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Lot Essay
Schärzler is one of a rare but important group of paintings of military aircraft that Richter painted in the early 1960s. An apparently objective representation of a German air force fighter jet Schärzler is one of the artist's blurred photographic paintings. Drawn, seemingly at random from a contemporary newspaper cutting, its subject matter is in fact deeply contentious. It was executed at the height of Richter's involvement with the pseudo art movement "Capitalist Realism" and is, despite its apparent distance and objectivity, a deeply provocative work aimed at probing the consciousness of the West German society within which (and perhaps for which) it was made.
Richter himself has often denied the clearly contentious nature of much of his imagery from these early years. He has claimed that his choice of subject matter, though selected with great care and attention towards its aesthetic and pictorial value, was never chosen with regard to its social or political implications. His decision to paint photographic pictures of friends, family and other figures from the Nazi era at a time when Germany was trying to overcome the collective guilt of its past, throws this apparent disinterest into question. Richter's early 1960s paintings of Hitler, his Uncle Rudi in Wehrmacht uniform, his Aunt Marianne (a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program) and Werner Heyde, a Nazi neurologist unmasked and arrested while living under an alias in West Germany in 1959, cannot surely have been painted without an awareness of their provocative content. Likewise, his paintings of World War II Stukas (1964) and a Mustang Squadron (1964), of American Bombers (1963), Phantom Interceptors (1964) as well as Schärzler all suggest that Richter knowingly aimed to employ the impersonal 'distance' of his supposedly objective and disinterested images as a tool to prick the fragile bubble of West Germany's conscience. For Richter made these aircraft paintings at a time when the country was not only attempting to emerge from the militaristic ghosts of its past but also when it was immersed in a fierce political battle at the heart of the Cold War. The image of bombers, all carried with them a pervasive and unnerving sense of political weight. With their country culturally and militarily dominated by the Western powers, West Germans were deeply concerned at this time about its being used by the Allied Powers as a NATO airforce base as well as their own government's rearmament against the powers of the Warsaw pact. Schärzler - a painting of a newspaper cutting depicting a jet - is a work that, despite its seeming banality and ordinariness, would have pricked West Germans' political sensibilities as inevitably as Richter's October 18 1977 series was to do over twenty years later.
In an interview in 1990, the critic Sabine Schultz suggested to Richter that his paintings of military aircraft like Schärzler were in fact anti-war pictures, a suggestion Richter keenly refuted, pointing out the ultimate impotence of such imagery. 'Pictures like that don't do anything to combat war", he replied, "They only show one tiny aspect of the subject of war - maybe my own childish feelings of fear and fascination with war and weapons of that kind." ("Interview with Sabine Schultz" Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, 1995 p. 212) Any power, resonance or meaning that these works have derives solely from their absence of agenda and their distanced objectivity. It is only by being completely unpartisan, unjudgmental and indifferent to the subjects they convey or the emotions they might stir, that they establish their validity and meaning. It is for this same reason that Richter paints from photographs for the photograph is supposedly "the only picture that tells the absolute truth," because it sees "objectively". As a consequence of this, the photograph "usually gets believed", Richter says, "even where it is technically faulty and the content is barely identifiable...The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing and in what it informs of." (Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting, ed.Hans-Ulrich Obrist. London, 1995 p. 31-33)
For this reason a photograph of a scrap of newspaper wields more 'objective' power than any painting ever can. As Richter has pointed out, "A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone." (Interview with Dieter Hülsmanns and Fridolin Reske, 1966, Ibid. p. 57.) The indifference of a photograph, its distance, neutrality and above all its supposed facticity allow it to act in a way a painting never can. In this work--a painting of a photograph reproduced on a scrap of newspaper--Richter not only exposes these qualities to scrutiny but he does so with a provocative image that strikes at the heart of his contemporary audience's anxiety. Richter's own fascination is with the nature of representation, but he can engage his audience with this fascination through the rendering of supposedly objective images that seemingly by accident, become highly provocative and troubling.
Such provocation was a part of Richter and his fellow 'Capitalist Realists' ironic stance towards widespread contemporary fears about the process then known as 'Americanization'. A subject of particular concern in 1960s West Germany, 'Americanization' was the term given to the political and military changes being wrought within the country and to the new media saturation that flaunted Western Capitalism's consumerist values in the face of the Federal Republic's less affluent socialist neighbour, the GDR. In selecting often shocking or provocative photographs self evidently pulled from extracts in the newspapers as well as other contemporary media, Richter was challenging his viewers to re-evaluate how they perceive the supposed 'objective' truth of the images they see in the media. An opponent of all ideology and belief having experienced at first hand both Nazi and Soviet regimes, Richter used the supposed neutrality of the photographic image as a way of avoiding all ideological precepts in his own work. He also uses the inherent lie of photography's supposed objectivity and the inherent ambiguity of his own work (painting from photographs) to undermine the build-up of ideology in other areas of life. Richter's anti-ideological battle is a struggle against all certainty and the narrowing of truth.
