‘The landscapes are a kind of longing’ — Gerhard Richter’s Schober (Haybarn), 1984

The year 1984 was a decisive one for Gerhard Richter. In Düsseldorf, curator Kasper König assembled 68 artists for the exhibition Von hier aus (‘From here on’). The neutral subtitle Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf (‘Two months of new German art in Düsseldorf’) did not reveal that the Düsseldorf exhibition hall was not only the stage for the first major appearance of a younger generation of artists, but above all the venue for the competition for the leading role in German painting, as this position had not yet been clearly assigned.

Among the candidates were Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, Sigmar Polke and Richter; they had all attracted attention beyond Germany in the years before.

How seriously Richter took this exhibition was evident in the fact that he painted nine large-format abstract pictures for it and, as a complement, two smaller pictures based on photographs, Schober (Haybarn) and Scheune (Barn).

Richter had made a name for himself in the 1960s by painting from photographs. However, in the late 1970s and especially in the early 1980s, he became deeply involved with abstract painting and achieved surprising results. This new practice of painting soon came to dominate Richter's oeuvre. So the pictures based on photographs that Richter painted in the 1980s, as a counterpoint to abstraction, now attracted all the more attention.

In 1981, these were mist-shrouded mountain landscapes; in 1982, the intimate candles; in 1983, still lifes with skulls; and shortly thereafter, landscapes with haystacks and barns, for which Richter chose as templates photographs from an excursion to the Bayerischer Wald.

In an interview, he described his working method: ‘I paint landscapes or still lifes between the abstract works. They make up about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand, they are useful because I like to work from nature — although I naturally use a photograph — because I believe that every detail from nature has a logic that I would also like to see in abstraction. On the other hand, painting from nature or painting still lifes is a distraction and creates a balance. I could also say that the landscapes are a kind of longing, longing for an undamaged, simple life. A bit nostalgic.’

As often in his interviews, Richter tried to downplay these landscapes and distract from their deeper meaning. Yet their creation alone, and this applies especially to Schober (Haybarn), sets them apart from the normal progression of his work.

Richter always painted abstract pictures in groups, moving from one picture to another and developing them in correspondence with each other. With the landscapes, on the other hand, it was about concentrating on a single picture that he had selected from hundreds of photographs he had taken himself and now transferred to the canvas. What fascinated him in selecting the motif could not be expressed in words; only in the painting process, it became clear that there was something touching in the inconspicuous.

‘When I used such banal everyday photos for pictures,’ he said. ‘I wanted to bring out the quality, i.e. the message of these photos, and show what one otherwise fundamentally overlooks in the small photo. They are not seen as art; but when you transport them into art, they gain dignity and are noticed. That was the trick or the concern in using these photos.’

Schober (Haybarn) is one of four pictures with similar motifs. While in two of them a barn is centrally placed in the image, the sunlit haystack lies somewhat distant, embedded in the darkness of the trees and set off in the foreground by a shadow area from direct access. In a landscape existing solely for itself, this simple structure sets a sign of human presence, of something familiar and homely.

Richter’s landscapes were often compared with German Romanticism, but this does not really apply to Schober (Haybarn), because Richter renounces any glorification or transfiguration and draws the painting’s effect solely from the subtle change that he produces through the blurring of contours.

Thus the picture becomes transformed from the present to the remembered, from the real to the imagined. As Richter said, the landscapes in their unbroken beauty appeared ‘almost like quotations’, and in contrast to abstraction, which is brought directly and really onto the canvas, they are ‘more of a dream’.

But there was not only melancholy in this; Richter also connected hope with painterly beauty: ‘For me, there is no reason to think, that’s done with, or we have other concerns, other beauties. This painting is in the process of fetching a future for itself, working it out, suggesting it.’

Richter was to be proven right; from Düsseldorf, Schober (Haybarn) and Scheune (Barn) travelled to New York, where they were immediately acquired by the collector couples Jerry and Emily Spiegel and Arthur and Carol Goldberg, clear proof of who had taken now the lead in European painting.

Gerhard Richter, co-curated by Dieter Schwarz, is at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris until 2 March 2026

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