Gerhard Richter

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the previous owner

Prato, Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Gerhard Richter, 1999 - 2000, p. 145, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Gerhard Richter, 1998, no. 835-1, illustrated in colour
André Comte-Sponville, Ed., Pensées sur l'amour, Paris 1998, p. 53, illustrated in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, Düsseldorf, K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Gerhard Richter, 2005, no. 835-1, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is visible under ultraviolet light.
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Luminescent, serene and evocatively historic, Gerhard Richter's Jerusalem all at once definitively confronts the grand tradition of History Painting and the Nineteenth Century Romantic Landscape via the contemporary lens of photo-realism. Executed in 1995, the very same year Richter was awarded the prestigious Arts Prize for Painting from the Wolf Foundation in Israel, Jerusalem represents the most significant use of an identified landscape in the artist's entire canon. Of the two almost identical paintings in which Richter depicts a sublimely diaphanous aerial-view of Jerusalem, the present work constitutes the incipient, pioneering and most atmospherically magnificent version. Indeed, this remarkable work significantly foreshadows its subsequent sister painting prestigiously housed in the Frieda Burda Collection, Baden-Baden. Where the latter is presently on show in the touring critically acclaimed Gerhard Richter retrospective, Panorama, currently on view at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the present work sits alongside a limited number of major Richter landscapes still remaining in private hands. Equally rivalling if not surpassing examples held in the joint collection of the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland; Centre Pomipdou, Paris; Ludwig Forum für International Kunst. Aachen; The Art Institute Chicago alongside countless others, Richter's Jerusalem stands out as unassailably rare in its Romantically sublime yet distinctly post-modern treatment of a highly evocative subject: the city of Jerusalem. Representing one of only two works in Richter's entire opus dedicated to a depiction of the biblical ancient city, this painting ranks among the most eminent and breathtaking from Richter's epoch defining canon of landscape painting. Indeed, Jerusalem indisputably embodies an unrivalled affirmation of Richter's statement from 1970: "Landscape is beautiful. It's probably the most terrific thing there is" (Gerhard Richter, 'Notes 1970', The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993, p. 64).

Richter's source is derived from a photograph taken the day after his exhibition Atlas opened at the Israel Museum on 19^th September 1995. Aligned to Richter's pivotal trips to Corsica in the 1960s and later Iceland in the 1970s, journeys that respectively inspired prominent works after the Corsican landscape and the later corpus of Iceberg paintings, Jerusalem represents a landmark for Gerhard Richter. The source photograph shows a view of Jerusalem's Old City from the south, looking towards the city walls and Christian Quarter across the area of Yemin Moshe. The foreground describes the rigid demarcations of urban planning: a car park and regimented tree-planting; and suggestions of urban shapes appear in the middle distance as the shadows of elegant brick arches at the left and angular architectural intersections at the right. However, at the centre of the canvas the focus of the painting is an expansive plain tinged with green at its edges. Thousands of years of Jerusalem's history, communed to us today through the Temples, Mosques, Churches, Abbeys, Monasteries, walls, pavements and streets, which so evocatively chronicle this extraordinary place, are enigmatically encapsulated by Richter's brush in streaks of arid landscape that wind back the historical clock to a time before history. At the heart of Jerusalem Richter exchanges the banalities of topographical accuracy and transient exteriority for the emotional charge of phenomenal atmospheric effect.

For an artist fixated with the veracity and empiricism of a title, there is perhaps none more iconic than this: Jerusalem. Of all the landscapes that have been forged by humankind, there can be few that are as loaded with narrative and suggestion as this. The city's extraordinary history extends back to the Fourth Century BC and ever since it has been a crucible of competing theologies and societal evolution. Its epic story has been primarily communed to our contemporary era through the stones, bricks and mortar of its ancient buildings, eminent walls and narrow streets, constructing a remarkably evocative atmosphere of both material precedent and historical character. Summoning thousands of years in historical significance, Richter's contemporary vision of the Old biblical city appears suspended, dream-like, in time. Captured in a mastery of sfumato brushwork and bravura handling of diaphanous light effects, Richter's epic God's eye view conjures and conflates the ethereal light of Turner with the inescapable influence of Caspar David Freidrich's epic and sublime vistas.

