Gerhard Richter – Ideology and Politics

On 12th October 1986 Gerhard Richter wrote in a diary note:

 

‘What shall I paint? How shall I paint?’ (Richter, 1995, p. 129)

 

That Richter, who had been painting at that time for over thirty years with a great deal of success, was still asking these questions, demonstrates the difficulties that the weight of painting’s history, the advent of photography and the widespread availability of images today present to even the most accomplished painter. This series of six essays will examine the role that Gerhard Richter’s painting has played in contemporary art in order to address these questions and more specifically: 

 

If Richter’s work demonstrated how painting might function after photography, how might painting function after Richter?

 

This essay will examine Richter’s approach to painting in the light of his distaste for ideologies and focus on the fifteen paintings collectively called October 18, 1977. The paintings were of four members of the Baader-Meinhof gang; part of a larger social activist/terrorist group called the Red Army Faction (RAF) operating in Germany in the late sixties and seventies, who were responsible for a series of terrorist acts, including arson, bank robbery, kidnapping, bombing and murder.

 

Richter was born in Dresden 1932 and brought up nearby.  His early life would therefore have been directly influenced by two pernicious ideologies of the twentieth century, Nazism and communism. Richter also had direct personal, as well as political, experience of these ideologies. His mother’s brother, Rudi, died a young Nazi officer, and his aunt Marianne, a schizophrenic, was forcibly sterilised under a Nazi program. Richter escaped to West Germany in 1961, a few months before the Berlin Wall was erected.  The ideology he left behind subsequently painted over two of his works: a wall painting ("Communion with Picasso", 1955) painted in the refectory of the Dresden Academy of Arts where Richter had studied for his B.A., and a mural entitled Lebensfreude in the German Hygienic Museum. It can be argued that throughout his career Richter continually returned this compliment by metaphorically painting over the idea of ideology and ‘isms’.  

 

Richter’s early distaste for ideology was made clear in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist in 1993:

 

‘By the age of sixteen or seventeen I was absolutely clear there is no God – an alarming discovery to me, after my Christian upbringing. By that time, my fundamental aversion to all beliefs and ideologies was fully developed. (Richter, 1995, p. 251)

 

The heterogeneity of Richter’s painting, embracing, as it does, portraiture, landscape, townscapes, aeroplanes, monochrome, abstracts, still life, and paintings influenced by painters such as Titian and Caspar David Friedrich, could be seen as a reaction to the limitations imposed by ideologies (and in particular the communist one from which Richter had escaped) and also illustrates Richter’s reluctance to succumb to the demands of the art market to fit within a particular ‘ism’ and the constraints such categorisation can bring. This heterogeneity can also be seen as a response to the belief in the 1960s that painting was exhausted; that it had said all that it had to say and had lost its relevance to society and the art world; the elusiveness provided by the different ‘suits’[1] that Richter wore and the indistinct look of his work and its connection to photography made it difficult for his work to be deemed irrelevant.  This was shown in an interview with Wolfgang Pehnt in 1984:

 

‘WP:    You’ve done a great deal of work with photography. For instance, whenever you’ve painted a portrait, it hasn’t been a portrait of the sitter but a portrait of the photograph of a sitter.

 

GR:     Yes, because painting at that time was so much called into question, cast into such disrepute. I couldn’t have a straightforward relationship with painting. That’s how it was at the time: anyone who was painting was on the wrong track anyway.’ (Richter, 1995, p. 114)

 

And in an interview with Jonas Storsve 1991:

 

‘But I clearly remember this anti-painting mood did exist. At the end of the 1960s the art scene underwent its great politicisation. Painting was taboo because it had no ‘social relevance’ and was therefore a bourgeois thing.’ (Richter, 1995, p. 223)

 

This frequent changing of ‘suits’ in Richter’s early work brought with it the criticism of inconsistency, which Richter spoke about in an interview with Sabine Schütz in 1990:

 

SS: Quite early on you were described as ‘inconsistent’ because you were always swapping levels, both in your subject matter and, even more, in your style. You have described yourself as ‘uncertain’.  Or is some of it about proving to yourself and to others that you can do anything?

 

GR: No it isn’t that….Inconsistency is simply a consequence of uncertainty, which I certainly do tend to suffer from – but then I also regard it as inevitable and necessary.

 

SS: So perhaps uncertainty is the overriding theme?

 

GR: Maybe. At all events, uncertainty is part of me; it’s a basic premise of my work. After all, we have no objective justification for feeling certain about anything. Certainty is for fools and liars.’ (Richter, 1995, p. 215)

 

Uncertainty is not a trait of ideologies.

 

Having developed a fundamental aversion to beliefs and ideologies at the age of sixteen or seventeen, Richter continued to demonstrate that belief in his writing and interviews:

 

from  his notes in 1989:

 

‘My denunciation of ideology: I lack the means to investigate this. Without a doubt ideologies are harmful, and we must take them very seriously: as behaviour, and not for their content (in content they are all equally false.’ (Richter, 1995, p. 177)

 

October 18th 1977 was the day that the bodies of two of the members of the Baader-Meinhof gang, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, were discovered in their cells at Stammheim high-security prison, near Stuttgart. Two other members of the group had also died in Stammheim: Holger Meins from a hunger strike three years earlier, and Ulrike Meinhof, who was found hanging in her cell on May 9th 1976. It was more than ten years before Richter began painting the collection of fifteen paintings collectively entitled October 18, 1977 that was first exhibited in Krefeld, near Cologne between February 12th and April 4th 1989. What had made him decide to paint this subject more than ten years after the events depicted? Richter himself is non-committal:

 

‘I had kept a number of photographs for years, under the heading of unfinished business. It’s hard to say how it came about late in 1987 my interest revived..’ (Richter, 1995, p. 183), conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker, 1989.

 

As noted above, Richter had underlined uncertainty as a basic premise for his work, and the subject of the Baader-Meinhof gang, whilst on the surface presenting the certainties of conflicting ideologies, left and right, under the surface it presented a host of uncertainties: the reasons for the radicalisation of what were mostly middle-class citizens; why these reasons largely went unquestioned; the validity of the harsh treatment of the group once imprisoned; murder or suicide etc. The subject may therefore have had a resonance for Richter ‘s own uncertainty about what to paint and how to paint it, expressed some eighteen months before he began work on the October 18, 1977 collection, and may have offered him the opportunity to demonstrate the relevance of painting, and in particular, his approach to painting, to the issues facing society at that time, as embodied in the Baader-Meinhof story. Certainly it presented an opportunity for him to express his views on the futility of ideologies; but it also gave him the opportunity to present the losses, rather than the promised gains, that result from ideological thinking.

 

Richter had gathered many hundreds of photographs from various sources, including the press, the police and members of the underground. He had originally intended to paint many more than fifteen pictures and cover more of the RAF story. In the end he painted:

 

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