.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘If the Abstract Pictures show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning’ (Gerhard Richter)
Acquired directly from the artist the year it was painted, Tulpen (Tulips) (1995) is a rare and beautiful floral still life by Gerhard Richter. It belongs to a series of photo-paintings of flowers Richter made during the 1990s, four of which are held in major museum collections, and was itself recently on long-term loan to the Belvedere in Vienna. The work depicts a vase of yellow tulips, based on a photograph taken by Richter and softly blurred in his characteristic style. It is both luminous and poignant, calling up the ghosts of art history in a meditation on our relationship with painting, photographs and the passage of time. Tulpen has been exhibited widely since its creation, appearing in Gerhard Richter. 100 Pictures at the Carré d’Art, musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes (1996); Richter’s major German retrospective that travelled from Düsseldorf to Munich (2005); a survey of contemporary German painting at the Museu de Arte Moderno de São Paulo (2010-2011); two exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2011, 2012-2013); and the Belvedere’s celebration of flower painting Say it with Flowers! Viennese Flower Painting from Waldmüller to Klimt (2018).
Richter has been investigating the truth-claims of painting and photography since the 1960s. For him they are equally unreliable as ways of comprehending reality: both no more than arrangements of colour which, examined closely, dissolve into abstraction. He has probed these ideas in varied and complex ways across the decades. His first photo-paintings drew upon newsprint and historical sources, examining post-war Germany’s image of itself. His earliest ‘abstract’ works of the 1970s were in fact photo-paintings of close-up brushstrokes: they appear abstract but are representations of things. His squeegeed Abstrakte Bilder, begun the following decade, engaged with chance, attempting to liberate the painting from any predetermined form. Throughout his career he has continued to pursue photo-paintings in parallel to his abstract works. Their blurred uncertainty brings the figurative image into question, highlighting its inherently illusory nature.
Richter’s photo-paintings encompass an almost endless diversity of source imagery, from press clippings to family snapshots and drive-by photographs of landscapes. Tulpen belongs to a subset that consciously echo art-historical motifs. These include his beloved Lesende (Reader) (1994)—a depiction of his wife, Sabine, which recalls the reading women painted by Johannes Vermeer—and his Schädel (Skulls) and Kerzen (Candles) of the 1980s, which conjure the vanitas still-lifes of the Dutch Golden Age. His floral paintings evoke the same genre, wherein flowers—beautiful, but inevitably fading—are used as symbols for the transience of life itself. Richter’s blurring technique heightens this elegiac quality. Tulpen’s photographic sheen dissolves in a sweep of streaked brushstrokes, and the picture slips out of our grasp. No longer simply a metaphor for earthly vanity, these flowers seem to represent the death of painting’s innocence.
Tulips are a historically loaded subject. Cultivated in Persia for over a thousand years, they were introduced to the Netherlands from the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century. They were greatly admired for their beauty, and their trade mounted to a frenzy known as ‘tulip mania’ or tulpenmanie during the 1630s, peaking before an abrupt market crash in 1637. Wealthy buyers fought for the rarest varieties, sometimes paying gargantuan sums for a single bulb—all in pursuit of a flower that bloomed for around a week during springtime. The tulip’s symbolic presence in the vanitas still life has become all the more potent in retrospect. Richter places these echoes at the service of a conceptual commentary on painting itself. Spotlit by the flash of the camera, the yellow petals shine briefly against the background’s darkness.
Tulpen also speaks to more personal preoccupations. The mid-1990s saw rising international acclaim for Richter: a major European retrospective toured Europe across 1993 and 1994, and his fifteen-canvas cycle October 18, 1977 (1988) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1995. His abstract output was prolific, becoming increasingly exuberant in colour and complexity. During the same year Richter married Sabine Moritz, whom he had met in 1994. He painted S. mit Kind (S. with Child) (1995), a group of eight pictures now held in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, which show her holding their newborn son. Drawn from his own photographs of the family’s innermost private life, these are among the most intimate images of Richter’s oeuvre. Tulpen complements their reflection on the preciousness of life and love.
