September: The Success and Failure of Gerhard Richter

Probably like most other folk interested in painting, I made it to the Tate for the Gerhard Richter show – ‘Panorama’ recently.  However, as I went right at the end of the exhibition’s run, it’s also likely that anything intelligent (or otherwise) that I might have to say about it has already been said by others over recent weeks.  I’ve heard him described as ‘The most important painter of our age’, amongst various epithets.  I’m not sure who decides those things and what the exact criteria would be but it does seem impossible for contemporary painters to get round Richter.  There’s a feeling you probably have to go through him and absorb the implications of his vast output to work out where we are and how we got here. If that’s true, the Tate show presented a vital opportunity to experience a major retrospective of key paintings from the different phases of his career with each phase hung in chronological progression.

Instead of rehashing the usual generalities about Richter, I’ll use this post to discuss my feelings and ideas about one particular painting from the show.  I’m hoping to find time soon to follow this with another one discussing my responses to a small selection of further works that particularly caught my eye for whatever reason.

Gerhard Richter, 'September', 2005

‘September’ is Richter’s attempt to engage with the horror of what we are persuaded to call ‘9/11’,  (Grudgingly, I’ll allow the Americans the right to their own date numbering system for that one).  I was already familiar with the painting in reproduction from Robert Storr’s essay ‘September, A History Painting By Gerhard Richter’ [1.], but was definitely in two minds about the piece.  Storr’s slim volume usefully brings us the insights of a curator who has exhibited Richter’s work himself, (including the controversial Baader-Meinhof related ‘October’ paintings), but also of someone who witnessed the events at first hand.

The big question is - can painting deal meaningfully with such an era-defining event, particularly in the age of mass media?  It would always be a massive ask but given his previous intelligent and effective engagement with the themes of Nazi Germany, World War Two and the demise of the Baader-Meinhof terror group, – if Richter wasn’t going to do it, who would?

Having seen the painting now, it seems the answer to the first question is - possibly, but only on certain specific terms.  For me, the painting is a strangely underwhelming expression and lacks the immediate impact and resonance of many media images from the event.  I also feel it lacks the power to startle of those earlier German History works of Richter’s.  However, this might be to misunderstand the terms on which he attempts to investigate his subject or even what the real subject actually is.

Generally, Richter’s approach to troubling themes of politics or history has been singularly lacking in passion yet also unsettlingly personal at the same time. Often, his subject matter has been figurative but depicted in a manner that emphasises banality, both in context and depiction.  The classic example would be ‘Uncle Rudi’.  Though dressed in the uniform of the Wehrmacht, Rudolf is depicted in unremarkable surroundings and mostly resembles the type of image that must have haunted many German family albums after the the war.  Richter’s own family were largely sympathetic to the National Socialist cause but paradoxically, an Aunt, (also famously depicted), was a victim of sterilisation and euthanasia.  More disturbing still is the knowledge that, unknown to Richter, his Father in Law was a gynaecologist directly implicated in such actions under the Nazis.

Gerhard Richter, 'Uncle Rudi (Onkel Rudi)', 1965

Through his dispassionate portraiture he engages not with the actual atrocities of the period but with their traumatic legacy for future generations of Germans like himself.  He has also spoken about the difficulty of dealing with a subject like the Holocaust in painting without resorting to an appalling spectacle. [2.]  I once leafed in bemusement through a coffee table volume of beautiful, artistic concentration camp photos in a bookshop and thus have immense respect for his restraint.

Gerhard Richter, 'Mustang Squadron (Mustang-Staffel)', 1964

Gerhard Richter, 'Bombers (Bomber)', 1963

Gerhard Richter, 'Townscape Paris (Stadtbild M2)', 1968

At other times he has produced paintings dealing with the Allied bombing raids suffered by the Germans, yet again with considerable detachment and in two different ways.  The first group depict planes releasing bombs or squadrons of Allied fighter planes in battle formation.  Here we see the instruments of war at work above vaguely delineated landscapes but nothing of their actual effects.  Elsewhere, he gives us cityscapes, often in aerial view, which imply the wartime destruction, (and reconstruction in Cold War conditions), of urban centres.  The Allied obliteration of Dresden is the example he seems to allude to, - it was Richter’s birthplace and the city to which he returned to study after the War.  However, the action is only obliquely referenced and then, perplexingly, from a bomber’s distanced viewpoint.

Gerhard Richter, 'Confrontation, (Gegenuberstellung)', 1988

Later on, the pictures of the Baader-Meinhof group were derived from news and forensic photos taken during and after their demise and they appear as unremarkable blurred presences in mundane surroundings, (even when lying dead!).  We see nothing of their actions or their victims and, certainly, to fully appreciate these paintings we need to know the back-story of events leading to and surrounding the situations they depict.  Once we are thus equipped, there is no doubt that, for all of Richter’s detachment, their power to arrest us is immense. My own feeling is that they appear like ghostly manifestations, hovering between life and death.  Richter received much criticism for supposedly sympathising with Marxist Terrorists but this is to ignore the artist studious refusal to ally himself either with the murderous ideology of the group or the authority of the State, (that may have caused certain members to meet a mysterious end).  He mourns the folly of the World as an impartial observer, never as an involved participant.

