Lot Essay
This work is registered at the Gerhard Richter Archive under no. 147-4
In 1967, Richter painted a series of black and white nudes from pornographic photographs. The alienation of the artist is effected in these pictures both by the medium and by the subject matter. The overt sexuality of the pictures is illusory, the provocative poses adopted by the women are a lie. Meanwhile the transfer of photograph to painting removes the spontaneity essential to the photograph and does not replace it with any opposing painterly quality.
Richter's aim in the work based on photographs was to reduce the role of the artist to choosing the format, cutting out and enlarging the material and treating the surface of the picture on the canvas. His goal was to remove the subjectivity inherent in the act of painting.
The blurred image of Small Reclining Nude and others in the series is intended to convey a fleeting impression, the indistinctness of the snapshot, a closing off and a detachment from the subject matter. As Hilden says: "The medium remains hermetically sealed off from the phenomenon it represents." Furthermore, the nude is herself closed off from the viewer. She is dwarfed by the height of the background which does not protect her but rather threatens her pallid vulnerability with its regimented pattern and heavy shadowing. It is impossible to see whether she is maintaining eye contact with the viewer; Richter has deliberately introduced an element of alienating doubt by blurring her face to obliterate the possible relationship between sitter and spectator. Her pose is much less lubricious than that of the other nudes of 1967 and this restraint also serves to make the model seem more an unwilling victim of the painter/photographer's voyeurism.
In 1967 Richter painted a full length portrait of a woman in underwear titled Olympia. Hilden associates this painting not only with the Greek myth of Olympia but also to Manet's famous nude of the same name. Small Reclining Nude has much more similarity to the Impressionist painting than the one for which the German artist has borrowed the title. The differences between the two are such as to emphasise the defencelessness of the later nude's pose. Manet's Olympia is composed and defiant, she maintains confident eye-contact with the audience, and has the support of her serving maid to reinforce the strength of her position. Richter's unsettling nude seems to be trying on the contrary to protect her body from the painter's eye. Far from being supported by accolytes, she is isolated and diminished by her surroundings. This is the most thoughful of Richter's pornographic paintings and the one in which his perennial concerns with the relationships between the spectator, painter, photographer and sitter are most interestingly probed.
In 1967, Richter painted a series of black and white nudes from pornographic photographs. The alienation of the artist is effected in these pictures both by the medium and by the subject matter. The overt sexuality of the pictures is illusory, the provocative poses adopted by the women are a lie. Meanwhile the transfer of photograph to painting removes the spontaneity essential to the photograph and does not replace it with any opposing painterly quality.
Richter's aim in the work based on photographs was to reduce the role of the artist to choosing the format, cutting out and enlarging the material and treating the surface of the picture on the canvas. His goal was to remove the subjectivity inherent in the act of painting.
The blurred image of Small Reclining Nude and others in the series is intended to convey a fleeting impression, the indistinctness of the snapshot, a closing off and a detachment from the subject matter. As Hilden says: "The medium remains hermetically sealed off from the phenomenon it represents." Furthermore, the nude is herself closed off from the viewer. She is dwarfed by the height of the background which does not protect her but rather threatens her pallid vulnerability with its regimented pattern and heavy shadowing. It is impossible to see whether she is maintaining eye contact with the viewer; Richter has deliberately introduced an element of alienating doubt by blurring her face to obliterate the possible relationship between sitter and spectator. Her pose is much less lubricious than that of the other nudes of 1967 and this restraint also serves to make the model seem more an unwilling victim of the painter/photographer's voyeurism.
In 1967 Richter painted a full length portrait of a woman in underwear titled Olympia. Hilden associates this painting not only with the Greek myth of Olympia but also to Manet's famous nude of the same name. Small Reclining Nude has much more similarity to the Impressionist painting than the one for which the German artist has borrowed the title. The differences between the two are such as to emphasise the defencelessness of the later nude's pose. Manet's Olympia is composed and defiant, she maintains confident eye-contact with the audience, and has the support of her serving maid to reinforce the strength of her position. Richter's unsettling nude seems to be trying on the contrary to protect her body from the painter's eye. Far from being supported by accolytes, she is isolated and diminished by her surroundings. This is the most thoughful of Richter's pornographic paintings and the one in which his perennial concerns with the relationships between the spectator, painter, photographer and sitter are most interestingly probed.