Richter painted two versions of Tulpen in 1995, both derived from the same photograph: the present work features a more pronounced blur than its counterpart. This practice of doubling was especially common in Richter’s mid-1990s photo-paintings. He also painted two versions of Lesende, another pair of flower still-lifes in 1994, and two self-portraits in 1996. Such pendant pictures add another twist in the hall-of-mirrors journey from reality to photograph to painting. In this sense the present work recalls the screenprinted Pop flowers of Andy Warhol, whose source photograph was cropped, manipulated, flattened and multiplied into a masterful thesis on the life of the image in the mechanical age. Tulpen addresses these same issues, but also carries the glow of personal feeling. While he is an artist disillusioned by appearances—an unreliable connecting structure between ourselves and the world—Richter continues to find meaning, solace and even romance in his art.
Dieter Schwarz on Tulips (825-1), 1995
A floral still life by Gerhard Richter, painted in the 1990s, may come as a surprise because still lifes, and especially those depicting flowers, had fallen out of favour in post-war art. For artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and a little later Odilon Redon and Pierre Bonnard, the floral still life played a central role in painting. In this genre, the artificiality of the composition, the intimacy of the motif, namely nature transformed into private decoration, and the autonomously developed colourfulness were casually combined in a picture. Richter’s tulip still life, in its modest format, is quite different: it is not carefully arranged, but painted from a snapshot in which the vase is cut at the bottom and placed in front of a barely recognisable dark chair. The model photo was slightly cropped on the left and right so that the bouquet stands out frontally and does not invite the viewer to enter the pictorial space. The bright yellow does not mirror nature, but is based on the industrial chroma of the photo. As is usual with Richter, the motif was blurred with brushstrokes, but, this time, a moment of aggression emerges in the clearly visible horizontal strokes, as if the charming appearance of the bouquet is being wiped away. Shortly afterwards, Richter painted the tulips again in the same format and using the same model photo, as if he wanted to reassure himself of the reality of the motif. However this second version is smoother and without the blurriness of the first. As always with Richter, just when it seems he has embraced a conventional topic, he discreetly but decisively dissociates himself from it, and as he explained, ‘the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality.1
In 1962, Richter began painting from photographs. He used images from newspapers and magazines and from his family album, which he had taken with him when he fled the GDR to West Germany. The subjects tended to be figures from public and private life. In the 1970s, Richter added landscapes which he painted from photos he had shot himself. As an artist who had undergone an academic education, Richter was no stranger to the doctrine that painting was classified into genres, and so it seemed only consequent in the 1980s that he added still lifes to his body of work—of which the candles in particular found great popularity. Likewise, his oeuvre had changed from the early grey depictions to colourful abstract pictures. Even in 1994, when Richter painted three flower still lifes, the abstract paintings remained the majority of his output. Earlier motifs such as a candle and a skull which had hinted at dark undertones were replaced with mellower subject matter, such as flowers, and also paintings of Richter’s young wife Sabine Moritz as a reader or bather which alluded to figure paintings from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
1995 was a happy year for Richter with the birth of his son Moritz and his marriage to Sabine and in his own way this was reflected in his work. The tulip still life was soon followed by the cycle S. mit Kind (S. with Child), in which Richter made unmistakable reference to traditional representations of motherhood. The tulips were like a prelude to this softly tuned new imagery, which had rarely been encountered in Richter’s work before. At the same time he demonstrated that it seemed almost incredible to him and that its destruction or abolition was already inherent in the act of painting, namely in the transfer of the photographic model into the picture.
In 1981, Richter noted the difference between abstract and figurative paintings saying: ‘If the “abstract paintings” show my reality, then the landscapes and still lifes show my yearning.’2 In contrast to abstraction, which is an everyday struggle with material painterly questions, the flower and landscape paintings refer to what is missing and can only be imagined as an ideal. Thanks to its familiar and impersonal appearance, the tulip still life transfers the subjective mood of the painter into the general domain. By hinting at the distant or even the loss of the familiar, Richter gives the floral still life a quality that detaches it from history, guaranteeing its presence.
[1] G. Richter, ‘Notes 1981,’ in D. Elger and H-U. Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 120.
