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Lot Essay
Shimmering layers of silver oil paint form a patina-like encasement over Abstraktes Bild’s surface, almost fully cloaking a ground populated with bright yellow, red, and blue pigments. The glossy sheen of the grayish topmost layer provides a uniformly smooth texture only momentarily interrupted by divots in which color appears. Color is concealed and revealed to the viewer in this important abstract work by Gerhard Richter in an analogous way to which the artist worked his canvas, inventing a novel form of abstraction which continues to exert a strong influence on contemporary art.
The present work arises from 1990, a critical year in Richter’s life linking the artist’s emergence to his mature career. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter grew up in Nazi Germany. Assimilated into the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic after the war, Richter was trained in socialist realism at the Kunstakademie before rejecting what he termed the East’s “grandiloquent delusions” and moving to West Germany. The artist was introduced to abstraction with works by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana at Documenta II, and his early work explored how the reintroduction of figuration into the abstract avant-garde could confront Germany’s barbaric historic past while also experimenting with works of pure abstraction. These efforts culminated in 1988 in the painted series 18. Oktober 1977. In these fifteen paintings based off photocopies of original photographs showing the lives and deaths of four young political radicals who died in police custody, Richter employs slurred and murky motifs in shades of gray to comment on the inability of paintings to provide accurate representations of history.
Richter himself realized the importance of this series which marked a caesura in his oeuvre, commenting in 1989 that “I realize that these pictures set a new standard, set a challenge to me. I may be deceiving myself. It’s all still too fresh. But one thing I have realized; it’s hard for me to go on painting” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné Volume 4; Nos. 652-1-806-6, 1988-1994, Dresden, 2014, p. 20). Completed the next year, the present lot is the product of Richter’s challenge, its canvas an experimental space in which he first devises and articulates the methods and sentiments which will echo in later Abstraktes Bilds until his retirement from painting in 2017.
While Richter had previously worked with a squeegee to abrade paint surfaces, using a brush only to apply the ground and layer highlights of pigment, the artist introduces here the spatula as a co-equal tool to the squeegee, which he uses to interrupt the outer silver layers and reveal earlier layers of color. The work’s brooding atmosphere begotten by the dominant leaden grays follows from his Oktober series, which relies on a similarly restricted palette. Richter laid individual layers of paint over each other in a patchwork “method of working with randomness, chance, sudden inspiration, and destruction” (G. Richter, quoted in op. cit, p. 21). The artist sought to give this random product a formal structure with the use of a spatula, with which he would interrupt the grayish destruction of the topmost layer to create more controlled phases of impasto. The final composition emerges through an alteration between coincidence and planning, each layer of paint an artistic intervention calling to question the previous stroke. Speaking of his new abstraction in 1990, Richter said “they should, by all means, be smarter than me. I no longer have to be able to follow them completely. They have to be something that I no longer understand entirely. As long as I comprehend them theoretically, they are boring” (op. cit.). The resultant work achieves a painterly density and seriousness which echo the aura of the Oktober cycle.
Abstraktes Bild provides a record on canvas of Richter’s own internal anguish over his favored artistic medium. In his diary, the artist would oscillate rapidly between almost diametrically opposed sentiments—a despairing Weltschmerz and a high idealism. “Art is a pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God,” Richter wrote, ten days after writing that “art is wretched, cynical, stupid, helpless, confusing—a mirror-image of our own spiritual impoverishment” (G. Richter, quoted in John Ganz, “Faust Forward,” Artforum Vol. 61, No. 9, May 2023). Richter’s bipolarity parallels German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche’s concept of The Apollonian and Dionysian, in which the duality between these two seemingly-opposed kunsttriebe achieves ideal art. The Dionysian represents disorder, emotion, and ecstasy, and can be seen in action through Richter’s use of the squeegee, producing arbitrary destructions which coalesce with his melancholic attitude towards art’s wretched and cynical aspects. The Apollonian embodies harmony, progress, clarity, and logic, and is symbolized by Richter’s use of the spatula, inserting planning and control back into the composition. Nietzsche theorizes in The Birth of Tragedy that only the fertile interplay of these two forces could generate the best exempla of Greek tragedy; these same forces collide both metaphysically within Richter and physically on the tableau, swinging like a pendulum between harmony and disorder as the artist moves from squeegeed chaos to spatula-created order. Only upon canvas are Richter’s contradictory statements on painting, that it is both a “pure realization” and “spiritual impoverishment,” firmly resolved.
