Gerhard Richter

Galerie Friedrich & Dahlem, Munich
Private Collection, Lugano (acquired from the above in 1965)
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, 24 June 1993, Lot 57
Private Collection
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Part I, 29 November 1995, Lot 43
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Wuppertal, Galerie Parnass, Neue Realisten: Lueg, Polke, Richter, 1964
Munich, Haus der Kunst, Grosse Kunstausstellung, Gerhard Richter, 1965, no. 480

Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, XXXVI Biennale Internazionale dell' Arte, 1972, p. 53, illustrated
Jürgen Harten, Gerhard Richter, Bilder 1962-1985, Cologne 1986, no. 45, p. 20, illustrated
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter Catalogue Raisonné, 1962-1993, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993, Vol. III, no. 45, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, London, National Portrait Gallery,Gerhard Richter Portraits, Painting Appearances, 2009, pp. 46-47, illustrated incorrectly in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals intermittent hairline cracks to the left and right extreme edges. There are a few diagonal hairline cracks extending from the top right hand corner, a barely visible feather crack towards the upper centre of the top left hand quadrant and a few fine circular cracks in the lower section of the composition. Inspection under ultra-violet light reveals two thin lines of restoration, each approximately 8cm, in the bottom left hand quadrant and a few further small spots of minor restoration scattered in places throughout. Following Gerhard Richter's advice, the artist's restorer Michael Trier partially repainted the white band across the top in 1995, which was done with Gerhard Richter's approval. Please refer to the department for professional condition reports by Hamish Dewar and Terence Mahon, which state that the work is in excellent condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

A triumph of Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking Photo-paintings of the 1960s, Neger (Nuba) is one of the most important foundation stones on which this master's immense reputation has been built over the past fifty years. Exceptional on account of its very early date; its remarkable scale; its exquisite execution; and its extraordinary re-presentation of subject matter, Neger (Nuba) is also a very first instance of colour being enlisted in Richter's recorded output. Indeed, as Paul Moorhouse has stated with specific reference to Neger (Nuba), "Most of Richter's early media-derived images are painted in monochrome tones. This notable exception anticipates his adoption of colour after 1966" (Exhibition Catalogue, London, National Portrait Gallery, Gerhard Richter: Portraits, Paintings, Appearances, 2009, p. 46). Executed in the artist's thirty-second year, this is a historic work that will remain central to the genesis of Richter's remarkable contribution to visual culture, a legacy that has been aptly summarized by the Director of The Museum of Modern Art, Glenn Lowry: "No artist of the postwar era...has placed more intriguing and rigorous demands upon specialists, interpreters, followers, and average viewers alike – nor upon himself...He has defined a vast pictorial and conceptual territory...In Richter's work...there is a demonstration of the ways in which painting's resources are constantly replenished by the very problems it seems to pose, both for the painter and the viewer. Nobody in our own time has posed them better or solved them more inventively than Richter" (Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Museum of Modern Art and travelling, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 2002-03, p. 7).

The composition of Neger (Nuba) was sourced in a found photographic image depicting members of the Nuba tribe from Sudan, which was originally reproduced in the magazine Kristall as the opening image to an article "Requiem für eine Nuba" (No. 22, 1964 p. 56-63). The magazine was doubtless sent to Richter by an aunt in Oldenburg, who sent bundles of collected publications to her nephew every few weeks during this period. Encountering this extraordinary picture acted as catalyst to arguably the artist's most ambitious artistic undertaking to date. As detailed by his exhaustively self-compiled  catalogue raisonné, to this point in his mature career he had completed only three canvases of comparable scale: Hirsch of 1963; Ferrari of 1964, now in the collection of Fort Worth's Modern Art Museum; and Familie am Meer of 1964, now housed in the Museum Küppersmühle für Moderne Kunst in Duisburg. The scale indicates the monumentality Richter felt necessary for this work, providing a suitable arena for the groundbreaking conceptual and technical advancements he would make on the canvas. His appropriation, editing and re-interpretation of the published image exemplify the cerebral project of his Photo-painting, while his extraordinary painterly rendition of the found photograph here was unprecedented within his oeuvre.

