Gerhard Richter coming to SFMOMA: ''Idiots can do what I do''
New York Times Magazine story (registration required) on German painter Gerhard Richter, as the Guggenheim prepares to stage a retrospective in February, and the SFMOMA is opening an exhibition this week:
Since the mid-60's, Richter has been celebrated and attacked, pretty much equally, for the extreme physical precision, maddening opacity and daunting intellectual quality of his work, which switch-hits, sometimes almost as if arbitrarily, between realism and abstraction. The realist pictures -- landscapes, flowers, skulls, portraits, candles, among other things -- copy postcards, news photos and his own snapshots in a style that is mechanically exact but calculatedly blurry in parts, daring a viewer to figure out what, if anything, the pictures are about. The abstractions sometimes perversely turn improvisational gestures into deliberate, mechanical-looking, freeze-dried marks. They have the quality of blue ice, pristine and cool. Richter's paintings are disciplined, contradictory, strange, melancholic, even sometimes morbid.
And they are among the great works of the postwar era. At a time when art is full of doubt, Richter is the most self-critical of artists, putting painting to the most extravagant tests and taking nothing for granted. In the process, he makes disturbing and often utterly beautiful art. Other artists, like Jasper Johns, ask what is the meaning of a brush stroke. Richter asks what is the value of art itself -- what is its use in the world.
...''Idiots can do what I do,'' he says, although of course he doesn't really think so. ''When I first started to do this in the 60's, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal -- that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn't seem to be the point.''
The point, among other things, was to distance himself from the cliches of artistic expression -- all the spontaneous, fiery, warm and fuzzy modes of painting -- so as to make people really look and not reflexively swoon. By using deliberately banal photographs, impersonally mimicked, he was doing the exact opposite of what painting was expected to do, not grabbing a viewer by the lapels but methodically copying an everyday image. In time, some of the pictures have come to look expressively painted, perceptions having changed, but making methodical copies was Richter's intent.
''The abstracts are the opposite to work on,'' he says. ''That process is more like walking, step by step, without an intention, until you discover where you are going. When I paint a landscape from a photograph or an image like this one, I can see the end point before I start, although in fact it always turns out slightly different than I imagined. What I have is not facility, because this really doesn't take skill. I have an eye. I couldn't make a drawing of you sitting here right now. I would love to have that ability, in the same way that I would love to play the piano. Virtuosity is a precondition for pianists, but in addition you have to be good. These are not the same thing. This is the big problem for painting today, the terrible side of modern art, because you can now do anything and simply declare it to be art -- with no sense of quality.''