“No ideology. No religion, no belief, no meaning, no imagination, no meaning, no invention, no creativity, no hope – but painting like nature, painting as change, becoming, emerging, being-there, thusness; without an aim, and just as right, logical, perfect and incomprehensible.”
—Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter pulls the squeegee across a luminescent expanse of sticking, shimmering oil paint. A central space of black grounds the artist’s brilliant gradations of strawberry red, acid yellow, bright cerulean, turquoise, and lime green. His tool swoops in wide diagonals; vertical and horizontal striations of pigment, a spackling of sunshine yellow and midnight blue. At such scale, the range of color, the prismatic rainbow of hues shining forth, is all-encompassing, overwhelming; astonishing in its depth, its encapsulation of the act of painting, of color played out across time. This is Abstraktes Bild, a painting of monumental scale, and a record of Richter, a true innovator, at the height of his powers.

 

 

Abstraktes Bild, 1987, comprised of two canvases, spans over eight feet in height and thirteen feet in width. The work is a consummate example of Richter’s skill with the squeegee, a tool he integrated into his abstract paintings only one year prior, which has become a hallmark and visual signature of his richly varied practice.ⁱ With the squeegee, the artist pulls paint across the composition, working on both canvases at once, scraping layers out from under one another in a seemingly infinite field of color.

 

An Innovative Method

 

The late 1980s were arguably the most important period of Richter’s artistic development. In addition to the career-changing innovation of the squeegee, 1986 marked the artist’s first major retrospective exhibition, which travelled across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and the decade, as a whole, saw an increased engagement with Richter’s work by American art institutions, galleries, and critics. As a result, Abstraktes Bild and its fellow, monumental Abstrakte Bilder of the late 1980s are among the finest and most desirable works in Richter’s oeuvre. The works, with the unique visual and tactile qualities realized by the squeegee, speak to Richter’s career-long pursuit of painting unbounded by ideology.ⁱⁱ His vision is the pursuit of painting, for painting’s own sake.

 

Besides the present work, there is only one other Abstraktes Bild created in 1987, of identically massive dimensions, which resides in the Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon. Similar Abstrakte Bilder populate esteemed public and private collections around the world, including those of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Ergo Versicherungsgruppe AG, Düsseldorf; Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, São Paulo; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and the Saint Louis Art Museum, which owns the iconic November, Dezember, Januar paintings of 1989. Abstraktes Bild was first exhibited at Galerie Durand-Dessert, Paris in 1988, and shown in the prestigious Carnegie International of the same year.

 

  Clip from Gerhard Richter Painting, 2011.

 

The use of the squeegee in Abstraktes Bild is essential to understanding the work’s significance in Richter’s oeuvre. The 2011 documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting, directed by Corinna Belz, gives unprecedented insight into the artist’s technique. Clips from Gerhard Richter Painting reveal a physical, deliberate, and embodied process. Working with wood and acrylic squeegees often larger than his own body, Richter drags paint across the canvas, at times applying his entire body weight to the squeegee. Belz’s microphones capture the deep scrape of the tool across the painted surface, and every squelch and drip of viscous oil paint. Each pass of the squeegee simultaneously covers the surface in new paint, excavates extant layers, and creates a new layer of color out of these accumulations.

 

One can imagine the practice played out, nearly 25 years earlier, with Abstraktes Bild. Richter’s layers of paint record the movements of his body and squeegee. Through paint, we can see his entire body working to drag the tool from the upper left to lower right of Abstraktes Bild. We see the skittering vertical ridges of yellow and green; a passage of white that skips, ever so slightly, at the hinge of the two panels. It is a visceral, bodily feeling, enacted in visual terms.

 

A Postmodern Context, A Natural Process

 

“The moment a narrative like Greenberg’s or Judd’s no longer dominated painting is the moment when painting got interesting.”
—John Yau

Richter created Abstraktes Bild in the international art historical context of postmodernism, a vein of criticism that deplatformed an artist’s originality in favor of viewing the artistic process as a reinterpretation of existent forms. Postmodernist critics decried the death of painting in the 1980s, cynically arguing that painting, whether figurative, abstract, or in between, had nowhere else to go. No further innovation could come from that medium, they argued. Richter disagreed.

 

In his writings and interviews from the 1980s, Richter lays out his stance as an artist without ideology, who, therefore, is guided by his materials. “I am a materialist on principle” he wrote in 1986, meaning that, for him, every emotive association of art derives from its physical properties: for Abstraktes Bild, it is the paint, the support, the brush, the squeegee.ⁱⁱⁱ For Richter, the lack of a universal ideology to guide all painting was not a death sentence, but a form of freedom, which allowed his abstract paintings to “evolve their motifs as the works proceeds,” as in the natural world. “For nature, too, does not develop an organism in accordance with an idea,” he wrote. “Nature lets its forms and modifications come, within the framework of its given facts and with the help of chance.”^iv

 