Richter himself has often denied the clearly contentious nature of much of his imagery from these early years. He has claimed that his choice of subject matter, though selected with great care and attention towards its aesthetic and pictorial value, was never chosen with regard to its social or political implications. His decision to paint photographic pictures of friends, family and other figures from the Nazi era at a time when Germany was trying to overcome the collective guilt of its past, throws this apparent disinterest into question. Richter's early 1960s paintings of Hitler, his Uncle Rudi in Wehrmacht uniform, his Aunt Marianne (a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program) and Werner Heyde, a Nazi neurologist unmasked and arrested while living under an alias in West Germany in 1959, cannot surely have been painted without an awareness of their provocative content. Likewise, his paintings of World War II Stukas (1964) and a Mustang Squadron (1964), of American Bombers (1963), Phantom Interceptors (1964) as well as Schärzler all suggest that Richter knowingly aimed to employ the impersonal 'distance' of his supposedly objective and disinterested images as a tool to prick the fragile bubble of West Germany's conscience. For Richter made these aircraft paintings at a time when the country was not only attempting to emerge from the militaristic ghosts of its past but also when it was immersed in a fierce political battle at the heart of the Cold War. The image of bombers, all carried with them a pervasive and unnerving sense of political weight. With their country culturally and militarily dominated by the Western powers, West Germans were deeply concerned at this time about its being used by the Allied Powers as a NATO airforce base as well as their own government's rearmament against the powers of the Warsaw pact. Schärzler - a painting of a newspaper cutting depicting a jet - is a work that, despite its seeming banality and ordinariness, would have pricked West Germans' political sensibilities as inevitably as Richter's October 18 1977 series was to do over twenty years later.
In an interview in 1990, the critic Sabine Schultz suggested to Richter that his paintings of military aircraft like Schärzler were in fact anti-war pictures, a suggestion Richter keenly refuted, pointing out the ultimate impotence of such imagery. 'Pictures like that don't do anything to combat war", he replied, "They only show one tiny aspect of the subject of war - maybe my own childish feelings of fear and fascination with war and weapons of that kind." ("Interview with Sabine Schultz" Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, 1995 p. 212) Any power, resonance or meaning that these works have derives solely from their absence of agenda and their distanced objectivity. It is only by being completely unpartisan, unjudgmental and indifferent to the subjects they convey or the emotions they might stir, that they establish their validity and meaning. It is for this same reason that Richter paints from photographs for the photograph is supposedly "the only picture that tells the absolute truth," because it sees "objectively". As a consequence of this, the photograph "usually gets believed", Richter says, "even where it is technically faulty and the content is barely identifiable...The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing and in what it informs of." (Gerhard Richter. The Daily Practice of Painting, ed.Hans-Ulrich Obrist. London, 1995 p. 31-33)
For this reason a photograph of a scrap of newspaper wields more 'objective' power than any painting ever can. As Richter has pointed out, "A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone." (Interview with Dieter Hülsmanns and Fridolin Reske, 1966, Ibid. p. 57.) The indifference of a photograph, its distance, neutrality and above all its supposed facticity allow it to act in a way a painting never can. In this work--a painting of a photograph reproduced on a scrap of newspaper--Richter not only exposes these qualities to scrutiny but he does so with a provocative image that strikes at the heart of his contemporary audience's anxiety. Richter's own fascination is with the nature of representation, but he can engage his audience with this fascination through the rendering of supposedly objective images that seemingly by accident, become highly provocative and troubling.
Such provocation was a part of Richter and his fellow 'Capitalist Realists' ironic stance towards widespread contemporary fears about the process then known as 'Americanization'. A subject of particular concern in 1960s West Germany, 'Americanization' was the term given to the political and military changes being wrought within the country and to the new media saturation that flaunted Western Capitalism's consumerist values in the face of the Federal Republic's less affluent socialist neighbour, the GDR. In selecting often shocking or provocative photographs self evidently pulled from extracts in the newspapers as well as other contemporary media, Richter was challenging his viewers to re-evaluate how they perceive the supposed 'objective' truth of the images they see in the media. An opponent of all ideology and belief having experienced at first hand both Nazi and Soviet regimes, Richter used the supposed neutrality of the photographic image as a way of avoiding all ideological precepts in his own work. He also uses the inherent lie of photography's supposed objectivity and the inherent ambiguity of his own work (painting from photographs) to undermine the build-up of ideology in other areas of life. Richter's anti-ideological battle is a struggle against all certainty and the narrowing of truth.