Gerhard Richter: Portraits
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Gerhard Richter: Portraits Details
This first comprehensive overview of the place of the portrait in Gerhard Richterís oeuvre assembles portrait paintings, photographs, watercolors, drawings and prints from the 1960s to the present--everything from classics like the strikingly honey-haired Betty to previously unknown works discovered in the course of research for this project. Icons such as Ema (Nude on a Staircase), Uncle Rudi, Mister Heyde, 48 Portraits, Self-Portrait, Family at the Sea, Small Bathers, Reader and Moritz, settle once and for all that Richterís emotional pull towards his material (ìThe subject matter is so important to me that I invest much time and effort in my search for it, so much that I just have to paint it.î) not only doesnít hinder him from producing classics, but rather encourages it. Stefan Gronertís essay follows the development of the portrait in the artistís work, starting with the blurred black-and-white pictures of the 1960s and moving on to the colorful panels of recent years, while Hubertus Butin devotes his essay to Richterís portrait photography of the 1960s. Portraits demonstrates that Richter pursues the theme of the portrait in not only all of the media in which he works, but in every genre as well.
Reviews
photography has had a good run,beginning with in depth thinking before it was even developed; Walter Benjamin and Susan Sontag for instance have primary essays of this new art form,many believe photography may have killed the impetus of art,its independence,art now engages to make more the commodity element, which it seems to be art is for sale,in the millions$$ Nothing more !the loss of aura, the fetish of the image as opposed to Marx's often referred to chapter in DAS KAPITAL,images do acquire a fetish,as "Marilyn" did or "Marlon Brando" ;Cindy Sherman has shown us these fetishizations and done well, adding new, off-center, content, respecting the commonplace particles, fragments of the banalities of Fifties,Sixties lifeworlds,showing us how she works, and that images are simply meant to be consumed, and consumed again, ad nauseum;.Richter does this as well but a wholly different sensibility,he hadn't the surface media reservoir to tap as Sherman; photography was more an escape a way for him to fill time before enlightenment hit, or perhaps nothing quite as pretencious, artist need to be connected in some way, so if you are not pressing the brush, something else needs to happen, With Richter I get the impression he is trying to comment on what photography is suppose to do, to introduce us to something we should know but don't like, our belief in where we are were and where we are going, We believe in the photo;its potential; what's in it, the truth content of it,We believe it because it is there,nothing we can do about that; but does the subject matter believe it?, the representaions themselves have an understanding of who they are, where they are, the particular spiritual place- places as Lucy Lippard has shown all have a truth content,a fetish reference;- if you know where to look. Richter takes all the voyeur "gazing" elements out of his subject matter,hewing,flattening out edges, de-contrasting the composition,magneticized to dull black n'white; subtracting the sharp fine lines, a "straffing" of the senses, saying photos are nothing more than a sequential counting of reality,as his a-matter-a-factly potrait series; no truth,only places,triggered objects; the jouissance is eradicating what the eye should know, even the Duchamp re-visitation "Nude descending. . ." is not startling, post-modernity is suppose to be exciting,playful,non-hierarchical, it is again just a signpost, evidence of something that happened, quite arbitrary; maybe saying "I am living in a pretty dull boring place righy now", DDR East Germany. But this is propaganda, any place can be made into art; and still the functions of the lifeworld complexities are there, away from the fetishizations of what we believe in,in the West. Sensibilities have been colonized in the West,it is more a function of our own hypocrisy, which is necessary; do we still beleive the Soviet colonies are not interesting places, as opposed to where? For Richter: Families still converse with each other,it is still a modern icon,people still do things together. For Richter he merely manipulates for some future work,all artists are quite arrogant here, never doing something that doesn't lead someplace,although never knowing where it leads.Photographers should be true believers if they don't expect profit from what they do, like atheists;living without fire insurance.Good evidence of a lifeline to creation.