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Lot Essay
‘… I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph. I am therefore seeking something quite specific’ (Gerhard Richter)
It is high summer in the German countryside. Heat rises from the ground, and trees shimmer against a clear blue sky. Standing on a path, we gaze over a hedgerow towards a low building in the field beyond. Golden haybales are stacked under its roof. A fence and tarpaulins laid nearby are further signs of human presence. Formerly in the collection of Emily and Jerry Spiegel, Schober (Haybarn) (1984) is among the largest and most beautiful of Gerhard Richter’s 1980s landscapes. Begun in the wake of his iconic Kerzen (Candles) and Schädel (Skulls) of 1982-1983, these exquisite, softly blurred pictures stem from a time of romantic bliss and creative ambition for the artist, who had recently married his second wife, Isa Genzken, and moved from Düsseldorf to a large new studio in Cologne. The decade saw major developments in both Richter’s abstract production and his photo-paintings. Beginning with his own camera rather than found black-and-white imagery, and using an array of new painterly techniques, he explored the cultural and physical landscape of his homeland. Schober belongs to the first group of these works to be derived from photographs Richter had taken with Fujifilm, which introduced a fresh palette of pastoral greens, blues and terracotta reds to his work.
After a painful period of conflict and familial breakdown, Richter’s divorce from his first wife, Ema Eufinger, was finalised in 1981. His marriage to Genzken the following year represented a new beginning. ‘The relationship was like nothing he had ever experienced before’, writes Dietmar Elger. ‘It was intense; he was living with another ambitious artist, and he valued Isa’s frank criticism’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, pp. 242-243). Towards the end of 1983, the couple left Düsseldorf for Cologne. Richter’s studio there, which occupied the entire fifth floor of a former cardboard factory, allowed him greater space and freedom than ever before. Inspired, motivated and in love, he was able to push his practice to sophisticated new heights.
Richter now began work towards his presentation in the landmark group show Von hier aus: Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf (From Here Out: Two Months of New German Art in Düsseldorf), which would open in September 1984. This two-month extravaganza came at a time of competition between Cologne and Düsseldorf as artistic centres, and, for Richter, of personal rivalry with another participant: Sigmar Polke. Having worked closely together in the 1960s, the two were now opposing figureheads of the German avant-garde. Richter was determined to prove himself. In a striking installation, he exhibited Schober and one other landscape painting, Scheune (Barn) (1984), opposite nine examples of his new large-format ‘wild abstracts.’ The show was received to huge acclaim, and was a breakthrough moment in Richter’s arrival to the global stage.
Following the success of Von hier aus, in 1985 Schober was among several landscapes to travel to galleries in New York. Alongside the abstract works, they caused a rush of critical attention that would culminate in Richter’s first North American retrospective in 1988. Another Scheune (Barn) (1983) was purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and Wiesental (Meadowland) (1985) by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. It was at this time that Schober was acquired from Marian Goodman Gallery by the visionary collectors Emily and Jerry Spiegel. The couple were themselves important patrons of MoMA, where Mrs Spiegel served as a trustee and member of the Painting and Sculpture Committee. They would later lend Schober for Richter’s touring European survey of 1993-1994. In their collection for more than three decades, it kept company with such masterpieces as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), which broke the world record for the highest price paid for a work by an American artist when it was auctioned in 2017.
Schober exemplifies the formal complexity of this new phase in Richter’s photo-paintings. He uses a range of techniques across the canvas to blur and enliven the image in different ways, inviting the viewer in only to deflect their gaze. Diagonal strokes feather the foliage in myriad directions, as if capturing the movement of branches in the breeze. A heated haze ripples the fencing and the haybarn’s roof. Look closer, however, and Richter’s mesmerising brushwork dissolves the image into a field of abstract marks. There are touches of impasto in the sky, reminding us that what we are seeing is paint on a flat surface. The absence of human figures renders the picture silent. The pathway glimpsed at the lower right offers no way in: the idyll is textured with ambiguity and occlusion, disclosing nothing.