Photo: Richard Drew

The same sense of impartial witness is attempted in Richter’s depiction of the World Trade Centre attack.  If a major function of the action was to create an unforgettable symbol of Islamic Fundamentalist opposition to Western Civilization, the artist’s task becomes a particularly dangerous one.  How is one to work without risking the propagation of such symbols?  Richter is open about his desire to drain any sense of drama or obscene beauty from the scene and an earlier vividly coloured version was apparently scrapped for this reason.  As a result, and also due to the pre-existing formal abstraction of the image, what remains is little more than an obscure configuration of tonal blocks and smoky smudge.  There is little detail of the moment of impact and none of the human dimension contained within news photos of falling figures or survivors on the ground with which we all became familiar after the event.  This shouldn’t really surprise us in the light of his earlier images of aerial attack already discussed

Those media images that did work in more oblique terms did it, I think, in one of two ways.  Some showed the buildings on fire but at some remove as components of a much wider skyline view, much as a Renaissance artist might depict a small battle scene in the background of an otherwise serene religious painting.  Others played on the incongruous contrast between the blue sky of a diamond-bright autumn morning and the livid inferno of flame and filthy smoke imposed upon it.  This latter group may fall into the trap of conjuring spectacle but for me they also capture the surreal horror (to a Northern European eye at least), of any atrocity carried out in sunshine.  ‘September’ is too close-in a view of the subject and, despite a passage of blue sky, is too greyed out and lacking in tonal impact to emulate either of these approaches.

 Another quandary with the painting is it just seems too modest in scale.  In his attempt to avoid the over-sized melodrama of much History painting or any interpretation of the atrocity as a grand art work in itself, Richter also dispensed with any sense of the bland monumentality of the towers under attack, and hence, of the Western, Liberal Capitalist values they represented.  Again, perhaps we can see Richter’s scrupulous even-handedness at work.  To play on the ability of a small group of low-tech fanatics to strike at the heart of such a monolith might be seen as telling too much of one side’s story.  Instead, we have a modest painting that I still find rather too easy to disregard altogether.

In one major sense, and perhaps this is Richter’s real agenda after all, the painting succeeds admirably.  His familiar device of arbitrarily scraping paint across the surface of a representational image here works as well as anywhere to signify the impossibility of his task.  It is a partial cancelling of an already obscure representational depiction – a further move towards the painterly and abstract.  So often he has set out to ask ‘Could a painting be this, or do that…?’ What it can’t and shouldn’t seek to do, he seems to suggest, is to identify with the participants in an historical event by presenting a captured or repeated moment.  That is the role of photography and television.  They may supply powerful and memorable images to haunt our nightmares but they are also quite likely to become propaganda for one side or another.  In their immediacy and desire to pursue the specifics of a moment, they become simplistic and deny the viewer any opportunity to meditate on the multiple possible interpretations of World events.

I think the best word to describe ‘September’ is ‘Vaporous’.  Richter’s plume of dark smoke appears to diffuse throughout the entire canvas and impedes our ability to discern anything with clarity.  It may compromise visual impact but does relate to a feature of 9/11 that few other images may have accounted for.  Robert Storr describes vividly the smell and taste of toxic fumes that pervaded New York after the towers burnt and fell,

“The smell of burning bodies was masked by the smell of burning plastic and other inorganic substances, but one knew that the nauseating scent was a composite including the odours of a crematorium.  Pictures have no smell, but in a synesthetic sense, Richter’s rendition of 9/11/01 has the taste of ashes.  To be sucked into this picture also entails breathing its atmosphere”. [3.]

Under such total erasure and chemical amalgamation of individual lives perhaps it becomes almost impossible to focus on the personal or identifiable at all.  Perhaps Richter was wise to focus instead on the polluting legacy of 9/11 that will be falling out for decades to come.  To some extent, we all now breathe that atmosphere.  Like no other pictorial medium, it is painting with its necessary period of reflective gestation and the ability to operate in simultaneous representational and abstract modes that is best suited to playing the philosophical long game.

Much of my initial dissatisfaction with the picture remains but I do admit that, rather than an inadequate testament to the moment of 9:11, ‘September’ might actually be an important study of both the limitations and unrivalled abilities of the medium in relation to the history of our times.

  

[1.]:  Robert Storr, ‘September, A History Painting By Gerhard Richter’, Tate Publishing, London, 2010

[2.]:  ‘I Have Nothing To Say And I Am Saying It’ (In Conversation With Nicholas Serota), From:  Mark Godfrey & Nicholas Serota With Dorothee Brill & Camille Morineau (Editors), ‘Gerhard Richter Panorama’ (Exhibition Catalogue), Tate Publishing, London, 2011, pp. 24-25

[3.]:  Robert Storr, ‘September, A History Painting By Gerhard Richter’, Tate Publishing, London, 2010