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拍品專文
"In several senses—conceptual, aesthetic, and technical—[Richter’s landscapes] would serve as a bridge from the photo-paintings to the abstract paintings soon to come." - Dietmar Elger (D. Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2002, p. 173).
Gerhard Richter’s Korsika (Schiff) belongs to an important group of paintings that established the artist’s landscapes as a pivotal part of his oeuvre. In 1968, Richter painted just three canvases featuring various views of Corsica following a family holiday to the island, with two further canvases painted the following year. Originally intended only as a private project to memorialize a special place for the artist and his family, these landscapes would actually open up new fields of artistic exploration, and encourage the artist’s journey to abstraction. This series is also the first of Richter’s landscapes to be painted in color, with one example from the series—Korsika (House)—in the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum.
Set amidst a dramatic landscape of majestic mountains and foreboding skies, a small sailing ship traverses a calm sea. As is typical of this discrete series, the horizon line is placed low in the composition leading to a predominance of sky. Here, dark clouds loom but there is a break in the moody gray large enough to let a shaft of light through to illuminate the sails of the ship (or “Schiff” in Richter’s native German) on the surface of the water. Unlike his earlier black-and-white or monochromatic landscapes, this new series is painted using color pigments—indeed these paintings of Corsica are the first landscapes in which Richter introduced color. In similar innovative fashion, and again in contrast to his earlier landscapes, the hard-edged lines that mark out the different areas of paint have been replaced by differentiating edges of paint that display extreme subtlety and softness, leaving an atmosphere of sublime beauty. Richter’s biographer and director of the Gerhard Richter Archive notes, “Details of the ostensible scene elude the viewer, who, in trying to break through the photographic illusion, encounters a perception impasse: the subject surrenders its illusionism as a scene to be transformed again into a painting” (quoted in Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2002, p. 173).
By 1968, Richter was financially secure enough to be able to take his family away on a proper vacation. Together with his wife, Ema, and daughter, Betty, the artist spent two weeks on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. During the trip, Richter took dozens and dozens of photographs of the island’s mountains and coastline. Back in Germany, he selected six photographs which he used as the basis for these paintings. Initially, Richter had intended these to be for his personal enjoyment only, but as he painted he began to realize the physicality of the landscape and decided to investigate further their painterly potential. This line of inquiry would ultimately lead to his iconic Abstraktes Bilder, the series of sweeping abstracts in which the painterly gesture reigns supreme. As the artist’s biographer Dietmar Elger has observed, “In several senses—conceptual, aesthetic, and technical—[Richter’s landscapes] would serve as a bridge from the photo-paintings to the abstract paintings soon to come” (Ibid.).
"I felt like painting something beautiful." - Gerhard Richter
The Korsika paintings were also executed at a time of political and social unrest around the world. 1968 was the year that witnessed the widespread protests, strikes, and civil unrest, from the Prague Spring beginning in January in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, to the student and labor-led demonstrations in May in France. Across the Atlantic, there was also widespread dissension at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, following a politically turbulent year in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Richter's abstracts emerged almost immediately as a discrete motif for the artist, a quiet moment of contemplation in the midst of such chaos and unrest. In making them, Richter was retreating into a rural idyll, away from the urban unrest of the era: "I felt like painting something beautiful," he said in 1970 (Ibid).
With paintings such as the present work, Richter is following in a grand tradition of German landscape painters. There are strong visual parallels between his work and that of the Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich, currently the subject of a major American retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Both artists’ landscapes are characterized by deep-set horizons, a high sky, and a sparse foreground often only populated with an isolated building or object for scale. Despite living more than one hundred years apart, the two share similarities in their personal experiences of the power of nature, as Richter himself says, “A painting by Casper David Friedrich is not a painting of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it ‘good,’ it concerns us—transcending ideology—as art that we ostentatiously defend (perceive, show, make). Therefore, ‘today,’ we can paint as Casper David Friedrich did” (Ibid.).
Korsika (Schiff) belongs to a series that established Richter’s Landscapes as a seminal body of work. He has been painting landscapes for more than half a century and no other motif has absorbed him in quite the same way, yet the actual number of paintings is relatively few. Thus, their importance lies not in their number, but in the prominent position they occupy in his body of work acting as the bridge between the early photorealist paintings with which he made his name and the abstract canvas which have come to dominate the latter part of his career.