Landscapes had been present in Richter’s work since the early 1960s, when he began to create photo-paintings based on newsprint and historical sources. These hazy, largely monochrome pictures set out the terms of a career-long inquiry into the relationship between image and reality, exposing painting and photography as equally ridden with illusion. Early landscapes such as Schloß Neuschwanstein (1963, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden), derived from a postcard of a Bavarian castle, presented Germany’s self-image as a fabric of clichés. A significant shift came in 1968, when Richter visited Corsica with his young family. He took dozens of photographs which became the basis for a new series of landscape paintings in colour. Initially intending to keep these works private, he soon realised their conceptual potential. With low horizons and wide, dramatic skies, works such as Korsika (Schiff) (Corsica (Ship)) (1968) offered parallels with the Romantic vistas of Caspar David Friedrich. Their haunting grandeur belied their origin as holiday snapshots. From this point onwards Richter would photograph locations across Germany and elsewhere specifically for the purposes of painting.
Richter continued to explore echoes of Romanticism through his landscapes, cloudscapes and seascapes of the 1970s, examining a societal and physical environment that had lost its innocence. A chasm separated the nineteenth-century culture and beliefs that had produced Friedrich’s work—which expressed awe at the majesty of Creation, and man’s place within it—from the post-war conditions of his own time. With the 1980s landscapes, however, Richter shifted focus. He moved closer to his motifs, creating images with visual interruptions and strong contrasts between foreground and background. Processed with Fujifilm, the photographs’ hues became richer. The presence of buildings, traffic-signs, cultivated fields and bridges in many of the pictures, notes Dietmar Elger, highlights the fact that they are ‘so-called “cultured landscapes”’ rather than idealised views (D. Elger, ‘Landscape as a Model’, in Gerhard Richter Landscapes, exh. cat. Sprengel Museum, Hanover 1998, p. 11). Now, like artists from Poussin to Monet before him, Richter explored the landscape as a site of human action, with nature and culture interacting in living colour.
The agricultural buildings seen in Schober and its companions—characteristic of rural Bavaria, where the photographs were taken—have an emblematic quality that recalls the ‘red house’ depicted by Edvard Munch, who painted a farmhouse on his property repeatedly throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Munch’s expressive, emotively-charged motif, however, they keep us at a distance. Schober’s haybarn is a blind strip of colour underlined in shadow. For all their allure, Richter understands these images—like any representation of the world—as illusory. ‘Every beauty that we see in landscape—every enchanting colour effect, or tranquil scene, or powerful atmosphere, every gentle linearity or magnificent spatial depth or whatever—is our projection; and we can switch it off at a moment’s notice’, he has said (G. Richter, ‘Notes, 1986’, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 158).
Richter’s forays into portraiture, still-life and landscape throughout his career form a critical dialogue with these tropes and the ideas they stand for. They can also be seen to reflect shifts in his outlook and circumstances. His pictures of icebergs—painted in 1982 from photographs taken in Greenland a decade earlier—were not only homages to Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (Sea of Ice) (1823-1824), but related to the collapse of his marriage to Eufinger. The candles and skulls of 1982-1983 were also elegies, reflecting on loss through the lens of the vanitas theme. Schober was born of a more vibrant and joyful period. As Richter began a new life with Genzken, his travels through Germany and beyond—documented in Atlas, his thousands-strong compendium of source images—were expansive, purposeful and exploratory in spirit. ‘… I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph’, he wrote. ‘I am therefore seeking something quite specific; from this I conclude that I know what I want’ (G. Richter, ibid.). Soon afterwards, he would paint pictures of apples that riffed on the still-lifes of Paul Cezanne.
The landscapes evolved in tandem with Richter’s abstract pictures, which developed dramatically with his adoption of the squeegee in the early 1980s. He viewed these Abstrakte Bilder, whose final form was determined by the unpredictable interaction of paint layers dragged across the canvas, as fictive models of reality. Through the open-ended, chance-based struggle of their creation, he confronted the ungraspable complexity of nature itself. The landscapes, in contrast, were wistful models of an irretrievable wholeness. The two bodies of work were different ends of a spectrum: together, they created a balance. ‘If I were to express it somewhat informally, I would say that the landscapes are a type of yearning, a yearning for a whole and simple life’, Richter said. ‘A little nostalgic. The abstract works are my presence, my reality, my problems, my difficulties and contradictions’ (G. Richter in conversation with D. Dietrich, 1985, in ibid., p. 146).
