Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter’s progressive advance towards compositional order and flawless execution during the 1960s achieves an almost Zen-like clarity in this portrait of the actress, Lis Kertelge. Executed during a period of unprecedented painterly confidence that culminated in the introduction of colour into his work later that year, the present work is amongst the most aesthetically sublime and technically accomplished photopaintings that Richter painted during the 1960s.

At a time when most of his contemporaries were putting down their brushes in favour of more advanced, less formal approaches to image making, Richter’s commitment to the expressive power and freedom of easel painting was as radical as the photographic sources on which he based his paintings. Through the licentious examples of Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and Warhol who had begun using mass media photography as a source for their work, he realised that it was no longer a pre-requisite of painting to have direct contact with the world; that the stimulus for art could be provided through magazines or any other visual intermediary. By using a readymade source, Richter also consciously engaged with the Duchampian debate regarding the subversion of traditional artistic notions like creativity, originality and ‘High’ art. What is more, the precision of the photographic source challenged his ability as a painter and fulfilled his requirements for a visual source free from art historical associations and subjective desires.

Based on an image he had found in a local newspaper, this painting was the first and largest of the two back-to-back portraits that Richter painted of Lis Kertelge. A little known figure outside of her German homeland, she, like the household icons of the everyday appearing in Richter’s work at this time, represented the public face of a new wave of bourgeois optimism sweeping through Europe in the post war period. The fact that she was an actress as well as an undeniable beauty provided him with an opportunity to make a direct and conscious comparison between his photobased portraits and Warhol’s celebrities and films stars like Liz and Marilyn. Richter had admired American Pop art from a distance since the early 1960s, and had made no secret of how Warhol’s use of photographs had encouraged him to pursue a similar avenue in his own work. However, instead of restricting the quality of the painting and its surface to the limitations of the source image as Warhol had, he here arouses an immediate curiosity and emotional response in the viewer through the painterly fluidity of his brushwork and treatment of the motif.

Constructing and distorting the image by brushing across the wet surface of the canvas in a symbolic act of self effacement, Richter engages his audience with the natural cycle of creation and destruction. As the beauty of the sitter emerges and recedes in an ethereal mist of brushwork, he highlights the pivotal role given to chance in his painting process and his wider ambivalence to it. Although emphatically flat in its surface, the movement and tension within the paint film endows the actress’ form with a fullness and vitality, particularly where the edges of the different colour fields overlap and flow into one another. The pigment there seems to float like grains of sand held in suspension and this delicacy of treatment lends itself effortlessly to the beauty of the motif.

As if emerging from the depths of a misty film set, unlike the second portrait of her which focused only upon her face, Richter captures the actress here in full cinematic glamour. Signalling the beginnings of his investigation into the boundaries separating abstract and figurative representation, the infinite subtlety of tone and mark employed here emphasize the illusion inherent to pictorial representation. In these late grisaille photopaintings of the 1960s, Richter did not seek to imitate the material of the photograph on which they were based, or even the already filtered reality contained within it; rather he wanted to construct another authentic reality - one which only existed in his works. For this reason, he professed his indifference to the subject of the source as well as its quality, stressing that he looked to photographs only as a compositional and tonal guide that would liberate his hand from the traditional choices governing style and form. The photo, explained Richter, “had no style, no composition, no criterion; I was freeing myself from personal experiences; for the first time I had nothing, it was pure image. That is why I wanted to have it, to show it; I didn’t want to use it as a medium for a painting; I wanted to use the painting as a medium for photography.” (Gerhard Richter cited in Rolf Schön, ‘Interview’, Gerhard Richter; 36 Biennale in Venedig-Deutscher Pavillon, 1972, p. 24) Unlike the American Pop artists for whom the motif was the primary subject of the painting, with Richter, the motif was foremost a means of triggering a discussion about the issues of painting and perception. The paintings were not so much about their content but rather about its relationship to lived reality.

Shrouded beneath an abstract sfumato blanket of painterly intervention, the unfocused blurred zones annul the content of the image without formulating one to replace it. Occurring as if seen in the blink of an eye or caught in a passing reflection, Lis Kertelge reveals Richter’s increasing interest in blurring the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. Although immediately legible from a distance, up close the image seems to dissolve into an abstract ether of feathered striations. By removing the contours and tonal boundaries of the image, Richter manipulates the dynamics of our relationship to it and reasserts his painterly control. In doing so he challenges the conventional opposition between these modes of representation to tackle our perception of art and how images function.