously feels drawn to a chronological approach and yet equally obviously retreats from it, suddenly squeamish at producing a biographical reading of Richter's key themes, meaning that, for instance, new 'wives' appear in the narrative before the previous ones have been divorced. And despite the flaws in his analysis of Richter's context and motivations - some more forgivable than others - Storr deserves credit for moments of extremely lucid, intelligent, attractive writing.
The best part of the book, though - except perhaps the plates - is an extended interview between Storr and Richter himself. Since this interview took place in German over a period of several days, doubtless plenty has been lost, tendentious readings have been introduced, and vital context has been edited away. Still, one draws from this something absent elsewhere in the book - a strong sense of Richter's playfulness, his humour, even a certain attractive modesty in his aspirations. Doubtless, there are critics who would say this playfulness is cynical or even sinister - a strategy to avoid taking sides, making decisions, giving away information. Surely, though, it is worth contemplating an alternative reading, in which the humour is genuine? It seems to me, at least, perfectly possible that Richter - a man who has had every reason to anticipate the dark side of dogmatic adherence to rigid ideological positions - might quite genuinely have retreated into a playful, slightly melancholy, deeply personal and subjective approach to art, in which his works mean something very specific to him, while at the same time he is unwilling (or perhaps unable) to enforce such readings on a wider public. (Even Richter's earlier atheism has now softened into the loaded comment on Christianity: 'Put it this way - I am a sympathiser'.) Hence the presumably inadvertent humour as Storr proffers first one and then another carefully-worked-out piece of theory to Richter, only to have it gently pushed aside by a joke, a self-deprecating remark, or a straightforward if genial evasion. Richter emerges from this interview as deeply engaged with the technical side of painting, a pragmatism about the nature of his own development, and a good-natured playfulness that recalls nothing more than - to pick, alas, a semi-American example - the more lucid moments of 1950s Willem de Kooning.
In 2002 it is very obvious that painting is not dead, and it is equally obvious that, whether one likes his work or not - as I do, incidentally - that Richter is destined to be one of the most influential painters of his generation. (Is it really possible to imagine Luc Tuymans, for instance, without Gerhard Richter?) The problem with painting has, in retrospect, been almost entirely theoretical. At MoMA and several other museums, in various university arts departments and in a host of art magazines, many thousands of people have spent the last few decades gainfully employed in writing painting's epitaph - while at the same time, the general public has taken little notice, and a host of painters, armed with various degrees of skill and determination, have painted on regardless. The tone of Storr's Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting is at one level pure unadulterated Richter-boosting, but at the same time, it is an attempt to create an English-language Richter who can plausibly occupy his assigned role within a particular dominant American account of art history. That the attempt does not entirely work says a lot for Richter's own power as a painter, for the resilience of painting as an art form - and for the solvent effect of humour, modesty and pragmatism on self-important and self-absorbed American art-world critical theory.
Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, pp. 336, $75 US, £50
Bunny Smedley, January 7, 2002 10:46 PM