[2] Ibid.
Acquired directly from the artist the year it was painted, Tulpen (Tulips) (1995) is a rare and beautiful floral still life by Gerhard Richter. It belongs to a series of photo-paintings of flowers Richter made during the 1990s, four of which are held in major museum collections, and was itself recently on long-term loan to the Belvedere in Vienna. The work depicts a vase of yellow tulips, based on a photograph taken by Richter and softly blurred in his characteristic style. It is both luminous and poignant, calling up the ghosts of art history in a meditation on our relationship with painting, photographs and the passage of time. Tulpen has been exhibited widely since its creation, appearing in Gerhard Richter. 100 Pictures at the Carré d’Art, musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes (1996); Richter’s major German retrospective that travelled from Düsseldorf to Munich (2005); a survey of contemporary German painting at the Museu de Arte Moderno de São Paulo (2010-2011); two exhibitions at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2011, 2012-2013); and the Belvedere’s celebration of flower painting Say it with Flowers! Viennese Flower Painting from Waldmüller to Klimt (2018).
Richter has been investigating the truth-claims of painting and photography since the 1960s. For him they are equally unreliable as ways of comprehending reality: both no more than arrangements of colour which, examined closely, dissolve into abstraction. He has probed these ideas in varied and complex ways across the decades. His first photo-paintings drew upon newsprint and historical sources, examining post-war Germany’s image of itself. His earliest ‘abstract’ works of the 1970s were in fact photo-paintings of close-up brushstrokes: they appear abstract but are representations of things. His squeegeed Abstrakte Bilder, begun the following decade, engaged with chance, attempting to liberate the painting from any predetermined form. Throughout his career he has continued to pursue photo-paintings in parallel to his abstract works. Their blurred uncertainty brings the figurative image into question, highlighting its inherently illusory nature.
Richter’s photo-paintings encompass an almost endless diversity of source imagery, from press clippings to family snapshots and drive-by photographs of landscapes. Tulpen belongs to a subset that consciously echo art-historical motifs. These include his beloved Lesende (Reader) (1994)—a depiction of his wife, Sabine, which recalls the reading women painted by Johannes Vermeer—and his Schädel (Skulls) and Kerzen (Candles) of the 1980s, which conjure the vanitas still-lifes of the Dutch Golden Age. His floral paintings evoke the same genre, wherein flowers—beautiful, but inevitably fading—are used as symbols for the transience of life itself. Richter’s blurring technique heightens this elegiac quality. Tulpen’s photographic sheen dissolves in a sweep of streaked brushstrokes, and the picture slips out of our grasp. No longer simply a metaphor for earthly vanity, these flowers seem to represent the death of painting’s innocence.
Tulips are a historically loaded subject. Cultivated in Persia for over a thousand years, they were introduced to the Netherlands from the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century. They were greatly admired for their beauty, and their trade mounted to a frenzy known as ‘tulip mania’ or tulpenmanie during the 1630s, peaking before an abrupt market crash in 1637. Wealthy buyers fought for the rarest varieties, sometimes paying gargantuan sums for a single bulb—all in pursuit of a flower that bloomed for around a week during springtime. The tulip’s symbolic presence in the vanitas still life has become all the more potent in retrospect. Richter places these echoes at the service of a conceptual commentary on painting itself. Spotlit by the flash of the camera, the yellow petals shine briefly against the background’s darkness.
Tulpen also speaks to more personal preoccupations. The mid-1990s saw rising international acclaim for Richter: a major European retrospective toured Europe across 1993 and 1994, and his fifteen-canvas cycle October 18, 1977 (1988) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1995. His abstract output was prolific, becoming increasingly exuberant in colour and complexity. During the same year Richter married Sabine Moritz, whom he had met in 1994. He painted S. mit Kind (S. with Child) (1995), a group of eight pictures now held in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, which show her holding their newborn son. Drawn from his own photographs of the family’s innermost private life, these are among the most intimate images of Richter’s oeuvre. Tulpen complements their reflection on the preciousness of life and love.