The above quotation can be read as a how-to guide for Richter’s squeegee method. Given a squeegee, oil paint, and two wooden panels, the result of each Abstrakte Bilder is different, due the role of chance in the painting process. While Richter has control of what colors he uses, where he applies them, and how he moves the squeegee (in what direction, with what force), it is chance that creates the gradations of color across the surface; chance that stipples the lime green in its idiosyncratic, irreplicable pattern over the black center; chance that scratches through the teal and midnight blue. Abstraction is a way to give form to chance; “the moment of chance is very important,” Richter explains, and “it is guided and used” in Abstraktes Bild.^v

 

 

 

 

Crucially, chance takes place over time in Abstraktes Bild. The work is not the result of one swipe of the squeegee, or a spontaneous splat of dripped paint. As does nature, Richter’s work takes time.^vi While not etymologically related, build as a homophone for Bild is a useful interpretive framework here. Richter builds up the painted surface of Abstraktes Bild; the work builds upon itself, layer upon layer, like rings make a tree, sediment makes a rock, bees build a hive. Abstraktes Bild records Richter’s movement with the squeegee; the process of nature, of work, over time.

 

Richter takes up the generative process of nature as his subject in Abstraktes Bild, rather than directly representing a landscape or a tree, and it is this evocation of process that gives Abstraktes Bild its rich associative power. Abstraktes Bild is a close-up of the bark of a tree. It is a comet-strewn night sky. It is the iridescent wings of a beetle. It is these and a thousand more things, and that, Richter says, is where the Abstrakte Bilder “get their effect from, the fact that they incessantly remind you of nature, and so they’re almost naturalistic anyhow.”^vii

 

Naturalism and the Sublime

 

 

“This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings.”
—Gerhard Richter

Indeed, naturalism is a key feature of Richter’s photorealistic paintings, and he has painted landscapes since the 1960s.^viii Richter’s photorealistic landscapes have a haunting, ethereal quality, engaged by the artist’s strategic blurring of the mimetic surface. The moodiness of Richter’s landscapes echoes the dramatic, emotive vistas of 19^th century Romantic painters such as Richter’s countryman, Caspar David Friedrich. For artists like Friedrich, the natural landscape was the ideal visual representation of the sublime, an aesthetic ideal of rightness or greatness, or even the divine. To encounter a sublime landscape was an emotional experience, provoking awe and a sense of satisfaction in the viewer.

 

Richter views his photorealistic landscapes and abstract works as complimentary practices, and he continued to create landscapes concurrent to his development of the Abstrakte Bilder. His mastery of the strategic blur in the former comes across in the press of lime and yellow in the black center of Abstraktes Bild, for example, and for a brief period in 1986, the artist experimented with combining his photorealistic landscape and squeegee techniques together in the same painting. The photorealistic work “has so much to do with reality that I wanted a corresponding rightness,” Richter says. In abstraction, “I believe I am looking for rightness…in nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colors fit the forms.”^ix Thus, for Richter, “rightness,” or perhaps, even, the sublime, lies not in the representational, but the abstract. It lies in the process of nature, the process of painting, as embodied in Abstraktes Bild.

 

“Art is the highest form of hope.”
—Gerhard Richter

It was necessary for Richter to have a hopeful view of painting in the cynical, postmodern context of the 1980s. As an artist working in a Germany divided after World War II, hope was an irreplaceable tool for Richter to parse the difficulties of everyday life in his art, not to mention the trouble of memory and historical trauma. In a 1986 interview, the taciturn artist grows passionate as he describes the link between art and hope. For Richter, making art is an essential part of the human experience, and celebrating it as such is essential to his 1980s practice. “It’s a hopeful thing” to make art, he says, “to possess this ability, and a good, humanistic thing. It stands in opposition to all the unpleasant things, such as aggression and malice, war and crime…to me [art] means this other side, which engenders hope, because we have this side in us: beauty, love, truth!!”^x

 

Abstract art, for Richter, is the ideal form for this “hopeful thing,” as the absence of recognizable forms creates the “sheer necessity” of finding a deeper meaning, for ourselves and what we see, in the work.^xi Working with chance, as in Abstraktes Bild, each painting by Gerhard Richter hinges on his unflinching faith that the work will emerge, out of layers and layers of paint, every time.

 

 

 

ⁱ Rosemary Cohane Erpf, Painting in the 1980s: Reimagining the Medium, University of Chicago Press, 2022, p. 111.

ⁱⁱ Gerhard Richter, quoted in Erpf, p. 105.

ⁱⁱⁱ Richter, entry for 28 Mar., 1986, in “Notes, 1986,” in Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, New York, 2009, p. 161.

^iv Richter, entry for 21 Apr. 1986, ibid.

^v Richter, quoted in Nicholas Serota, “I Have Nothing to Say and I’m Saying It,” in Mark Godfrey and Serota, eds., Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2011, p. 27; Richter, quoted in “Interview with Anna Tilroe, 1987,” in Elger and Obrist, p. 198.

^vi Richter, quoted in Serota, p. 17.

^vii Richter, quoted in “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Elger and Obrist, p. 186.

^viii “Gerhard Richter: Landscapes,” Gerhard Richter, accessed Sep. 2023, online.

^ix Richter, quoted in “Interview with Anna Tilroe, 1987,” in Elger and Obrist, p. 198.

^x Richter, quoted in “Interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986,” ibid., p. 191.

^xi Richter, “Text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982,” ibid., p. 121.