The present lot perfectly captures Richter’s tumult as he dwelt on the continued validity of painting, made just as the artist reached maturity at the end of his personal Künstlerroman. Abstraktes Bild is significant for emerging just as Richter making in his words “more adult” work, the drama laid out by paint on canvas the first joust between the melancholic and the ideal which plays out across the rest of his oeuvre (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter, Painting, 2011, documentary film). The foundations of Richter’s esteemed mature period beckons within this lot’s mesmerizing passages.
The present work arises from 1990, a critical year in Richter’s life linking the artist’s emergence to his mature career. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter grew up in Nazi Germany. Assimilated into the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic after the war, Richter was trained in socialist realism at the Kunstakademie before rejecting what he termed the East’s “grandiloquent delusions” and moving to West Germany. The artist was introduced to abstraction with works by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana at Documenta II, and his early work explored how the reintroduction of figuration into the abstract avant-garde could confront Germany’s barbaric historic past while also experimenting with works of pure abstraction. These efforts culminated in 1988 in the painted series 18. Oktober 1977. In these fifteen paintings based off photocopies of original photographs showing the lives and deaths of four young political radicals who died in police custody, Richter employs slurred and murky motifs in shades of gray to comment on the inability of paintings to provide accurate representations of history.
Richter himself realized the importance of this series which marked a caesura in his oeuvre, commenting in 1989 that “I realize that these pictures set a new standard, set a challenge to me. I may be deceiving myself. It’s all still too fresh. But one thing I have realized; it’s hard for me to go on painting” (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné Volume 4; Nos. 652-1-806-6, 1988-1994, Dresden, 2014, p. 20). Completed the next year, the present lot is the product of Richter’s challenge, its canvas an experimental space in which he first devises and articulates the methods and sentiments which will echo in later Abstraktes Bilds until his retirement from painting in 2017.
While Richter had previously worked with a squeegee to abrade paint surfaces, using a brush only to apply the ground and layer highlights of pigment, the artist introduces here the spatula as a co-equal tool to the squeegee, which he uses to interrupt the outer silver layers and reveal earlier layers of color. The work’s brooding atmosphere begotten by the dominant leaden grays follows from his Oktober series, which relies on a similarly restricted palette. Richter laid individual layers of paint over each other in a patchwork “method of working with randomness, chance, sudden inspiration, and destruction” (G. Richter, quoted in op. cit, p. 21). The artist sought to give this random product a formal structure with the use of a spatula, with which he would interrupt the grayish destruction of the topmost layer to create more controlled phases of impasto. The final composition emerges through an alteration between coincidence and planning, each layer of paint an artistic intervention calling to question the previous stroke. Speaking of his new abstraction in 1990, Richter said “they should, by all means, be smarter than me. I no longer have to be able to follow them completely. They have to be something that I no longer understand entirely. As long as I comprehend them theoretically, they are boring” (op. cit.). The resultant work achieves a painterly density and seriousness which echo the aura of the Oktober cycle.
Abstraktes Bild provides a record on canvas of Richter’s own internal anguish over his favored artistic medium. In his diary, the artist would oscillate rapidly between almost diametrically opposed sentiments—a despairing Weltschmerz and a high idealism. “Art is a pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God,” Richter wrote, ten days after writing that “art is wretched, cynical, stupid, helpless, confusing—a mirror-image of our own spiritual impoverishment” (G. Richter, quoted in John Ganz, “Faust Forward,” Artforum Vol. 61, No. 9, May 2023). Richter’s bipolarity parallels German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche’s concept of The Apollonian and Dionysian, in which the duality between these two seemingly-opposed kunsttriebe achieves ideal art. The Dionysian represents disorder, emotion, and ecstasy, and can be seen in action through Richter’s use of the squeegee, producing arbitrary destructions which coalesce with his melancholic attitude towards art’s wretched and cynical aspects. The Apollonian embodies harmony, progress, clarity, and logic, and is symbolized by Richter’s use of the spatula, inserting planning and control back into the composition. Nietzsche theorizes in The Birth of Tragedy that only the fertile interplay of these two forces could generate the best exempla of Greek tragedy; these same forces collide both metaphysically within Richter and physically on the tableau, swinging like a pendulum between harmony and disorder as the artist moves from squeegeed chaos to spatula-created order. Only upon canvas are Richter’s contradictory statements on painting, that it is both a “pure realization” and “spiritual impoverishment,” firmly resolved.
The present lot perfectly captures Richter’s tumult as he dwelt on the continued validity of painting, made just as the artist reached maturity at the end of his personal Künstlerroman. Abstraktes Bild is significant for emerging just as Richter making in his words “more adult” work, the drama laid out by paint on canvas the first joust between the melancholic and the ideal which plays out across the rest of his oeuvre (G. Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter, Painting, 2011, documentary film). The foundations of Richter’s esteemed mature period beckons within this lot’s mesmerizing passages.