Richter painted two versions of Tulpen in 1995, both derived from the same photograph: the present work features a more pronounced blur than its counterpart. This practice of doubling was especially common in Richter’s mid-1990s photo-paintings. He also painted two versions of Lesende, another pair of flower still-lifes in 1994, and two self-portraits in 1996. Such pendant pictures add another twist in the hall-of-mirrors journey from reality to photograph to painting. In this sense the present work recalls the screenprinted Pop flowers of Andy Warhol, whose source photograph was cropped, manipulated, flattened and multiplied into a masterful thesis on the life of the image in the mechanical age. Tulpen addresses these same issues, but also carries the glow of personal feeling. While he is an artist disillusioned by appearances—an unreliable connecting structure between ourselves and the world—Richter continues to find meaning, solace and even romance in his art.
Dieter Schwarz on Tulips (825-1), 1995
A floral still life by Gerhard Richter, painted in the 1990s, may come as a surprise because still lifes, and especially those depicting flowers, had fallen out of favour in post-war art. For artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and a little later Odilon Redon and Pierre Bonnard, the floral still life played a central role in painting. In this genre, the artificiality of the composition, the intimacy of the motif, namely nature transformed into private decoration, and the autonomously developed colourfulness were casually combined in a picture. Richter’s tulip still life, in its modest format, is quite different: it is not carefully arranged, but painted from a snapshot in which the vase is cut at the bottom and placed in front of a barely recognisable dark chair. The model photo was slightly cropped on the left and right so that the bouquet stands out frontally and does not invite the viewer to enter the pictorial space. The bright yellow does not mirror nature, but is based on the industrial chroma of the photo. As is usual with Richter, the motif was blurred with brushstrokes, but, this time, a moment of aggression emerges in the clearly visible horizontal strokes, as if the charming appearance of the bouquet is being wiped away. Shortly afterwards, Richter painted the tulips again in the same format and using the same model photo, as if he wanted to reassure himself of the reality of the motif. However this second version is smoother and without the blurriness of the first. As always with Richter, just when it seems he has embraced a conventional topic, he discreetly but decisively dissociates himself from it, and as he explained, ‘the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality.1
In 1962, Richter began painting from photographs. He used images from newspapers and magazines and from his family album, which he had taken with him when he fled the GDR to West Germany. The subjects tended to be figures from public and private life. In the 1970s, Richter added landscapes which he painted from photos he had shot himself. As an artist who had undergone an academic education, Richter was no stranger to the doctrine that painting was classified into genres, and so it seemed only consequent in the 1980s that he added still lifes to his body of work—of which the candles in particular found great popularity. Likewise, his oeuvre had changed from the early grey depictions to colourful abstract pictures. Even in 1994, when Richter painted three flower still lifes, the abstract paintings remained the majority of his output. Earlier motifs such as a candle and a skull which had hinted at dark undertones were replaced with mellower subject matter, such as flowers, and also paintings of Richter’s young wife Sabine Moritz as a reader or bather which alluded to figure paintings from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
1995 was a happy year for Richter with the birth of his son Moritz and his marriage to Sabine and in his own way this was reflected in his work. The tulip still life was soon followed by the cycle S. mit Kind (S. with Child), in which Richter made unmistakable reference to traditional representations of motherhood. The tulips were like a prelude to this softly tuned new imagery, which had rarely been encountered in Richter’s work before. At the same time he demonstrated that it seemed almost incredible to him and that its destruction or abolition was already inherent in the act of painting, namely in the transfer of the photographic model into the picture.
In 1981, Richter noted the difference between abstract and figurative paintings saying: ‘If the “abstract paintings” show my reality, then the landscapes and still lifes show my yearning.’2 In contrast to abstraction, which is an everyday struggle with material painterly questions, the flower and landscape paintings refer to what is missing and can only be imagined as an ideal. Thanks to its familiar and impersonal appearance, the tulip still life transfers the subjective mood of the painter into the general domain. By hinting at the distant or even the loss of the familiar, Richter gives the floral still life a quality that detaches it from history, guaranteeing its presence.
[1] G. Richter, ‘Notes 1981,’ in D. Elger and H-U. Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 120.
[2] Ibid.