Richter’s photo-paintings were a key focus of his 2025-2026 retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Seen across the decades, they reveal him not merely as a dispassionate observer of second-hand images but as a history painter deeply involved in the visual life of his era. Schober exemplifies the doubt and desire entangled in his position. It lays bare the layered fictions inherent in any image we create for ourselves, whether painting, photograph, national identity or artistic genre. At the same time, the painting takes on its own presence as an object, entirely distinct from the photographic source. It is a marker of a place Richter himself has occupied in time, a product of a happy moment in his life, and—despite everything—a statement of faith in his medium. ‘My works are not just rhetorical, except in the sense that all art is rhetorical,’ he says. ‘I believe in beauty’ (G. Richter quoted in M. Kimmelman, ‘An Artist Beyond Isms’, The New York Times, 27 January 2002, p. 24).
***
Gerhard Richter, Schober (550-2), 1984
By Dieter Schwarz, co-curator of Gerhard Richter at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
‘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’ (Gerhard Richter)
1984 was a decisive year for Gerhard Richter. In Düsseldorf, curator Kasper König assembled 68 artists for the exhibition Von hier aus. 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 Gerhard 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 actually 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. All the more so, the pictures based on photographs that Richter painted in the 1980s as a counterpoint to abstraction now attracted particular 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.’[i]
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, 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, 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.’[ii]
Schober 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, 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’.[iii]
But there was not only melancholy in this; with painterly beauty Richter also connected hope: ‘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.’[iv] Richter was to be proven right; from Düsseldorf, Schober and Scheune 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.
[i] ‘Interview mit Dorothea Dietrich, 1984’, in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007: Schriften, Interviews, Briefe. Herausgegeben von Dietmar Elger und Hans Ulrich Obrist. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008, pp. 146, 151.
[ii] ‘Interview mit Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984’, in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007, pp. 138–139.
[iii] ‘Interview mit Dorothea Dietrich, 1984’, in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007, pp. 146, 151.
[iv] ‘Interview mit Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984’, in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007, p. 137.
It is high summer in the German countryside. Heat rises from the ground, and trees shimmer against a clear blue sky. Standing on a path, we gaze over a hedgerow towards a low building in the field beyond. Golden haybales are stacked under its roof. A fence and tarpaulins laid nearby are further signs of human presence. Formerly in the collection of Emily and Jerry Spiegel, Schober (Haybarn) (1984) is among the largest and most beautiful of Gerhard Richter’s 1980s landscapes. Begun in the wake of his iconic Kerzen (Candles) and Schädel (Skulls) of 1982-1983, these exquisite, softly blurred pictures stem from a time of romantic bliss and creative ambition for the artist, who had recently married his second wife, Isa Genzken, and moved from Düsseldorf to a large new studio in Cologne. The decade saw major developments in both Richter’s abstract production and his photo-paintings. Beginning with his own camera rather than found black-and-white imagery, and using an array of new painterly techniques, he explored the cultural and physical landscape of his homeland. Schober belongs to the first group of these works to be derived from photographs Richter had taken with Fujifilm, which introduced a fresh palette of pastoral greens, blues and terracotta reds to his work.
After a painful period of conflict and familial breakdown, Richter’s divorce from his first wife, Ema Eufinger, was finalised in 1981. His marriage to Genzken the following year represented a new beginning. ‘The relationship was like nothing he had ever experienced before’, writes Dietmar Elger. ‘It was intense; he was living with another ambitious artist, and he valued Isa’s frank criticism’ (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, pp. 242-243). Towards the end of 1983, the couple left Düsseldorf for Cologne. Richter’s studio there, which occupied the entire fifth floor of a former cardboard factory, allowed him greater space and freedom than ever before. Inspired, motivated and in love, he was able to push his practice to sophisticated new heights.
