“Contact with like-minded painters – a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through. […] One depends on one’s surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists – and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke – matters a lot me: it is part of the input I need.”

—Gerhard Richter

 Richter and Polke: Collaborations and Comraderie

As one of the most influential and innovative artists of the late twentieth century, and a defining figure of abstraction, Richter has redefined the limits of painterly representation over the course of his staggering sixty-year career. Born in Dresden in 1932, the artist came of age in the long shadow of the Second World War, his childhood inflected with the burdensome history and ideological zealotry of both Nazism and the Soviet Union. Originally enrolling in the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1951, Richter’s early training was as a mural painter, limited by the stylistic and thematic parameters of Soviet Realism. Like Polke, Richter fled Soviet-occupied East Germany early, relocating to Düsseldorf in 1961 where he encountered a staggeringly different way of life characterised by a proliferation of consumer goods, embrace of diverse and international art movements, and more open-minded critique of socio-cultural issues.

With its muted tones and blurred pictorial treatment, Mann mit zwei Kindern is supremely representative of this richly inventive and productive period of the artist’s career, evolving out of the ‘Capitalist Realism’ movement he developed with the likes of Polke, Konrad Lueg, and Manfred Kuettner during their time as students at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1960s. A deliberately ironic response to state-sponsored idealisation of the people and their leaders that fed into Social Realism on the one hand, and the encroaching hegemony of American abstraction which did not seem to deal in any meaningful way with people or history on the other, Capitalist Realism provided these young artists with a means of responding to Pop’s preoccupation with a media-driven and commodity-saturated visual culture with an irony and critical distance specific to the German postwar experience.

While Polke turned to everyday objects such as bars of soap, chocolate bars, and socks in his early compositions as a means of articulating the specific conditions of Germany’s postwar economic recovery and identity, Richter’s appropriation of photographs speaks to a shared commitment to finding a newly direct and objective way of representing the world, intersecting with and critiquing both American Pop Art and German postwar consciousness. Where Polke’s early painting and Stoffbilder works interact more robustly with the familiar vernacular of American Pop as established by the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichenstein, Richter turned away from the languages and motifs of advertising and consumerism in favour of the photographic image and its assumed relationship to notions of objective truth. Despite the divergent directions that they would take their respective practices in the coming years, in these early years the two were deeply connected, Richter reflecting on their joint 1966 Galerie h exhibition and associated collaborative artist’s book project years later and musing that at that moment “I was as close to Polke as with nobody before.”ⁱⁱ

Photorealism and the Family Portraits 

“[…] everyone has produced his own ‘devotional pictures’: these are the likenesses of family and friends, preserved in remembrance of them.”

—Gerhard Richter

Although Richter’s use of photographic source material is varied and expansive, his paintings related to group family portraits are strikingly rare, representing only fifteen of the Photo Paintings produced between 1962 and 1971, most of which are now held in prestigious institutional collections worldwide. Its source image taken from the Polke family album from the 1950s, here we see the artist as a young boy, smiling and standing proudly beside his older brother Joannes (Hans) and younger sister Dorothea (Dorle). Referring to these family snapshots Richter has described the ubiquitous family photo album as its own mode of devotional imagery, captured, collected, and carefully preserved for future generations. Familiar and utterly ordinary, these amateur photographs confirm to certain visual codes in their arrangement and presentation, Richter embracing the universality of these snapshots and amplifying the sense of their inherent artificiality through his painterly treatment of the subject. 

Frequently referenced in discussions of this smaller suite of Family paintings, the 1964 painting Familie am Meer, exhibited alongside the present work in the major 2019 group show, Baselitz – Richter - Polke – Kiefer: Die jungen Jahre der Alten Meister exemplifies Richter’s fascination with these images, and their profound relevance to his broader artistic project. Ostensibly an everyday image of a family enjoying a day out on the seaside borrowed from the familial photo albums of his first wife, Marianne Eufinger, a darker history lay just beneath the surface of those smiling faces. As Richter was to discover, after joining the SS in 1935, Marianne’s father, the smiling Professor Heinrich Eufinger performed some nine hundred forced sterilisations on women incarcerated in asylums, including at the clinic where Richter’s own aunt had suffered a similar fate. As Richter has eloquently described, what attracted him to this particular image was precisely its universality, and its exposure of the inscrutability and fallibility of appearances. As the artist explains: “I was particularly struck by the two arms [of Heinrich Eufinger] that contain, as it were, a family. The protective, beaming father […] was the typical representative of a generation of fathers that had experienced an authoritarian upbringing themselves and built their careers in the ‘Third Reich.’”^iv

It's secret history an altogether more unique and personal one, Mann mit zwei Kindern is an exceptionally rare and poignant record of this intense period of artistic collaboration and creative experimentation for these two masters of postwar German painting. Interrogating the inherently untrustworthy nature of images that purport to speak plain truths, in dragging his dry brush across the still-wet surfaces of these works Richter introduces an inscrutable distance between us and the image, making manifest the instabilities and inconsistencies of our notions of memory, truth, and representation itself.

ⁱ Richard Calvocoressi, ‘Young Gerd’, Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2020, online.
ⁱⁱ Gerhard Richter, quoted in Gerhard Richter Archive, “polke/richter. Documentation of an exhibition,” online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961 – 2007, London, 2009, p. 33.
^iv Gerhard Richter, quoted in, Götz Adriani, Baselitz, Richter, Polke, Kiefer: The Early Years of the Old Masters, exh. cat., Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Deichtorhallen Hamburg, 2019, p. 128.