拍品专文
Without question Wolken (Fenster), 1970 is among Richter's most beautiful, and most important cloud paintings. A work of extraordinary physical appeal, it is also extremely sophisticated--a masterpiece for the mind as well as the eye. The special importance Richter attached to the work is signaled by two distinguishing characteristics: its size--it is the largest of all the cloud paintings; and its title--the addition of the word Fenster (Window) points to key elements in Richter's conception of his painting. Wolken (Fenster) typifies both Richter's Neo-Romantic idealism and his wry and ironic historicism; it is the interplay of these two tendencies that gives his works their distinctive charge.
Any account of Wolken (Fenster) must begin with its sheer visual power. It is a rapturously sumptuous work, refulgent with light, and energized by the dynamic arabesques formed by the outlines of the clouds. The palette, made of gold, azure and ivory, is cool and soothing and the filtered light is luminous, auric and pleasing. The scale of the piece is integral to its effect. At two by four meters, it is far larger than any traditional easel painting; its exceptional size is meant to suggest both the panoramic vistas of nature, and the monumental scale of architecture.
Wolken (Fenster) is among Richter's most direct evocations of the Northern Romantic tradition, and especially of the art of Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich and other German Romantic artists sought to infuse landscape with a degree of sublimity traditionally reserved for religious subjects. As Goethe once wrote about the Alps, "I felt myself exalted by this overflowing fullness to the perception of the Godhead, and the glorious forms of the infinite universe stirred within my soul!" Friedrich and others tried to capture this kind of experience in paint; they abandoned the structured format of the classic landscape and instead depicted vistas whose immense scale and relative emptiness suggested infinitude and purity. Richter has paid devout hommage to this ideal, adopting the characteristic subjects of German Romantic landscapes--icebergs, skyscapes, the Alps--as a program for his own work as a painter. The icy palette and formal purity of Wolken (Fenster) reinforce his links to this tradition. Moreover, since they represent the sky, Richter's cloud paintings are sublime and heavenly in a literal way. By their scale, beauty and emptiness, they provide the viewer with a kind of exalted absorption in supernal grandeur that was the chief goal of German Romantic landscape painting. As Friedrich's disciple, Carl Gustav Carus wrote in his Neun briefe uber Ladnscahftsmalerei:
When man, sensing the immense magnficence of nature, feels his own insignificance, and feeling himself to be in God, enters into this infinity and abandons his individual existence, then his surrender is gain rather than loss. What otherwise only the mind's eye sees, here becomes almost literally visible: the oneness in the infinity of the universe. (ed., L. Eitner, "Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 1750-1850," Sources and Documents, II, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1970, p. 48)
One way painters in the nineteenth century sought to achieve such effects was by creating immense, panoramic pictures of prodigious, awe-inspiring natural sites; an example is Frederic Church's enormous painting of Niagra Falls. The scale of Wolken (Fenster) is meant to recall such works.
Richter, however, is working at the end of a tradition, not at its start, and he brings to his Romantic pictures a heightened awarness of history, aesthetics and psychology. In the present work, his meditative, self-consciousness about the act of making art is manifest in the inclusion of the word Fenster in the title and in the inclusion of white framing elements around each of the panels. The idea that one is looking through a multi-panel window to see this majestic spectacle of nature changes everything. Some of the associations that arise are as follows.
First, the multi-panel format specifically recalls the polyptych, the standard altarpiece type from circa 1300 to circa 1500. This serves to reinforce the notion that the Romantic vision is a sacralization of nature. Second, the metaphor of nature observed through a window has been a standard part of the definition of painting since Alberti's De Pictura of circa 1433. Third, the viewer's consciousness of the window sets off a number of polarities: interior/exterior, natural/man-made, subject/object and so on. Moreover, one such polarity is absorption/self-consciousness, and this polarity accurately describes the psychological reality of gazing at anything beautiful, whether in art or in nature. Confronted with something as visually stunning as Wolken (Fenster), the viewer becomes wholly absorbed, lost in contemplation of the sublime, just as Romantic painters hoped. But such intense absorption is momentary, self-consciousness returns almost instantaneously: the viewer's attention oscillates between the work itself and his own reactions to it. This was a psychological truth that Friedrich and his peers did not acknowledge.
Furthermore, the presence of the window makes the viewer aware that he is seeing the natural spectacle through a medium, and that no matter how mimetic and realistic the representation is, it is still a simulacrum. Richter's paintings, which are made on the basis of photographs, consistently raise such questions.
