Gerhard Richter – The Grey Card
This essay examines Richter’s grey paintings and their relation to photography and to Richter’s overall practice.
A grey card in photography is a reference tool used with a light meter to produce a consistent exposure and colour. It reflects eighteen percent of the light incident upon it, and its surface luminance is isotropic; i.e. the angle of view of the observer makes no difference to the apparent brightness of the surface. It is designed to be as uniform as possible. In modern cameras a grey surface that is the equivalent to a grey card and a light meter are integrated into the camera. This system, when set to automatic mode in a camera, produces an overall light balance in a taken image that is equivalent to a grey card. This means that if a photograph is taken of a completely black surface using the automatic mode of a camera, the resulting photograph will be medium grey, and the same is true if the surface photographed is completely white. Thus the uniform grey that is at the heart of photography promotes its own uniformity. The set of rules that is behind this system was no doubt set up with the best intention, but was really designed for people who understood the rules; once Eastman Kodak made the Brownie camera (cheaply available in 1900 with the slogan ‘you just push the button’), the door was opened to errors such as under and over-exposure and blurring. Although over the next eighty years, there were technical advances in the cameras and lenses, the basic system of light reacting with a chemical film remained until the advent of digital photography, and even then, the only real change was that a digital sensor replaced film. There are parallels here with ideology; the founding manifesto; the rigid unchanging system; the greyness and uniformity (e.g. the soviet era) and the promise that is never delivered. A photograph also promises something positive, preservation, some meaning, an anchor, a pretence of immortality, but delivers instead a reminder of mortality and what has been lost. The focus is on what has been rather than what might become. The viewer inhabits a space between the illusion of the past and the illusion of the present, stuck in negative space.
Richter’s reaction to the problematic (“…painting at that time was so much called into question, cast into such disrepute” (Richter, 1995, p. 114)), status of painting in the 1960s (a status perhaps defined by the negative; all the things that painting could no longer be) was to focus on the negative, literally as in photography; in the subject matter he picked (when asked by Rolf Gunter Dienst how he chose his subjects Richter replied: “ perhaps the choice is a negative one in that I was trying to avoid anything that touched on well-known issues – or any issues at all, whether painterly, social or aesthetic.” (Richter, 1995, p. 62)), and conceptually, as Peter Osborne suggests when writing of Richter’s work:
“…a specific kind of postconceptual painting which inhabits the ontological space of a suspended double negation – negation of painting by photography and negation of photography by painting .”(Osborne, 2009, p. 95).
Johannes Meinhardt writes of Richter’s reaction to the problem of painting:
“Unlike the painters of minimal art, Richter chose not to liberate himself from painting, but rather to liberate painting from a corset of conventional expectations and meanings rooted in the concept of the artist as a genuine, original creator, one who sought to express himself in painting.” (Meinhardt, 2009, p. 135).
“Richter’s response to the problematic status of painting was, then, not to stop painting but rather to rid his work of any hint of subjectivity; to continue to paint but to make a complete break with the ontological aims of modern painting; the desire for radical purification and self-transcendence that had characterised the history of modernist abstraction.” (Meinhardt, 2009, p. 136)
In a response to the question “ Why is photography so important in your work?” posed by Rolf Schön in a 1973 interview Richter stated:
“Because I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgement. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That’s why I wanted to have it, to show it – not use it as a means to painting but as a means to photography.” (Richter, 1995, pp. 72-73).
The option that Richter did not take was the path of minimal art, at least not conceptually, since much of his work in the 1960s (the colour charts, the grey paintings) could be construed as minimalist in its appearance; in its lack of figuration and expression. Whereas minimalism eschewed the pictorial, the intentionally illusionistic and the fictive in favour of the literal, (rejecting the illusionism in painting as a lie, Richter’s aim in removing subjectivity and style from his work was to see what painting might become (…endless possibilities that can never be realised – the boundless, the meaningless in which I place so much hope.” (Richter, 1995, p. 79)), with the mechanical nature of photography for him offering the best means to pursue this. As Meinhardt writes, minimalism “objected to what had previously defined painting, namely its visual reality as illusion.” (Meinhardt, 2009, p. 138), whereas Richter “… insisted that the essential illusionism of painting persists quite apart from intentionality, and – more sweepingly – quite apart from meaning, and thus even independent of unconscious meaning or motivation.” (Meinhardt, 2009, p. 139). It is difficult to accept minimalism’s position that it solved or addressed the problem of painting as a lie. Even minimalist paintings are not taken purely as structures with paint applied, there is always some degree of illusion (and some degree of intention in the illusion), as Richter noted in 1989:
“…we compare a white painting by Robert Ryman not with a whitewashed wall but with the intellectual experience of the history of monochromy, and with other problems in art theory; and even then it fundamentally functions in the same way. We still compare it with snow, flour, toothpaste and who know what else.” (Richter, 1995, p. 182).
And if painting is a lie, what exactly is it lying about? Lying is a fiction, and all art and all perception is in some way fictive. (But grey….can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour”. (Richter, 1995, p. 85)). If minimalism seems to present the safety of the cul-de-sac, Richter’s approach seems more trenchant, more difficult, more daring.
Richter started his grey paintings in 1968, when he was feeling the pressure from being increasingly under siege, both in terms of his isolation from the art world and from the climate of opinion that painting no longer had anything new to offer:
“When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over… I did so because I did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful.” (Richter, 1995, p. 82).
Grey may therefore have reflected his mood of the time, but it was also an extreme test of his belief that painting was still relevant and able to produce something new, and that photography and his desire to paint photographs was the way to achieve this. For Richter grey represented his desire to rid his painting of subjectivity, style and meaning (“To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent to indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape.” (Richter, 1995, pp. 82-83)). His choice of grey was also consistent with photography as a conceptual basis for his work, since the basis, the starting point, of any photographic exposure is also grey; the grey card. It also reflects the ‘space of suspended double-negation’ that Peter Osborne suggests Richter’s painting occupies (Osborne, 2009, p. 95), (“Grey to me was the absence of opinion, nothing, neither/nor” (Richter, 1995, p. 70)). And as grey represents amid-point between black and white, Richter’s grey paintings represent a mid-point in his career between the early photo-projection paintings and the colourful layered abstracts produced after the grey paintings.
The venture into grey, rather than leading to “nothing meaningful” produced a rich set of over hundred paintings. As Richter himself put it when writing about the grey paintings in a letter to Edy de Wilde in 1975:
“As time went on, however, I observed differences of quality among the grey surfaces – and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalising a personal dilemma, they resolved it. Destitution became a constructive statement; it became relative perfection, beauty, and therefore painting.
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