Gerhard Richter - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York

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  • Provenance


    Galerie Rolf Preisig, Basel; Private collection, Switzerland; Schönewald Fine Arts, Xanten; Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London; Private Collection; Galerie Gmurzynska, Zug

  • Exhibited

    Paris, centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Gerhard Richter, February 1 – March 21, 1977; Aarau, Aargauer Kunsthaus und Kunsthalle Krems, Die Schwerkraft 1774-1997, 1997; Sprengel Museum Hannover, Gerhard Richter: Landscapes, October 4, 1998- January 3, 1999

  • Literature

    B.H.D. Buchloh and G. Richter, eds., Gerhard Richter, Paris, 1977, p. 7(illustrated); U. Loock, and D. Zacharopoulos, Gerhard Richter, Munich, 1985, p. 44(illustrated); D. Elger, J. Harten, and Städische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Gerhard Richter.Bilder (Paintings) 1962-1985, Cologne, 1986, p. 200 (illustrated); B.H.D. Buchloch, P. Gidal,B. Pelzer and A. Thill, eds., Gerhard Richter: Werkübersicht (Catalogue Raisonné), Volume III,Bonn, 1993, no. 407 (illustrated); A. Bürgi, W. Denk, S. Kunz, S. Oettermann, M. Schaub,and B. Wismer, Die Schwerkraft der Berge. 1774-1997 (Sondereinband), Aarau, 1997, p. 197(illustrated); D. Elger and G. Richter, eds., Gerhard Richter: Landschaften (Landscapes),Ostfildern-Ruit, 1998, p. 68 (illustrated); D. Schuster, “Impressionem auf Auktionen- oderdie Werke sind nicht genug”, Artinvestor, no. 2, 2003, p. 33 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    In the history of Gerhard Richter’s painterly body of work, the artist hasfocused on the very tenets that underlie the twentieth century’s critical artmovements. First and foremost a painter, Richter has been a prolific literaryartist as well, ascribing his own art to theoretical writings that continuehelping us define his approaches within the scope of Postmodern art, andhis unique position within it.Throughout Richter’s tenure, landscapes occupy a significant positionwithin his career; no other genre has fascinated him to the same extent,nor occupied his devotion with such intensity.While endeavoring throughmany artistic styles in a quasi epistemological quest, the artist has alwaysreturned to the very basic formality of landscape painting, never limiting itto a transitional or exploratory ‘period’ of his career. Vesuv, from 1976,epitomizes Richter’s ongoing investigation with the subject of distillingimagery from photography, a medium that in his mind encompasses thevery essence of an image with its singular, absolute, capacity to capture theworld. As described by the artist in the 1960’s prior to painting Vesuv, “Thephotograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute,and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way ofinforming, and in what it informs of, it is my source,” (G. Richter, The DailyPractice of Painting, Writing and Interviews 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 31).Vesuv’s composition startles us with a pristine sense of reality; theatmospheric haze employed by Richter has less to do with conjuring asense of perspective than with expressing a sublime quality to the overalllook and feel of the picture.To be sure, every element within the painting isexquisitely rendered and evocative of a timelessness, even the time of dayeclipses confirmation—this scene could just as equally take place at duskor dawn, one thousand years ago or yesterday. While elements of landscape painting appeared initially in Richter’s work early on in his career in 1963, the artist began his independent series of landscapes in 1968 after his first vacation, an excursion that landed him besotted with the terrain of Corsica. Eventually, in 1976, the photographs he took from this trip to MountVesuvius in Southern Italy were painted with exquisite detail and slight transfigurations, and form a series of seven paintings devoted to the subject, of which the present lot is exemplary. While Richter’s Vesuvius paintings present a veritable catalogue of the natural world—land and sea, clouds and sky, plains and mountain, in both their compositional formats and subject matter—these paintings are often thought to invoke the tradition of the sublime and, especially, to recall the seductive and beautifully captivating paintings of fellow German painter, nineteenth century Romantic Caspar David Friedrich.Richter’s canvas mirrors Friedrich’s challenge to capture the landscape’sphysicality and sublime beauty as it appears cast in a summer glow, but theparallel stops there as the two artists approach the act from very differentideologies. Friedrich, engaged the formalism of landscape painting within atraditional, religious hierarchy, in which the act of painting that which issublime and pure aligns you closer with your Christian faith.This traditionalRomantic concept played out well into the nineteenth century throughoutEurope and was not limited to Germany; Paul Cèzanne’s exploration withinthe same theme are essential to the history of landscape painting as well,as the artist relied on painting his expressions of Mount Saint Victoire with adaily, religious, devotion.Richter continues this Romantic tradition of expressing nature with asimultaneous truthfulness and disconcerting awareness to its inherentbeauty.Yet he explains that… “my landscapes are not only beautiful ornostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, butabove all they are ‘untruthful’… By its forms it is always against us,because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesisof ourselves,” (J. Lloyd, Gerhard Richter: The London Paintings, London,1988, n.p.).Thus, the complex truth of Gerhard Richter’s Vesuv, is that they are, at everylevel, disquieting and equivocal, seductive and eloquent. Richter painted his“untruthful” landscapes by projecting a photographic image onto a barrensurface, roughly articulating its outlines with pencil, and then filling thesecontours with oil paint.The process of painting, which has indeed becomeone of Richter’s signature styles, only enhances the subject’s evocativepotential. Richter explains, “the simple and familiar and entirely efficientmeans of being blurred [heightens] their subtle erasure revealing more thanenough to deny our immersion in fulfillment,” (D. Elger, ed., Gerhard RichterLandscapes, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1998, p. 30).Richter is a consummate self-critique, aware that on each occasion hepaints, he engages his viewer and creates a new paradigm to view hisartwork. His career has traversed from the Capitalist Realist pictures in theearly 1960s to the Abstrakt Bilder works from recent years.The artist worksin these various styles with a volte face existence, on each juncture a newset of laws forms.While ascribing to the distinct tenets of the artisticmovement he references, Richter deliberates between fully ascribing to andmerely alluding with subtle references, ultimately basing his own work offthe parameters these styles set and not allowing their whole influence todefine his artwork. In this way, the artist has remained uniquely visionary:adapting previous modicums to his own perfection. He exercises completecontrol and discretion over their influence on his own art, choosing to avoidany one artistic methodology or movement.Within a contemporary context, despite Richter’s use of real-life photographsand imagery, his relationship with his American Pop-Art and Europeancounterparts remains loose. For Richter established a stronger connectionto the metaphysical and shied away from the abstraction of any consumerculture or packaged world. Richter’s adaptation of photographs was alsomore obscured by his painterly touch, in essence the artist was lessconcerned with identifying his subject than with the approach to capturinga certain aesthetic. As he writes, “I do not pursue any particular intentions,system, or direction. I do not have a programme, a style, a course to follow. Ihave brought not being interested in specialist problems, working themes,in variations toward mastery. I shy away from all restrictions, I do not knowwhat I want, I am I inconsistent, indifferent, passive; I like things that areindeterminate and boundless, and I like persistent uncertainty. Otherqualities promote achievement, acquisition, success, but they are assuperseded as ideologies, views, concepts and names for things. Now thatwe do not have priests and philosophers any more, artists are the mostimportant people in the world.That is the only thing that interests me,”(Gerhard Richter, artist statement from 1966, taken from N. Serota, ed.,Gerhard Richter, London, 1992, p. 109).Ultimately, Richter’s art is deliberate and precise, the beauty of his worklying within his theoretical approach fused with creative spirit. Richter isfirst and foremost a painter who reflects on the abilities art is able, in anabstract sense, to reflect the spirit of the times and the intellectual systemsat place to define them. Above all, and in especially the present work Vesuv,Richter evokes a pathos running throughout his entire artistic body: “If theAbstrakt Bilder show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show myyearning…These pictures are motivated by the dream of the classical orderand a pristine world—by nostalgia, in other words—the anachronism inthem takes on a subversive and contemporary quality,” (H. Olbrist, GerhardRichter: The Daily Practice of Paintings, Writings, and Interviews 1962-1993,London, 1995, p. 98). By examining a picture’s incarnations over time, Richterbelieves in his profession’s responsibility to articulate these doctrines to thepublic.Thus, through recreating the past, the present day comes into light, through Richter’s consummate strive for perfection.

  • Artist Biography

    Gerhard Richter

    German • 1932

    Powerhouse painter Gerhard Richter has been a key player in defining the formal and ideological agenda for painting in contemporary art. His instantaneously recognizable canvases literally and figuratively blur the lines of representation and abstraction. Uninterested in classification, Richter skates between unorthodoxy and realism, much to the delight of institutions and the market alike. 

    Richter's color palette of potent hues is all substance and "no style," in the artist's own words. From career start in 1962, Richter developed both his photorealist and abstracted languages side-by-side, producing voraciously and evolving his artistic style in short intervals. Richter's illusory paintings find themselves on the walls of the world's most revered museums—for instance, London’s Tate Modern displays the Cage (1) – (6), 2006 paintings that were named after experimental composer John Cage and that inspired the balletic 'Rambert Event' hosted by Phillips Berkeley Square in 2016. 

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Gerhard Richter

Vesuv (Vesuvius) 407

1976
Oil on wooden panel.
26 x 37 3/8 in. (66 x 95 cm).
Signed, numbered and dated “Richter, 1976 Nr. 407” on the reverse.

Estimate
$1,800,000 - 2,500,000 

Sold for $1,833,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York