Richter's work is ironic, and intensely so; but his is a noble and nostalgic irony, in no way aligned with the scornful nihilism and shallow opportunism of the Deconstructionists.
Any account of Wolken (Fenster) must begin with its sheer visual power. It is a rapturously sumptuous work, refulgent with light, and energized by the dynamic arabesques formed by the outlines of the clouds. The palette, made of gold, azure and ivory, is cool and soothing and the filtered light is luminous, auric and pleasing. The scale of the piece is integral to its effect. At two by four meters, it is far larger than any traditional easel painting; its exceptional size is meant to suggest both the panoramic vistas of nature, and the monumental scale of architecture.
Wolken (Fenster) is among Richter's most direct evocations of the Northern Romantic tradition, and especially of the art of Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich and other German Romantic artists sought to infuse landscape with a degree of sublimity traditionally reserved for religious subjects. As Goethe once wrote about the Alps, "I felt myself exalted by this overflowing fullness to the perception of the Godhead, and the glorious forms of the infinite universe stirred within my soul!" Friedrich and others tried to capture this kind of experience in paint; they abandoned the structured format of the classic landscape and instead depicted vistas whose immense scale and relative emptiness suggested infinitude and purity. Richter has paid devout hommage to this ideal, adopting the characteristic subjects of German Romantic landscapes--icebergs, skyscapes, the Alps--as a program for his own work as a painter. The icy palette and formal purity of Wolken (Fenster) reinforce his links to this tradition. Moreover, since they represent the sky, Richter's cloud paintings are sublime and heavenly in a literal way. By their scale, beauty and emptiness, they provide the viewer with a kind of exalted absorption in supernal grandeur that was the chief goal of German Romantic landscape painting. As Friedrich's disciple, Carl Gustav Carus wrote in his Neun briefe uber Ladnscahftsmalerei:
When man, sensing the immense magnficence of nature, feels his own insignificance, and feeling himself to be in God, enters into this infinity and abandons his individual existence, then his surrender is gain rather than loss. What otherwise only the mind's eye sees, here becomes almost literally visible: the oneness in the infinity of the universe. (ed., L. Eitner, "Neoclassicism and Romanticism, 1750-1850," Sources and Documents, II, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1970, p. 48)
One way painters in the nineteenth century sought to achieve such effects was by creating immense, panoramic pictures of prodigious, awe-inspiring natural sites; an example is Frederic Church's enormous painting of Niagra Falls. The scale of Wolken (Fenster) is meant to recall such works.
Richter, however, is working at the end of a tradition, not at its start, and he brings to his Romantic pictures a heightened awarness of history, aesthetics and psychology. In the present work, his meditative, self-consciousness about the act of making art is manifest in the inclusion of the word Fenster in the title and in the inclusion of white framing elements around each of the panels. The idea that one is looking through a multi-panel window to see this majestic spectacle of nature changes everything. Some of the associations that arise are as follows.
First, the multi-panel format specifically recalls the polyptych, the standard altarpiece type from circa 1300 to circa 1500. This serves to reinforce the notion that the Romantic vision is a sacralization of nature. Second, the metaphor of nature observed through a window has been a standard part of the definition of painting since Alberti's De Pictura of circa 1433. Third, the viewer's consciousness of the window sets off a number of polarities: interior/exterior, natural/man-made, subject/object and so on. Moreover, one such polarity is absorption/self-consciousness, and this polarity accurately describes the psychological reality of gazing at anything beautiful, whether in art or in nature. Confronted with something as visually stunning as Wolken (Fenster), the viewer becomes wholly absorbed, lost in contemplation of the sublime, just as Romantic painters hoped. But such intense absorption is momentary, self-consciousness returns almost instantaneously: the viewer's attention oscillates between the work itself and his own reactions to it. This was a psychological truth that Friedrich and his peers did not acknowledge.
Furthermore, the presence of the window makes the viewer aware that he is seeing the natural spectacle through a medium, and that no matter how mimetic and realistic the representation is, it is still a simulacrum. Richter's paintings, which are made on the basis of photographs, consistently raise such questions.
Richter's work is ironic, and intensely so; but his is a noble and nostalgic irony, in no way aligned with the scornful nihilism and shallow opportunism of the Deconstructionists.