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Lot Essay
Richter's "Roter Akt" from 1965 is a tantalizing image of a modern housewife. In her bold attempt to appear "sexy" for her husband, the anonymous woman allows herself to be photographed in the nude. Richter heightens this sense of household eroticism by saturating his blurred photorealistic rendering of the intimate scene in a red hot haze. The nude housewife or "girl next door" smiles seductively at the viewer, kneeling in front of a potted plant, which in the kitsch aesthetic of soft-porn magazines, might be used to symbolise the Garden of Eden. The image is significant for its "blurring" of the boundaries between private life and public life. Furthermore, this painting is especially important in the context of Richter's early work since it is an obvious precursor to the series of black-and-white pornographic images that followed two years later.
In an interview with Benjamin Buchloch, Richter discussed his choice of everyday subject matter and interest in snapshot photography: "The motifs were never random; I had to make too much of an effort for that, just to be able to find photos I could use... I looked for photos that showed my actuality, that related to me. And I selected black and white photos because I noticed that they depicted that more forcefully than color photos, more directly, with less artistry, and therefore more believable. That's also the reason why I preferred those amateur family photos, those banal objects and snapshots." (In: R. Nasgaard and I Danoff, "Gerhard Richter: Paintings", London/New York 1988).
Furthermore, the playful candidness of the nude photograph - a game between husband and wife - has been robbed of its spontaneity by the painstakingly precise rendering in oil on canvas. Any sense of subjectivity has been removed from the portrait, making it an anonymous image of any "girl next door". Indeed, the model in "Roter Akt" is more a victim of the disinterested, formally obsessed painter than of the voyeuristic intentions of the photographer. As the first of Richter's pornographic images, the "Roter Akt" is the most conceptual and formally compact, as well as the one in which the artist's perennial concerns with the relationships between the viewer, the painter, the photographer and the model are most interestingly and convincingly probed.
In an interview with Benjamin Buchloch, Richter discussed his choice of everyday subject matter and interest in snapshot photography: "The motifs were never random; I had to make too much of an effort for that, just to be able to find photos I could use... I looked for photos that showed my actuality, that related to me. And I selected black and white photos because I noticed that they depicted that more forcefully than color photos, more directly, with less artistry, and therefore more believable. That's also the reason why I preferred those amateur family photos, those banal objects and snapshots." (In: R. Nasgaard and I Danoff, "Gerhard Richter: Paintings", London/New York 1988).
Furthermore, the playful candidness of the nude photograph - a game between husband and wife - has been robbed of its spontaneity by the painstakingly precise rendering in oil on canvas. Any sense of subjectivity has been removed from the portrait, making it an anonymous image of any "girl next door". Indeed, the model in "Roter Akt" is more a victim of the disinterested, formally obsessed painter than of the voyeuristic intentions of the photographer. As the first of Richter's pornographic images, the "Roter Akt" is the most conceptual and formally compact, as well as the one in which the artist's perennial concerns with the relationships between the viewer, the painter, the photographer and the model are most interestingly and convincingly probed.