GERHARD RICHTER AT THE TATE MODERN

GERHARD RICHTER AT THE TATE MODERN

 Gerhard Richter (b 1932, Dresden, Germany) typifies German suburbia, a Dresden artist who settled in Duesseldorf the middle class twin of neighbouring working class Cologne. As an Ossi who became a Wessi Richter settles on the disturbing facts of German history but also provides a commentary on perception, ways of seeing the past through unsettling images of his father, who he hardly knew, clownishly gaping at the artist through soft focus grey tones. His Uncle Rudi in Wehrmacht gear smiles endearingly at the artist/camera, for Richter early on decided upon photorealism as an art aesthetic through the then dominant medium of black & white photography. He gravitates through this to emerge into full colour abstraction as a further plausible re-invention before returning to grey photorealism in his depiction of the German autumn, the "suicides" of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Esslin in 1977. 

In a retrospective view from a decade later when the Red Army Faction, still active but infrequently so, and just before their final implosion ten years after the end of the Cold War. Richter is bringing into question art as a historical narrative form, saying that it has limited ability to focus on the event itself which is shattered, refracted and formless. Richter was never so close to the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe to be named as a member of 'the outer circle', the journalistic description of activists, intellectuals and sympathisers including such eminent artists and auteurs as Gunther Grass, Heinrich Boell and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. There's a sense in Richter's painting of an artist obsessed with historical authenticity, ways of seeing, his own supposedly objective gaze and putative involvement in the events he's depicting. That's what makes his art so suburban but ultimately dissatisfying. The early Richter is all about readymade, blurred photographs, seascapes, landscapes and his immediate family. There is genial Uncle Rudi, who died at the front, Aunt Marianne, mentally ill and a victim of the Nazi's T4 euthanasia programme. These blurred snapshots are painted with an austerely limited palette of greys. Impasto is often employed to suggest the difference between viewing large scale works close up or far away. Two different paintings are suggested within one using this technique and Richter is also influenced by colour theory and colour charts. He rarely reaches into art history for inspiration but one notable exception is his interpretation of Titian's Annunciation. Once again Richter utilises the gauzy soft focus lens seemingly more akin to the pornographer than the artist. 

Richter leaves behind his grey period, which straddles the mid-60s and 1970s, beginning a series of large scale abstract canvases, a form very typical of the period. By the late 1980s Richter has returned to his grey, monochrome palette to offer a retrospective glance at the period of crisis when the Red Army Faction was a distinct threat to peace and stability in West Germany but has no sympathy for their agenda. These paintings are translucent snapshots that circle their subject, close ups that gather momentum but also offer us lurid, exploitative kitsch. The past, Richter intimates, is shifting beneath accrued perceptions. Memory is hazy, pertinent details even salient facts are shifting between the urge to forget and the tendency to revise the past in the light of the present. Baader-Meinhof dissolves into earlier history paintings: cities wrecked by aerial bombardment, formations of Mustang fighter planes, B52 bombers but also fading to a yet greyer surround. The influence of the 18th century painter Casper David Frederich (1774-1840) is also felt especially in Richter's work Iceberg in Mist. Richter actually went to Greenland to find icebergs just like the ones Frederich saw in order to complete this painting. Icebergs in mist, lambent clouds, cityscapes, the Himalayas. The camera eye pulls away from the specific to the universal. 

Richter's personal narrative is a narrative of mankind as well. His work hovers between realism and abstraction, Richter never fully abandons photo-realism as an aesthetic approach. Photorealism becomes a genre choice rather than a deep felt approach to his art. There's something static, disengaged (and probably Warholian) about his RAF paintings, for instance, as if the artist's objective, neutral gaze is beginning to wonder about the actual feelings he has for the whole Baader-Meinhof gang and how his feelings about Germany are changing too. Is Richter exploiting the RAF for his own narrow ends, intruding on a tragic public event with a lurid scheme guaranteed to attract public attention? Is he exploiting German history or enlivening it with a renewed debate about 'historical objectivity' and 'revisionism'. Andreas Baader's record player concealed his gun but his crimes and politics are unconcealed. The scene of their arrest and the funeral of the three main RAF figures are awash with grey intention and change according to the viewer's distance. It’s up to the viewer to decide about his or her own feelings and about Richter's too. 

Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, London, October 2011