Shortly after its creation this painting was included in the landmark exhibition Neue Realistsen, Richter, Polke, Lueg, held at Rudolf Jährling's Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal in November 1964. This exhibition became one of the first manifestations of the movement Kapitalistischer Realismus, within which Richter's art of this period is often classified. Richter had first used the term 'Capitalist Realism' to describe his work in a letter to the newsreel company Neue Deutsche Woche in April 1963, and on 11^th October 1963 he had staged a remarkable Fluxus happening together with Lueg at the Mobelhaus Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf. Despite having graduated from the Dresden Art Academy in the GDR in 1956, Richter only completed his studies at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in West Germany (where he had met Lueg and Polke, as well as Blinky Palermo) in July 1964, and was given his first solo exhibition by Alfred Schmela at his tiny gallery in the Düsseldorf old town in September 1964. Jährling has recalled how he had first met Richter and his friends in Wuppertal in February 1964 when they called to ask if they could show him their work, which they had set up outside in the snow in front of the gallery. Jährling was so struck by the astounding canvases that he saw propped up in the wintry setting that he committed to a group show without hesitation (Dietmar Elger,Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, pp. 79-81).

Emerging from ethereal, mist-like veils of medium and pigment, the composition of Neger (Nuba) has been subtly blurred by the artist's meticulous feathering of the wet paint surface with a fine dry brush to inscribe thousands of horizontal furrows in a consummate exhibition of sfumato brushwork. This standardised and impersonal treatment results in a surface regulation that aptly serves the underlying conceptual objectivity of the Photo-painting project: "I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit" (Gerhard Richter,The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1995, p. 37). At the same time, Richter's tonal variation eradicates outline but emphasises contour, thereby constantly manipulating the spectator's focus. Indeed, the portrayal of light across the scene lends a sculptural quality to the anatomical forms, which loom towards the viewer seemingly in three-dimensions. Furthermore, the diaphanous paint layers lend an ephemeral quality to the painting, its imagery becoming like a visual cue for some half-forgotten memory. Catching the transient glimpse of a fleeting moment, this technique also imitates the effect of movement itself. Richter confronts the viewer not only with the manipulation of paint, but also the manipulation of perception.

Also fundamental to Richter's treatment of the composition is the broad, horizontal, white margin stretching across the top of the canvas. This explicit reference to the cropping and editing process accentuates the readymade status of the found image and the artist's independence from the creation of imagery. It is also testament to the response Richter was developing at this moment to American Pop Art, and particularly to the work of Andy Warhol, whose repeated silkscreens were such a brilliantly pithy interpretation of the desensitizing effects of mass-media image multiplication. "I gave it a large margin: Warhol's paintings treated the image in a way that you could imagine the image continuing indefinitely on either side of the canvas. With my picture the large printed margin separates the image within the painting from surrounding reality" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Gallery,Gerhard Richter, 1991, p. 125).

The source image for Neger (Nuba) itself shows part of a funeral ceremony of the Mesakin Quissayr tribe of the Nuba people from the Kordofan region of central Sudan. It was taken by Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), who had first encountered the Nuba society and culture in December 1962 when they were almost entirely isolated from the outside world. She held a profound adoration for Africa, having made her first trip to the continent in April 1956 to make a film about the illegal slave trade, and her final visit there in 2000 when she was aged 98. The photo-story for which this was the lead image was published in Axel Springer'sKristall in 1964, accompanied by the text: "Never before was the camera witness to a Nuba funeral. For months, Leni Riefenstahl lived among this primitive people in the Nuba mountains in the province of Kordofan in Sudan - without a tent, without comfort, without an interpreter. Having learned the language of the natives and gained their friendship, she was allowed to participate as the first white in a Nuba funeral and take these unique photos." As has been published subsequently, the funeral being held was for a local wrestler, who had died from a venomous snake bite, and as a sign of mourning close relatives and friends of the deceased had covered their bodies in white ash and wept unrestrainedly. It is this moment - first captured by Riefenstahl's lens - that is re-presented by Richter on such a grand scale.

Richter's breakthrough artistic epiphany came when he realised that the found photograph – whether a snapshot from a family album, an advertisement from a magazine, or photojournalistic document from a newspaper – provided the perfectly impersonal, distanced, and therefore 'unartistic' means of composition that he so desperately sought. Although in 1964, the same year asNeger (Nuba), he claimed in a letter to Heiner Friedrich, "I also can't explain why I actually paint a photo, in general and in particular a certain photo; what it is that I find enormously fascinating; and what meaning the representational has for me"(the artist cited in: Dietmar Elger,Op Cit, p. 31) later, in 1972, he declared: "I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. Suddenly, I saw it in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgement. It freed me from personal experience. For the first time, there was nothing to do: it was pure picture" (Gerhard Richter, Op Cit, pp. 72-3).

