Emanating celestial light on a spectacular scale, the divine and immersive beauty of Gerhard Richter’s Seestück [Seascape] is entirely illustrative of the aesthetic and conceptual mastery that have come to define the artist’s revolutionary body of work. Radiating luminescent sunlit hues filtered through a harmonic miasma of soft ephemeral forms, this painting is undeniably indebted to a long and familiar legacy of art historical heritage. Readily evocative of the Romantic and sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable’s famous cloud studies, the atmospheric light effects of Turner, as well as drawing on the cloud’s symbolic value as heavenly proxies in Renaissance and Baroque painting, the present work instantly conjures an encompassing transhistorical field of references, whilst remaining resolutely contemporary.
“Richter’s landscape paintings do not go back to any religious understanding of Nature, for him the physical space occupied by Nature is not a manifestation and a revelation of the transcendental. In his pictures there are no figures seen from behind inviting the viewer to step metaphorically into their shoes or sink reverentially into some sublime play on Nature.”
Though drawing on a nineteenth century Romantic lineage and inescapably evoking a religiously loaded semiotic legacy, the artist’s fascination with clouds and seascapes extends into an exploration of chance in painting—the ultimate expression of which was later refined from the 1980s onwards via the Abstrakte Bilder. Drawing on his concurrent photography practice, Richter bases his Seascapes on source images from his own archive, but through his remarkable painterly prowess pushes the horizon further into transcendent abstraction. One of only four 2- by 3-meter canvases depicting this subject, all of which were executed in 1975 and are housed in prominent private collections worldwide, including the Froehlich Collection in Stuttgart, this concise group of works straddles the readily drawn schism separating Richter’s abstract works from the hyperreal Photo Paintings. Foregrounding religion, history and artistic inheritance within the complex debate for painting’s legitimacy in the later twentieth century, the Seestück represent one of Richter’s most pluralistic of thematic inquiries, and most astounding of aesthetic investigations.
Growing up in Dresden, Richter would undoubtedly have been familiar with Caspar David Friedrich, as it was the city in which the father of German Romanticism established his reputation in the early nineteenth century. The atmospheric vapor, an ethereal and mysterious effect pronounced by Richter’s Seestück finds immediate visual parity with the transcendental light-metaphors laid down within any number of works by Friedrich, such as Large Enclosure (1832) or Morning in the Riesengeberge (1810). Within the twentieth century the endeavors of Richter’s contemporaries to revive the genre of landscape, such as Lichtenstein’s comic book sea and cloudscapes or Blinky Palermo’s Minimalist abstractions, confer a somewhat anachronistic reading upon Richter’s romantic vistas in comparison. Though contemporaneous with Robert Smithson’s pioneering of Land Art, at first glance these works appear to share more in common with Constable’s masterful rendering of the sky or Turner’s treatment of atmospherics—ideologies rooted in specifically nineteenth century concerns with truthfulness to nature or an expression of the sublime.
Gerhard Richter’s Seascapes in Prominent Institutional Collections
Nonetheless, the subversion and contemporaneity of Richter’s works subtly operates within a remarkable double-speak. Interviewed in 1986 Richter described his landscapes as “cuckoo’s eggs,” making explicit their inherently untruthful or misleading character. (The artist quoted in “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” p. 163) Hubertus Butin critically expanded on this in 1994, explaining, “Richter’s landscape paintings do not go back to any religious understanding of Nature, for him the physical space occupied by Nature is not a manifestation and a revelation of the transcendental. In his pictures there are no figures seen from behind inviting the viewer to step metaphorically into their shoes or sink reverentially into some sublime play on Nature.” (Hubertus Butin, “The Un-Romantic Romanticism of Gerhard Richter,” in Exh. Cat., Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, The Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790-1990, 1994, p. 462) By employing the sublime visual language founded in Friedrich’s pantheistic view and passing it through a mechanical photographic document, Richter systematically de-romanticizes the genre, making it resolutely contemporary. This particularly stands for the Seascapes. Executed in series, these are not celestial visions supporting divine figures or concealing an intimation of a heavenly beyond; though undeniably beautiful as a painted artefact, Richter’s seascapes are wild and beautiful but ultimately indifferent, isolated, fragmented and evacuated of an emphatic human element.
RIGHT: John Constable, Cloud Study, 1821. Image © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection / Bridgeman Images
Following the irreconcilable events of the first half of the twentieth century, Richter confronts the impossibility of continuity: by invoking the Romantic tradition directly, Richter looked to “make visible the caesura separating his age from Friedrich’s.” (Ibid., p. 80) In 1973 Richter acknowledged this strategy: “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 ‘good’, it concerns us—transcending ideology—as art that we ostensibly defend (perceive, show, make). Therefore, ‘today,’ we can paint as Caspar David Friedrich did.” (The artist in “Letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann, February 1973,” in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ed., The Daily Practice of Painting, London 1995, p. 81) At first appearing incommensurate with contemporary practices of high-art, Richter’s detachment and evacuation of sentiment via the serial and mechanical, and its infusion with the vicissitudes of recent history, ensures a legitimate form of landscape painting that is also intensely beautiful.
As both abstract forms and photorealist paintings, the Seestück represent some the most metamorphic and multidimensional works of Richter’s career—significantly, it was this body of work that conceptually furnished and facilitated the artist’s transition into full painterly abstraction in the late 1970s. Visually defining ontological openness, the present work simultaneously stands among the most beautiful and stunning of the artist’s oeuvre whilst representing the most transgressive, symbolically redolent and conceptually pluralistic motifs ever translated by the artist into paint. All aspects of the artist’s philosophical, historical and aesthetic concerns are subtly concentrated into the glorious miasma and ethereal sfumato that constitutes Richter’s Seestück.