Richter now began work towards his presentation in the landmark group show Von hier aus: Zwei Monate neue deutsche Kunst in Düsseldorf (From Here Out: Two Months of New German Art in Düsseldorf), which would open in September 1984. This two-month extravaganza came at a time of competition between Cologne and Düsseldorf as artistic centres, and, for Richter, of personal rivalry with another participant: Sigmar Polke. Having worked closely together in the 1960s, the two were now opposing figureheads of the German avant-garde. Richter was determined to prove himself. In a striking installation, he exhibited Schober and one other landscape painting, Scheune (Barn) (1984), opposite nine examples of his new large-format ‘wild abstracts.’ The show was received to huge acclaim, and was a breakthrough moment in Richter’s arrival to the global stage.
Following the success of Von hier aus, in 1985 Schober was among several landscapes to travel to galleries in New York. Alongside the abstract works, they caused a rush of critical attention that would culminate in Richter’s first North American retrospective in 1988. Another Scheune (Barn) (1983) was purchased by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and Wiesental (Meadowland) (1985) by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. It was at this time that Schober was acquired from Marian Goodman Gallery by the visionary collectors Emily and Jerry Spiegel. The couple were themselves important patrons of MoMA, where Mrs Spiegel served as a trustee and member of the Painting and Sculpture Committee. They would later lend Schober for Richter’s touring European survey of 1993-1994. In their collection for more than three decades, it kept company with such masterpieces as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982), which broke the world record for the highest price paid for a work by an American artist when it was auctioned in 2017.
Schober exemplifies the formal complexity of this new phase in Richter’s photo-paintings. He uses a range of techniques across the canvas to blur and enliven the image in different ways, inviting the viewer in only to deflect their gaze. Diagonal strokes feather the foliage in myriad directions, as if capturing the movement of branches in the breeze. A heated haze ripples the fencing and the haybarn’s roof. Look closer, however, and Richter’s mesmerising brushwork dissolves the image into a field of abstract marks. There are touches of impasto in the sky, reminding us that what we are seeing is paint on a flat surface. The absence of human figures renders the picture silent. The pathway glimpsed at the lower right offers no way in: the idyll is textured with ambiguity and occlusion, disclosing nothing.
Landscapes had been present in Richter’s work since the early 1960s, when he began to create photo-paintings based on newsprint and historical sources. These hazy, largely monochrome pictures set out the terms of a career-long inquiry into the relationship between image and reality, exposing painting and photography as equally ridden with illusion. Early landscapes such as Schloß Neuschwanstein (1963, Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden), derived from a postcard of a Bavarian castle, presented Germany’s self-image as a fabric of clichés. A significant shift came in 1968, when Richter visited Corsica with his young family. He took dozens of photographs which became the basis for a new series of landscape paintings in colour. Initially intending to keep these works private, he soon realised their conceptual potential. With low horizons and wide, dramatic skies, works such as Korsika (Schiff) (Corsica (Ship)) (1968) offered parallels with the Romantic vistas of Caspar David Friedrich. Their haunting grandeur belied their origin as holiday snapshots. From this point onwards Richter would photograph locations across Germany and elsewhere specifically for the purposes of painting.
Richter continued to explore echoes of Romanticism through his landscapes, cloudscapes and seascapes of the 1970s, examining a societal and physical environment that had lost its innocence. A chasm separated the nineteenth-century culture and beliefs that had produced Friedrich’s work—which expressed awe at the majesty of Creation, and man’s place within it—from the post-war conditions of his own time. With the 1980s landscapes, however, Richter shifted focus. He moved closer to his motifs, creating images with visual interruptions and strong contrasts between foreground and background. Processed with Fujifilm, the photographs’ hues became richer. The presence of buildings, traffic-signs, cultivated fields and bridges in many of the pictures, notes Dietmar Elger, highlights the fact that they are ‘so-called “cultured landscapes”’ rather than idealised views (D. Elger, ‘Landscape as a Model’, in Gerhard Richter Landscapes, exh. cat. Sprengel Museum, Hanover 1998, p. 11). Now, like artists from Poussin to Monet before him, Richter explored the landscape as a site of human action, with nature and culture interacting in living colour.
