Art - Richard Cork on why Gerhard Richter is elusive despite a dizzying array of materials
The moment we walk into the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Gerhard Richter throws us off balance. Paintings stretch ahead on large white screens in the centre of the immense room. But the first one, a blurred head of Brigid Polk moodily tilted in dark, shadowy space, seems quite at variance with the larger work beyond. Here, fuzzy figuration gives way to sharply focused abstraction: a cluster of 18 different colours, each embedded in gleaming lacquer on its own aluminium-bond panel. They announce the more impersonal and analytical side of Richter's imagination.
Here is a painter who openly declares a range of interests far broader than most artists. Seeing no reason why he should be confined within a narrow stylistic path, Richter delights in flouting expectations by leaping at will from one way of seeing to another. Nor does he provide any reassurance on the Whitechapel's side walls. For here an avalanche of photographs, diagrams and drawings assails us. This heady total of 5,000 images has nurtured Richter's tirelessly self-questioning and eloquent work over the past four decades.
During that period, he has become Germany's most impressive postwar painter. But this show proves that he is not yet ready, at the age of 71, to settle into a cosily predictable identity. Far from it: the source material forces us to hunt around for the springboards of Richter's inspiration. We search through an array of small, black-and-white snapshots, all seeming to record family holidays and grinning moments of domestic hilarity. But just as we feel lulled by an affectionate shot of a boy clutching a giant ice cream cone, Richter springs an ambush. Suddenly, without any explanation, we are confronted by a grainy news photo of a coffin carried by hunched, grim-faced officials.
The world of private happiness has been replaced by a more public and ominous alternative, reflecting the extreme diversity of experiences Richter underwent as a child. Born in Dresden, he grew up in a small East German village. His parents' Christian faith clashed with the communist dictates of their Soviet rulers, and Richter found himself increasingly at odds with the rigid anti-modernism of his teachers at the Dresden Art Academy. Escaping to Dusseldorf in 1961, he felt a surge of relief. But bewildering contradictions never ceased to assail him, and they are openly reflected in the restless trajectory of his work.
The multifarious interests spanned by the photographic material, aptly called Atlas, are often dizzying. At one moment we peer at a 1960s starlet sashaying down a Hollywood staircase in a gem-encrusted gown. Richter earned his early reputation with paintings based on mass-media sources and he was for a while linked with pop art. But his insistence on blurring, or even obliterating, the photographic image proves that he retained a vital sense of distance, questioning camera-based representation and investigating the possibilities of chance or accident as well.
Memories of past traumas, however, would not go away. Among the proliferation of photos, where pornographic scenes are followed by a super-blurred Chairman Mao and model battleships, images of Nazi concentration camp victims stand out. Richter has not yet been able to turn these emaciated figures into paintings. They are, perhaps, too freighted with pain. He usually prefers to concentrate on less emotionally loaded subjects such as the 48 portraits of men which include Wilde, Mahler, Stravinsky and Graham Greene.
Not that Richter shies away from distressing subjects altogether in his art. In 1987, he executed a whole series of photo-based paintings of the Baader-Meinhof gang, centred for the most part on images where Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe lie dead in their prison cells. The results rank among Richter's finest achievements. But he usually prefers less violent starting points, and a whole section of Atlas is devoted to photographs of empty shores, cloud studies and expanses of deserted sea and sky. They suggest his kinship with the Romantic landscape tradition of Caspar David Friedrich. And from this absorption in rural tranquillity comes a painting as seemingly idyllic as Vierwaldstatter See, where a lone vessel appears becalmed in a fjord-like location. By executing the entire work in a blurred range of greys, however, Richter invests the scene with an unexpected and inescapable melancholy.
Mournfulness is never far away. Among the photographs of sublime mountain ranges or night skies, we are startled to find Hitler, or a savage series of magazine pictures headlined Death in Safari-Park, where a tourist is devoured by lions. Neither of these highly emotive subjects can be found in painted form here. Indeed, we often search fruitlessly for a direct connection between the photographs in Atlas and the paintings on display.
But the show is beautifully installed and filled with surprises. The final room downstairs is dominated by a vaporously handled Abstract Painting, produced in 1977 just after Richter suffered what he calls "a crisis". After analysing the process of painting in his Colour Chart pictures, and then embarking on a protracted sequence of all-grey canvases, he realised that his life had to change. "I had reached a cul-de-sac," he once told me, "and started blowing up." As a result, he abandoned his obsession with monochrome grey and started experimenting with freer, rule-breaking alternatives. These often involved drastic scraping with a spatula, right across the canvas; and Abstract Painting looks as if it has been attacked, smeared and defaced by the artist himself. At the same time, the colours Richter deploys here are soft and beguiling.
A similar ambiguity governs the por-tion of Atlas displayed on a nearby wall. Alongside colour-chart samples, redolent of Richter at his most diagrammatic, we find photographs of busts on plinths, sculptural blocks of flats, cloud studies and grand landscape panoramas installed in galleries. Their sheer diversity suggests that a whole array of contrasting images lie behind the apparently headlong spontaneity of Abstract Painting.
Even when we come across a 1977 portrait of his daughter Betty, and see how faithfully he adheres to the original photograph on a neighbouring wall, Richter claims the right to depart from his starting point in a host of subtle ways. The photograph clearly shows that Betty was lying down, observed by her father from above. But in the painting, she seems to hover strangely in space, and Richter has made her far more blanched. It comes as no surprise to learn how Betty was stricken with a severe, life-threatening illness when Richter painted her. The pallor of the girl's flesh is alarmingly akin to some nearby photographs of candles and skulls. By linking her with these sombre still lives, Atlas makes us appreciate how Betty's portrait is close to a memento mori. But her expression, poised halfway between bleached despair and a resolute desire to survive, predicts that she will overcome the affliction in the end.
The final painting challenges any assumption that Richter is at his best with photo-based figuration. Subtitled Blood Red, it is a large mirrored surface saturated with crimson pigment, immersing the viewer in a world where everything is suffused with the colour of mortality. Standing before this rich yet disconcerting expanse, I realised that the ranks of Atlas photographs massed on the walls behind me had also become drenched in this pervasive redness.
It seemed to insist, all over again, that Richter is not wholly reliant on the camera. Even though he feeds off photographic stimuli all the time, this defiantly independent artist continues to stand at a remove.
"Gerhard Richter - Atlas" is at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London E1 (020 7522 7888) until 14 March. Richard Cork's four books on modern art, including essays on Richter's earlier work, were recently published by Yale University Press
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