‘He Made My Hair Fly’: The Exciting Genius of Gerhard Richter’s Paris Extravaganza – Review | Gerhard Richter

gAs a child, Erhard Richter remembers drawing with his finger on an empty, lightly greased dinner plate, tracing and tracing imaginary curves and spatial structures in endless modifications of china. Decades later, he would place dots of different colors on a canvas and then blend them using curved, slippery brush strokes, lubricated with oil and paint, until the entire surface was covered. A more or less pure color slipped between impure and frequently mixed passes of pigment. Other paintings were painted with squeegees and large spatulas, pushing and pulling the paint across the surface, often scraping it back. The squeegee often picks up previously applied, sometimes half-dried, paint, etching previous layers even as new layers are applied. He would smear the paint and then pull it off again, and Richter would keep working until he couldn’t think of anything else to do with the painting. One day in 2017, he stopped drawing completely. Since then, he has devoted himself mostly to painting.

Richter’s art is full of beginnings and endings, and he relishes coincidence as much as he uses ingenuity and precision in depicting people, places and things, from wilting flowers in a vase to street corners, elegiac landscapes and the dead. Standing in the middle of his retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, it strikes me that no matter how one chooses to describe or divide the various strands of his work, his art remains irreducible. It is contradictory, volatile, disciplined yet unmoderated, and the contradictions mock fixed readings. His art is full of distraction, with self-absorption and objective stare.

After receiving academic training at an art school as a muralist in Dresden, Richter and his wife Emma fled to West Germany in 1961. After a few false starts, he soon began painting black-and-white images drawn from photographs in newspapers and magazines, and from family snapshots. This is his aunt Marianne, 14, with baby Gerhard. Marianne was a schizophrenic, later institutionalized and then killed in the Nazi euthanasia program in 1945. And here is Uncle Rudi, in his Wehrmacht greatcoat, smiling at his portrait. He seems rather innocent, and died early in the war. This is Richter’s father, a long-ago prisoner of war, his hair comically wavy, mugging for the camera. Family photos, newspaper clippings, planes, bombs, dates and holidays crowd the wall.

From the beginning, Richter was fascinated by and distrustful of photographs, which he often took himself and returned to as the basis for paintings. He also returned, again and again, to themes taken from his own life, to the events and things around him. These issues included loaded themes of the Holocaust and the deaths in prison of four members of the Baader-Meinhof group. He drew dangling toilet paper, a kitchen chair, a bottle of wine, an apple on a table, a candle and a skull, and the moment the second plane hit the tower on September 11.

At times Richter played with the banal, even the chaotic and the sentimental. As he moves between the selections, he draws Isa Genzken’s bare back, with a kind of gentle objectivity, while his daughter Ella looks down, reading a book. Light hitting the corner of a gothic wall, unkempt winter branches in the snow, and a squatters house. Everything leads somewhere else, even when we can’t see it.

This is the most comprehensive retrospective of the 93-year-old artist’s work I have seen. Organized chronologically and thematically and including some 270 works, the exhibition is full of transitions and juxtapositions across its many rooms. But where is that vast, mixed-up painting of the Alps, or the pornographic ones, or the one he did of a tourist being attacked by a lion in a safari park, or the portrait of his daughter Betty, her head leaning to the side? Getting everything here, of course, would be impossible.

A lover of lists, classifying and archiving his works by subject, including all the images he has collected in his massive photo atlas, Richter has been the subject of numerous retrospectives and evaluations – including, in 2020, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an exhibition that ended within days of its opening, due to Covid. Each exhibition tells its story differently.

The important point is to be able to stay and follow Richter’s development over the decades. Insofar as we advance, we digress, like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and like Richter himself, through this exciting exhibition. Emma, ​​Richter’s first wife, descends the stairs naked (a reference to Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting Nude Descending the Stairs). It takes its place among his first cloud views and his photographically derived landscapes. The tide is breaking on the muddy foreshore. A bridge crosses a slanting horizon, and there’s a green field under a gloomy sky. Now an aerial view of the city. Were the streets and buildings bombed or were they bombed by Richter’s strikes?

Sometimes, he works from photographs and postcards, other times from nothing at all. There are boards that offer almost as much and others that only give you a gray surface to dip your teeth into. One is based on fast, shiny markers that catch the light. Another has a wrinkled texture and orange peel, another appears matte and blotchy, a faint light smiling through the mist.

I leaned in close, moving between the translucent glass panels shifting this way and that on a frame in the middle of the room, trying to see between and through them, as Richter’s paintings refracted, reflected, and were interrupted by bursts of gallery lights bouncing off the glass, complicating the view. Then there are the mirrors and ribbon paintings whose multiple horizontal lines pass like a rushing train, raising my hair as it goes.

There are moments of calm, in the thick white abstractions and in the brick side of the house that reminds me of Vermeer, with the blurry tree next to it whipping in the wind; And the noise and the roar and the indescribable silence and muteness of the black and white abstractions named for the winter months; And the abstract ideas that John Cage had in mind when Richter painted them; and 4,900 squares of frosted color that were made while Richter was working on the stained glass window of the Cologne Cathedral. The exhibition leads you back and forth, from one thing to another, to barely recognizable drawings, some of which resemble circles of unknown terrain that have been divided and drawn by special cartography.

Constantly recomplicating matters even as he unpacked them, Richter reworked Titian’s 1630s card postcard of the Annunciation – housed in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice – on a series of five panels in 1973. The image becomes successively more mixed and amorphous, and the sacred light spreads over the scene it illuminates, which swims and rushes and gradually becomes less and less possible. Understand it. It is melting, like the icebergs in the Greenlandic mist that he later went on to paint, or the film that he still uses as a source for the panoramic funeral, which concludes Baader-Meinhof’s 1988 cycle of 15 paintings (titled October 18, 1977). The crowd and coffins were just a barely recognizable flash of grey. As much as it seems to me that these paintings describe a kind of impossibility.

In 2014, Richter attempted to work with photographs taken by a prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, at great risk, even drawing the gruesome, cryptic images recording the cremation of gassed victims on his nude canvases, but finding that the impossibility of painting them led the artist to erase the images entirely. But images are not erased as much as they are buried. The blocks of dark and light colours, and the layered provisions of black, gray and red make it impossible to trace any reference back to its original source. You can’t close your eyes and find them.

Except, of course, that’s exactly where Richter’s calculated design leads us, housed in the gallery’s final room, with its juxtaposition of photographs, abstract paintings and gray mirrors hung opposite. They leave us wanting to see deeper. Moving away from the paintings toward the gray mirror, you find yourself dimly reflected, entangled among the objects in the room.