Gerhard Richter’s Korsika (Schiff) belongs to an important group of paintings that established the artist’s landscapes as a pivotal part of his oeuvre. In 1968, Richter painted just three canvases featuring various views of Corsica following a family holiday to the island, with two further canvases painted the following year. Originally intended only as a private project to memorialize a special place for the artist and his family, these landscapes would actually open up new fields of artistic exploration, and encourage the artist’s journey to abstraction. This series is also the first of Richter’s landscapes to be painted in color, with one example from the series—Korsika (House)—in the permanent collection of the Seattle Art Museum.
Set amidst a dramatic landscape of majestic mountains and foreboding skies, a small sailing ship traverses a calm sea. As is typical of this discrete series, the horizon line is placed low in the composition leading to a predominance of sky. Here, dark clouds loom but there is a break in the moody gray large enough to let a shaft of light through to illuminate the sails of the ship (or “Schiff” in Richter’s native German) on the surface of the water. Unlike his earlier black-and-white or monochromatic landscapes, this new series is painted using color pigments—indeed these paintings of Corsica are the first landscapes in which Richter introduced color. In similar innovative fashion, and again in contrast to his earlier landscapes, the hard-edged lines that mark out the different areas of paint have been replaced by differentiating edges of paint that display extreme subtlety and softness, leaving an atmosphere of sublime beauty. Richter’s biographer and director of the Gerhard Richter Archive notes, “Details of the ostensible scene elude the viewer, who, in trying to break through the photographic illusion, encounters a perception impasse: the subject surrenders its illusionism as a scene to be transformed again into a painting” (quoted in Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago, 2002, p. 173).
By 1968, Richter was financially secure enough to be able to take his family away on a proper vacation. Together with his wife, Ema, and daughter, Betty, the artist spent two weeks on the Mediterranean island of Corsica. During the trip, Richter took dozens and dozens of photographs of the island’s mountains and coastline. Back in Germany, he selected six photographs which he used as the basis for these paintings. Initially, Richter had intended these to be for his personal enjoyment only, but as he painted he began to realize the physicality of the landscape and decided to investigate further their painterly potential. This line of inquiry would ultimately lead to his iconic Abstraktes Bilder, the series of sweeping abstracts in which the painterly gesture reigns supreme. As the artist’s biographer Dietmar Elger has observed, “In several senses—conceptual, aesthetic, and technical—[Richter’s landscapes] would serve as a bridge from the photo-paintings to the abstract paintings soon to come” (Ibid.).
"I felt like painting something beautiful." - Gerhard Richter
The Korsika paintings were also executed at a time of political and social unrest around the world. 1968 was the year that witnessed the widespread protests, strikes, and civil unrest, from the Prague Spring beginning in January in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, to the student and labor-led demonstrations in May in France. Across the Atlantic, there was also widespread dissension at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, following a politically turbulent year in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Richter's abstracts emerged almost immediately as a discrete motif for the artist, a quiet moment of contemplation in the midst of such chaos and unrest. In making them, Richter was retreating into a rural idyll, away from the urban unrest of the era: "I felt like painting something beautiful," he said in 1970 (Ibid).
With paintings such as the present work, Richter is following in a grand tradition of German landscape painters. There are strong visual parallels between his work and that of the Romantic painter Casper David Friedrich, currently the subject of a major American retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Both artists’ landscapes are characterized by deep-set horizons, a high sky, and a sparse foreground often only populated with an isolated building or object for scale. Despite living more than one hundred years apart, the two share similarities in their personal experiences of the power of nature, as Richter himself says, “A painting by Casper David Friedrich is not a painting of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it ‘good,’ it concerns us—transcending ideology—as art that we ostentatiously defend (perceive, show, make). Therefore, ‘today,’ we can paint as Casper David Friedrich did” (Ibid.).
Korsika (Schiff) belongs to a series that established Richter’s Landscapes as a seminal body of work. He has been painting landscapes for more than half a century and no other motif has absorbed him in quite the same way, yet the actual number of paintings is relatively few. Thus, their importance lies not in their number, but in the prominent position they occupy in his body of work acting as the bridge between the early photorealist paintings with which he made his name and the abstract canvas which have come to dominate the latter part of his career.