Lot 22
  • 22

Gerhard Richter

Estimate
15,000,000 - 20,000,000 USD
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Description

  • Gerhard Richter
  • A.B. Courbet
  • signed, dated 1986 and numbered 616 on the reverse
  • oil on canvas
  • 118 1/8 x 98 3/8 in. 300 x 250 cm.

Provenance

Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne
Private Collection, Cologne
Gladstone Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Chicago
The Pace Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Exhibited

Kassel, Germany, Documenta 8, June - September 1987, cat. no. 4, p. 206, not illustrated (as Courbet)
Cologne, Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Gerhard Richter. 20 Bilder, October - November 1987, illustrated (as Courbet)
Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, April 1988 - May 1989, pl. 74, p. 140, illustrated in color (as Courbet)

Literature

Michael Hübl, ‘Gerhard Richter,’ Holbein Art Forum, no. 20, 1990/1991, p. 81, illustrated
Angelika Thill, et al., Gerhard Richter: A Catalogue Raisonné 1962 - 1993, vol. III, Ostfildern-Ruit, 1993, cat. no. 616, n.p., illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Cologne, Museum Ludwig (and travelling), Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder (Large Abstracts), 2008, p. 55, illustrated in color (as Abstract Painting: Courbet) and pp.20-21 (text)
Emanuele Garbin, Il bordo del mondo. La forma dello sguardo nella pittura di Gerhard Richter, Venice 2011, p. 150 (text)
Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, Vol. 3, Nos. 389 - 651-2. 1976-1987, Dresden and Ostfildern, 2013, p. 551, illustrated in color and p. 550 (text)

Condition

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. This painting is not framed.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

"I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor was it my intention to achieve the trivial goal of art for art's sake."
Gustave Courbet, from "Realism," the preface to the brochure of his personal exhibition at the Pavilion of Realism outside the 1855 Universal Exhibition.

"I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture... I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself."
The artist interviewed in 1990, in Hubertus Butin and Stefan Gronert, Eds., Gerhard Richter. Editions 1965-2004: Catalogue Raisonné, Verlag Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p. 36

A majestic panorama of richly variegated paint cresting across a vast canvas, A.B. Courbet comprises the epitome of Gerhard Richter’s astoundingly powerful art of abstraction. Simultaneously concealing and revealing spectacular accents of red, yellow and blue primaries, a sublime veil of lusciously viscous oil paint flows laterally across the canvas like a tide coursing across the geological strata of a cliff face. This painting sits at the chronological head of the period when the artist’s creation of monumental essays in abstraction reached new heights and the long, hard-edged spatula ‘squeegee’ became the central instrument of his technical practice. In its phenomenal scale and sheer, uncontestable quality, A.B. Courbet ranks in the very finest achievements of Richter’s abstract output.

The vast and intensely beautiful chromatic expanse of A.B. Courbet stands as one of the most elegant and fully resolved exemplars of Richter's epic corpus. It embodies the aesthetic of the artist's abstract vision and is very much a paragon of "the compositionally complex, heavily impastoed and richly polychromatic Abstract Paintings" described by Roald Nasgaard (Exh. Cat., Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1988, p. 106). Seeping layers of brilliantly charged hues are dramatically scattered across the canvas, alternately coalescing and dissolving to defy conventional color patterns. Accumulations of innumerable streaking strata of lustrous oil paint forge a sublime symphony of dark and light tracts punctuated by vibrant reds, yellows, blues and greens. This coloristic harmony and lyrical resonance broadcast an evocative atmosphere of density and chaos, while the interplay of hues and the complex smattering of thick impasto invite the viewer to look both at and through the laminae of material. We become immersed in color and movement as if confronting a natural phenomenon. Absorbed by the vast surface area of the canvas, the experience is evocative of confronting a monolithic masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism by an artist such as Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock. The result of Richter's remarkable technical aptitude, which has led to his reputation as one of the outstanding painters of our era, this work is testament to his ceaseless technical explorations in the field of abstraction and to his profoundly intellectual interrogation of the nature of images and perception.

Although the title Abstraktes Bild, indicated here by the initials A.B., is typically translated as 'Abstract Painting', the curator Robert Storr restores the meaning of Bild as 'picture', implying something beyond mere painting, as this "reinforces the impression...of shoals, riptides, and cresting waves amid the paintings' scraped and layered pigments." (in Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Cologne 2002, p. XIII)  Here tracts of color are dragged across the canvas using the squeegee, so that the various strains of malleable, semi-liquid pigment suspended in oil are fused together and smudged first into the canvas, and then layered on top of each other as the paint strata accumulate. The painting undergoes multiple variations in which each new accretion brings color and textural juxtapositions until they are completed; as Richter himself declares, "there is no more that I can do to them, when they exceed me, or they have something that I can no longer keep up with." (Exh. Cat., Chicago, Op. Cit., p. 108) Furthermore, Richter's technique affords an element of chance that is necessary to facilitate the artistic ideology of the abstract works. As the artist has explained, "I want to end up with a picture that I haven't planned. This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture... I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things I can think out for myself." (the artist interviewed in 1990 in Hubertus Butin and Stefan Gronert, eds., Gerhard Richter. Editions 1965-2004: Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p. 36) With the repeated synthesis of chance being a defining trait of its execution, the painterly triumph of the present work becomes independent of the artist and acquires its own inimitable and autonomous individuality.

Gerhard Richter's artistic contribution is internationally considered within the highest tier of our era, his inimitably diverse canon evidencing more than five decades of philosophical enquiry into the core natures of perception and cognition. Indeed, with its poignant critical reflections and groundbreaking advancements, it is undeniable that his output has opened up a wealth of possibilities for the future course of art history. Since the early 1960s he has engaged manifold genres of painting, delving into and pushing the boundaries of theoretical and aesthetic levels of understanding whilst exploring and challenging the fundamentals of their development. However, his extraordinary odyssey into the realm of abstract painting is often regarded as the culmination of his artistic and conceptual enquiries into the foundations of visual understanding. After decades of exploring the role of painting in relation to competing visual cultures; film and photography and even painting itself, the emergence of the Abstraktes Bild stands as the crowning achievement of his oeuvre. As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has highlighted, and as there can be absolutely no doubt, Richter's position within the canon of abstraction is one of “incontrovertible centrality.” (Exh. Cat., Cologne, Museum Ludwig, Gerhard Richter: Large Abstracts, 2009, p. 9)

In sum, A.B. Courbet beautifully encapsulates Richter's theory that with abstraction "there is no order, everything is dissolved, more revolutionary, anarchistic." (Exh. Cat., Chicago, Op. Cit., p. 108) As a collective corpus, the Abstraktes Bilder are destined to have a unique identity whereby the total deconstruction of perception - dismantling themes of representation, illusion, communication - becomes a sublime chaos. As a paradigm of this oeuvre the present work communes a subjective relationship with the viewer and becomes itself experience rather than object. Here Richter deconstructs the concept that abstraction demands logical framework, thereby advancing the pioneering achievements of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian, and continuing the line of enquiry instituted by the Abstract Expressionists by delivering a visual experience of phenomenal psychological resonance. In the words of Nasgaard, "The character of the Abstract Paintings is not their resolution but the dispersal of their elements, their coexisting contradictory expressions and moods, their opposition of promises and denials. They are complex visual events, suspended in interrogation, and fictive models for that reality which escapes direct address, eludes description and conceptualization, but resides inarticulate in our experience." (Exh. Cat., Chicago, Op. Cit., p. 110)