“These paintings have always been discussed in the light of the traditions and the limits of the rhetorics of the sublime as seen in German Romantic painting. Above all the early landscapes, painted between 1968 and 1981, have provoked comparisons of this sort. The open skies, dramatic sun sets, colourful rainbows and the light breaking through the clouds raise the atmospherics of the motifs into the realm of transcendental light-metaphors.”
Image/ Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022
At once dramatic and atmospheric, Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) is an exquisite canvas from Gerhard Richter’s celebrated Wolken series, a corpus of work that powerfully navigates the boundary between painting and photography, abstraction and representation, nature and the sublime. Transcendental in its treatment of light and exacting in its handing of pigment, the present work illuminates Richter’s masterful technique and his profound, career-spanning dialogue with photography, source imagery, and the genre of landscape painting. On the surface of the present work Richter creates a heightened sense of drama as sunlight breaks through heavenly white clouds. Set against a bright blue sky, the sun-drenched clouds are magnificent in their precise rendering. Satisfying his viewer’s longing for a spiritual encounter with the awesome force of nature, Richter draws upon the cloud’s value throughout the art historical canon as a powerful symbol of heavenly proxies. As Richter himself poignantly noted the very same year Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) was executed, “I felt like painting something beautiful” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Dietmar Elger, “Landscape as a Model,” in Exh. Cat., Hanover, Sprengel Museum, Gerhard Richter: Landscapes, 1998, p. 12). Attesting to its significance within the concise cycle of Wolken paintings, Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) has been illustrated in over sixteen publications and has travelled extensively as part of eight major exhibitions – five across Europe, two in America and two in Asia. The present work was most recently on view as part of the critically-acclaimed retrospective Gerhard Richter: Painting After All at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York between March and July 2020. One of the very best iterations of the Cloud paintings, Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) is testament to Richter’s painterly prowess and status as one of the most significant artists of the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries.
Richter’s Large-Scale Wolken
Nationalgalerie - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin
Image: © Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur fuer Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin
Executed in 1970 and numbered 276 in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, the present work is one of only twenty-two photo-realist Cloud paintings in oil on canvas, six of which are held in prestigious museum collections, including Museum Folkwang, Essen; Fondation Camignac, Paris; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn. Executed between 1968 and 1979, the series is among Richter’s most celebrated, and marks a significant pre-curser to his photo-realist Kerzen (Candles) and Schädel (Skulls) of the 1980s. Altering the effects of light and weather conditions on cloud formations, Richter renders swirling celestial bodies that are at once divine, transient and untouchable, a source of curiosity across centuries and a subject of profound intrigue to artists throughout the canon of art history. Indeed, whilst remaining resolutely contemporary in its associations with photography and abstraction, Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) is indebted to the art historical tradition of landscape painting and the beloved genre of the cloudscape from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods through to the Nineteenth Century. From Michelangelo’s ethereal clouds on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in The Last Judgement (c. 1540), to John Constable’s celebrated cloud studies and Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic vistas in works such as Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (circa 1817) and Monk by the Sea (1808-1810), the present painting evokes the sublime visual language founded in such pantheistic masterworks. Yet Richter’s photographic, near-scientific approach to the very same subject matter systematically de-romanticises the great genre of landscape painting. In great contrast to the works of the German Romanticists, Richter’s landscapes are devoid of the human figure, and thus devoid of human emotion or empathy. As Robert Storr wrote in the exhibition catalogue accompanying Richter’s major 2002-03 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York: “Friedrich’s theme was awesome forces greater than humankind, but it is a human presence that gives them scale and imbues them with meaning. The emotional power of Richter’s treatment of the same situation derives from the mesmerizing lifelessness – the total un-humanity of the subject. Whatever feeling we may try to invest in these inanimate objects is returned to us intact, like a shout or cry without a transforming echo, making the inappropriateness of our attempt to link those objects to psychological states unnervingly manifest. Thus, no matter how picturesque an image may be, a barrier imposes itself between the scene depicted and the viewer’s longing to make himself or herself a part of it and at home in nature” (Robert Storr quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 2002-03, p. 66-67)
Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022
“A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted: specific ideologies, for example. Beyond that, if it is any ‘good’ it concerns us – transcending ideology – as art that we consider worth the trouble of defending (perceiving, showing, making). It is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich ‘today.’”