The agricultural buildings seen in Schober and its companions—characteristic of rural Bavaria, where the photographs were taken—have an emblematic quality that recalls the ‘red house’ depicted by Edvard Munch, who painted a farmhouse on his property repeatedly throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Munch’s expressive, emotively-charged motif, however, they keep us at a distance. Schober’s haybarn is a blind strip of colour underlined in shadow. For all their allure, Richter understands these images—like any representation of the world—as illusory. ‘Every beauty that we see in landscape—every enchanting colour effect, or tranquil scene, or powerful atmosphere, every gentle linearity or magnificent spatial depth or whatever—is our projection; and we can switch it off at a moment’s notice’, he has said (G. Richter, ‘Notes, 1986’, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 158).
Richter’s forays into portraiture, still-life and landscape throughout his career form a critical dialogue with these tropes and the ideas they stand for. They can also be seen to reflect shifts in his outlook and circumstances. His pictures of icebergs—painted in 1982 from photographs taken in Greenland a decade earlier—were not only homages to Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (Sea of Ice) (1823-1824), but related to the collapse of his marriage to Eufinger. The candles and skulls of 1982-1983 were also elegies, reflecting on loss through the lens of the vanitas theme. Schober was born of a more vibrant and joyful period. As Richter began a new life with Genzken, his travels through Germany and beyond—documented in Atlas, his thousands-strong compendium of source images—were expansive, purposeful and exploratory in spirit. ‘… I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph’, he wrote. ‘I am therefore seeking something quite specific; from this I conclude that I know what I want’ (G. Richter, ibid.). Soon afterwards, he would paint pictures of apples that riffed on the still-lifes of Paul Cezanne.
The landscapes evolved in tandem with Richter’s abstract pictures, which developed dramatically with his adoption of the squeegee in the early 1980s. He viewed these Abstrakte Bilder, whose final form was determined by the unpredictable interaction of paint layers dragged across the canvas, as fictive models of reality. Through the open-ended, chance-based struggle of their creation, he confronted the ungraspable complexity of nature itself. The landscapes, in contrast, were wistful models of an irretrievable wholeness. The two bodies of work were different ends of a spectrum: together, they created a balance. ‘If I were to express it somewhat informally, I would say that the landscapes are a type of yearning, a yearning for a whole and simple life’, Richter said. ‘A little nostalgic. The abstract works are my presence, my reality, my problems, my difficulties and contradictions’ (G. Richter in conversation with D. Dietrich, 1985, in ibid., p. 146).
Richter’s photo-paintings were a key focus of his 2025-2026 retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Seen across the decades, they reveal him not merely as a dispassionate observer of second-hand images but as a history painter deeply involved in the visual life of his era. Schober exemplifies the doubt and desire entangled in his position. It lays bare the layered fictions inherent in any image we create for ourselves, whether painting, photograph, national identity or artistic genre. At the same time, the painting takes on its own presence as an object, entirely distinct from the photographic source. It is a marker of a place Richter himself has occupied in time, a product of a happy moment in his life, and—despite everything—a statement of faith in his medium. ‘My works are not just rhetorical, except in the sense that all art is rhetorical,’ he says. ‘I believe in beauty’ (G. Richter quoted in M. Kimmelman, ‘An Artist Beyond Isms’, The New York Times, 27 January 2002, p. 24).
***
Gerhard Richter, Schober (550-2), 1984
By Dieter Schwarz, co-curator of Gerhard Richter at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
‘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’ (Gerhard Richter)
1984 was a decisive year for Gerhard Richter. In Düsseldorf, curator Kasper König assembled 68 artists for the exhibition Von hier aus. 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 Gerhard 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 actually 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. All the more so, the pictures based on photographs that Richter painted in the 1980s as a counterpoint to abstraction now attracted particular 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.’[i]
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, 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, 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.’[ii]
Schober 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, 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’.[iii]
But there was not only melancholy in this; with painterly beauty Richter also connected hope: ‘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.’[iv] Richter was to be proven right; from Düsseldorf, Schober and Scheune 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.
[i] ‘Interview mit Dorothea Dietrich, 1984’, in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007: Schriften, Interviews, Briefe. Herausgegeben von Dietmar Elger und Hans Ulrich Obrist. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008, pp. 146, 151.
[ii] ‘Interview mit Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984’, in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007, pp. 138–139.
[iii] ‘Interview mit Dorothea Dietrich, 1984’, in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007, pp. 146, 151.
[iv] ‘Interview mit Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984’, in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007, p. 137.