Lost At Sea: Gerhard Richter's Seascape

I’ve been quite prolix in some of my recent posts so here’s an attempt to be more concise.  I want to discuss some more of the pictures from Gerhard Richter’s recent ‘Panorama’ Exhibition at Tate Modern but will attempt that in a series of shorter posts rather than one long piece.  Here’s the first.

Gerhard Richter, 'Seascape [Cloudy]', 1969

‘Seascape [Cloudy]’ is one of a series of seascapes that Richter has painted since the late 1960s.  Many share the same square format and generous dimensions, (this one being 200cm X 200cm), and most employ a similar photorealist style with little of the blurring or unfocussing techniques sometimes applied to his photo-derived images.  This picture had an immediate effect on me in the ‘Panorama’ show.  It was not so much for intellectual or technical reasons but rather an emotional response to the hostile, profundity of Richter’s depiction of choppy sea and squally sky.  The thickly clotted cloud, chill, greyed palette and racing waves evoke a bleakly Northern European vision.  For me, this is unmistakably the North Sea.

Caspar David Friedrich, 'Moonrise by the Sea', 1821

Richter has declared a connection with the work of the German Romantic painter - Caspar David Friedrich and there are clear links here with his seascapes and lonely figures overwhelmed by that aesthetic quality of nature known as The Sublime.  Closer examination reveals a strangely precise division at the horizon of Richter's image.  In fact, his seascapes all comprise mismatched sea and sky combinations and this is just the subtlest, most unified instance of that strategy.  Whilst espousing a deeply Romantic mode of Germanic painting, Richter also questions its spiritual credentials by demonstrating how artificially and arbitrarily The Sublime can be constructed in the studio.

Karl Weschke, 'Body in the Atlantic Sea', 1982-1984

Another notable quality of ‘Seascape [Cloudy]’ is that of existential isolation.  The empty sea running to its bottom edge gives no possibility of anything solid beneath our feet, leaving us seemingly lost at sea.  It reminds me of my visit as a student to the exposed West Cornwall studio of another German artist - Karl Weschke and of seeing his painting of a figure floating in an expanse of empty ocean.  Weschke – a volunteer coastguard radio operator, described with passion the experience of calling a Rescue Helicopter home after a futile search for a lost sailor.  It made a powerful impression on me then and still does today.