A veritable master class in focus and light manipulation, Jerusalem is the mature culmination of decades of Richter's Photo Painting that utterly epitomizes the aesthetic genius of his iconic series: from the monumental Cloud and Seascapes to the eminent and celebrated Candles and Skulls. Indeed, very much aligned with the Candle paintings, the sensational painterly symphony of Jerusalem conjures an otherworldly atmosphere that exceeds the actual subject to become a meditative focus in itself. Extending a tradition from Turner to Monet to Rothko, with Jerusalem Richter asserts his pre-eminence as a painterly master of sublime light. As the pre-eminent figurative subject of his phenomenal oeuvre, landscape is central to the art of Gerhard Richter and accounts for his place among masters of the genre from Claude and Poussin, through Constable and Turner to Friedrich. Of course, fundamental to Richter's imagery is the additional interpretative layer of photography: the artist reports his subjects via the camera lens for subsequent analysis. With a self-conscious combination of dispassionate assessment and subjective editorship, Richter has analysed urban, land, sky and seascapes as relayed through the photographic lens, and by painting the photograph rather than the subject itself he posits key ideas about perception and comprehension.

Clearly Jerusalem confronts the canonical traditions of German Romanticism, nonetheless, such reductive interpretations overlook Richter's quasi-mechanical methodology. Bypassing the vagaries of subjective interpretation, Richter's Photo Paintings adhere to his maxim that: "The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source" (Gerhard Richter, 'Notes, 1964-1965', The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London 1995, p. 31). Whereas Romanticism prescribed an ontological philosophy concerning humanity's conditioning by Nature, photography captures a transient moment with "no style, no concept, no judgement" (the artist cited in: Peter Sager, 'Mit der Farbe denken', Zeitmagazin 49, 28^th November 1986, p. 33). Indeed, Roald Nasgaard has described how Richter's employment of photographs "rescued him from the burden of inherited tradition, and from the alternative traps of the prevailing aesthetics and ideologies around him" (Exhibtion Catalogue, Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, and travelling, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988-89, p. 40). Dependent upon aperture exposure and shutter speed, the photograph is correlated to a finite length of time: as propounded by Robert Storr, "Conceptually, Roland Barthes's definition of the photographic condition as "the that has been" of experiential reality is once again germane. These vistas never were and never will be there for us; they were there for the artist just as long as it took to snap the picture and are only available to him now through the combination of that imperfect documentation and his equally imperfect memory" (Exhibition Catalogue, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 2002, p. 67). Moreover, in the case of Jerusalem Richter has transferred and magnified the imagery of a postcard-sized photograph, thereby expanding visual information to create a vision not quite consonant with actual ocular experience and positing vital queries about the realities of visual cognition.

With a clear blue sky, arid landscape, deep green Cyprus trees and sandy architecture, the atmosphere conjured in Richter's Jerusalem is timelessly characteristic of the Israeli capital. The horizon dissects the composition into two halves: the sky shimmers with mirage-like pink and orange hues where it curves to meet the arid plane of land that stretches into the far distance. The landscape is treated throughout with gradual tonal variation and sfumato brushwork that eradicates outline but emphasises contour. Indeed, the portrayal of light across the scene, from the foreground foliage to the far horizon, lends a sculptural quality to the compositional elements which loom towards the viewer into three-dimensional focus. Frequently and justly cited as the greatest painter of this era, Richter has committed fifty years of his extraordinary career to interrogating the nature of perception: visual, emotional, psychological. Within the context of this investigative project Jerusalem provides the masterstroke subject for his ultimate analysis. Confronting an entity of unique impact that inevitably triggers powerful cognitive reflexes in each viewer, this painting begins where others can only hope to end. Challenging the agencies of representation, perception and understanding, Richter's Jerusalem asks what we really know of a landscape, a city, or a place. Indeed, this masterwork even surpasses Richter's lifelong commitment to truth in the name of questioning our ontological concept of who we are and how we understand the world around us.

Herein, Richter's urban portrait is open to a plenitude of interpretation. Simultaneously refuting the souvenir picture-postcard and the exoticism of a mysterious city as well as daring to redefine the physiognomic identity of the metropolis. This work is material proof that his figurative painting is not ubiquitously the project of dispassionate documentary as once he claimed. Rather Jerusalem evidences the central importance of landscape in Richter's output, not only as a vehicle to take on questions of perception and visual communication, but in this exceptional instance provide the platform to address themes of a wider politico-social context. With this landscape that is so charged with issues of both the past and the future he invents a truly unique, intellectual and contemporary take on History Painting. In the year of this transcendent work Gerhard Richter joined the likes of Marc Chagall, Yehudi Menuhin, and Frank Gehry by being conferred the Wold Foundation's Art Prize. By way of conclusion the most fitting tribute to Jerusalem is provided by the written commendation of this prestigious award:

"Despite History and in conjunction with it, Richter is reinventing Painting for today, transcending its very laws in order to dare to impose Beauty...We must dare to talk of Beauty gained over indifference, of Painting as an act of faith. By doing so, Gerhard Richter introduces the problem of representation and the representable, of history and politics, in the specific context of post-Auschwitz Germany, of Germany beyond the Wall."