Of course, a photographic image is necessarily defined by what it depicts, and actual iconographical content inevitably affected the artist's process of selection and editorship. Indeed, the following 1966 statement indicates the artist's interest in the subject matter of his found images: "The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone. This is something that just has to be incorporated into painting" (Ibid, pp. 56-7). Inasmuch as the source image for the present work narrates the story of a funeral, it is loaded with personal human tragedy that has been projected into a vast arena of public attention. In exactly the same way that Warhol's celebrated Death and Disaster series interrogated how the agents of mass-media transformed personal and private tragedies into spectacles of colossal public interest,  Neger (Nuba) assesses the projection of a never-before witnessed display of communal grief into the domain of global scrutiny. When Leni Riefenstahl first returned to the Nuba with developed prints of her photographs it was the first time that they had been able to see their own likenesses, having never had mirrors or means of reflection. That these people, who for millennia had not visually confronted their own physiognomies, were in an instant distributed into the glare of international publicity is a hugely ironic outcome of the advancements of the new media age. This staggering distance between the truly isolated reality of individual experience and the limitless transmission of that reality is brilliantly appraised by Richter with this masterful work. Indeed, Neger (Nuba) escalates the project of Warhol's Death and Disaster commentary on domestic America to an unprecedented analysis of how the instruments of mass communication had transformed the world.

Although the primary concern of Richter's photo-based paintings was to initiate discussion with the critical issues of painting and with the ambiguous natures of representation and perception, selecting this particular subject also presented the opportunity to confront art historical precedent. In purely formal terms, Neger (Nuba) is reminiscent of a long tradition of painting groups of nude bodies: from Titian's Diana and Actaeon of 1559 in the National Gallery of Scotland to Rubens' Diana and Calisto of 1638-40 in the Prado; Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus of 1827 to Ingres' The Turkish Bath of 1862, both in the Louvre. Of course this institution was critiqued within artistic parameters by the likes of Gauguin's Delightful Days  of 1896, today housed in Lyon's Musée des Beaux-Arts, and Cézanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses of 1906, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, before being so comprehensively devastated by Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907 that resides in The Museum of Modern Art. Since 1970 Richter has assembled snapshots and press clippings, many of which have served as the direct sources for his paintings, in a monumental cataloguing project entitled Atlas. While the source image for Neger (Nuba) is not included, Atlas Sheet 15 from 1964 includes a cutting from the Feuilleton section of a newspaper that illustrates Picasso's 1908 painting Three Women. Measuring 200 by 185cm and housed in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg since 1948, this masterpiece may very possibly have been seen in person by Richter when he travelled to Moscow and then Leningrad in March 1961. Its inclusion in Atlas is manifest proof that Richter was contemplating Picasso's early Cubist works at precisely this time, which were so famously inspired by Central and West African reliquary figures and masks, as well as expedition photographs of the peoples of these regions taken by Edouard Fortier and others and reproduced in popular periodicals such as L'Illustration. The parallels between Picasso's working practices and the genesis of Neger (Nuba) are clear, and there can be little doubt that the present work embodies a very conscious effort to continue the deconstruction of art historical convention that had been initiated by the great master of Modernism almost sixty years earlier. The genius of Neger (Nuba) stems from conflating this revolutionary precedent with a vital and contemporary analysis of the new media age.

In sum, with this masterwork Richter exposes the false autonomy and supposed objectivity ascribed to photography and challenges his audience to question and re-evaluate their perception of contemporary media. By re-establishing painterly control and enlisting his legendary handling of paint to interpret this sensational subject-matter, he forces distance between the reproduced image and its audience to focus our eye on issues of re-presentation and visual cognition. As Glenn Lowry has said, these lines of enquiry have defined a long and illustrious career of groundbreaking artistic innovation. One of the most important contributions to painting of the post-war era, Neger (Nuba) will forever remain vital to the earliest beginnings of this remarkable journey.