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven
Image: © Bridgeman Images
The Wolken paintings are deeply rooted in photography, and the title of the present work is unique in its reference to a photographic technique called contre-jour, in which the camera is positioned directly toward a source of light. The contre-jour thus creates a backlighting of its subject. While Richter’s title references this photographic-imaging technique, it also evokes the equivalent technique in painting, which was employed by artists long before the invention of photography. The technique in painting exhibits the use of dramatic shadows cast to the left and right of a subject in silhouette, with a stark contrast between light and dark. Indeed, many landscape paintings throughout the art historical canon employ the contre-jour technique, with such compositions emanating around the subject of the sun or the moon as a light source. This effect is palpable in works such as Corrado Giaquinto’s The Birth of the Sun and the Triumph of Bacchus (1761-62), J.M.W Turner’s The Morning After the Storm (1840-45) or Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men by the Sea at Moonrise (1817). Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) echoes these earlier compositions as back-lit clouds revolve and swirl around the light of the sun, partly in shadow and partly exposed to bright, blinding light.
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich
Image/ Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022
The present work is based on two photographs documented in Richter’s Atlas sheets dating from 1970. The photographs were taken during different times – one in daylight with white clouds juxtaposed against a blue sky and the other at sunrise or sunset, the clouds emanating around the sun in hues of rosy pink. Immersive and ethereal in its beauty, Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) combines the treatment of light in both photographic images. The winding shapes of the clouds are smooth and slightly blurred on the surface of the canvas, as Richter’s meticulous brushwork seeks to imitate the objective realism of photography. In an interview with art critic Peter Sager in 1972, Richter discussed his desire to emulate the photographic image: “Photography had to be more relevant to me than art history: it was an image of my, our present day reality. And I did not take it as a substitute for reality but as a crutch to help me to get to reality… I needed the greater objectivity of the photograph in order to correct my own way of seeing: For instance, if I draw an object from nature, I start to stylize and to change it in accordance with my personal vision and my training. But if I paint from a photograph, I can forget all the criteria that I get from these sources. I can paint against my will, as it were. And that, to me, felt like an enrichment” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting – Writing and Interviews 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 66). From 1949 to 1953 Richter had a job as an advertising and stage painter, and then as a photographic library assistant. His keen interest in the medium of photography has persisted ever since: “The photography is a consequence and not a cause. Photography interested me because it is such a good representation of reality” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Ibid., p. 62).
Image: © Elke Estel/Hans Peter Klut, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022
While the Cloud paintings reveal Richter’s obsession with photography and photographic techniques, they also convey the artist’s career-long investigation into abstraction as well as an oscillation between conscious control and chance central to Richter’s conceptual approach to painting. As Mark Godfrey asserts, “These are not just paintings of skies – they are paintings that show Richter’s attraction to the ‘unknowable and unrepresentable’, his celebration of the limitations of organization and control” (Mark Godfrey, “Damaged Landscapes” in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate Modern (and travelling), Gerhard Richter: Panorama, 2011-12, p. 83). Indeed, clouds are intangible, shapeless, formless and always in flux. Clouds thus signified a subject matter that was out of the artist’s control, and one that required a submission to the dynamism of chance. These aspects of coincidence and subconscious also prevail throughout Richter’s celebrated Abstrakte Bilder, some of which he called ‘free abstracts’, a name that aptly conveys his embrace of irregularity and chance across his oeuvre: “This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: It has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a readymade) always possesses. Of course, this is also a method of bringing in unconscious processes, as far as possible. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things that I can think out for myself” (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Sabine Schütz in: Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interview and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 256).
Image/ Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022
Luminescent and serene, Study for Clouds (Contre-jour) is testament to Gerhard Richter’s unique ability to surpass the limitations of his forbears and propel time-honoured genres into the contemporary era. Within the exceptional cycle of the Wolken, the present work captures a sublime moment of infinite movement. Articulating a confrontation between the painterly and the photographic, the representative and the abstract, the natural and the super-natural, this painting stands among the most beautiful of Richter’s oeuvre whilst representing the most transgressive, symbolically redolent motifs ever translated by the artist into paint.