Past Master

John Haber
in New York City

Gerhard Richter: A Retrospective

I hardly know what to call Gerard Richter's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, but I know somehow that I have to reach for a name. There must be one, for work so perilously familiar.

Modernism, people used to say, hinges on self-reflection. The avant-garde looks within, goes the legend, rather than to norms. Painting reflects on itself, its materials, and its making. Richter, in contrast, may well epitomize the postmodern artist—you know, the glib sort eager to give everything that last extra twist. Or does he? The more the twists keep coming, the less glib and more open-ended they seem.

What hit me?

Gerhard Richter has all the trappings of irony. So why does it seem so beautiful and so sincere? His portraits and landscapes have the photorealist panache of Richard Estes or Chuck Close, but the photographs they evoke are blurry. In his abstractions, he applies the gestures of all-over painting, but with a squeegee. No one could mistake these paintings for a window onto reality. For that matter, no one could mistake photography for such a window once he is done.

Call work like this all-over painting? Not when underpainting stands so ready to erupt from the central channel. An outpouring of paint? Not when the layered surface attests to an almost glacial care. Process art, then? Not when a squeegee effaces its traces.

Abstraction? Not while the mind, like the painted surface, cries out in denial. Something unique, then? Not when Richter has deliberately repeated himself for so long—and indeed one no longer knows if he quotes abstraction or his own confrontation with it. So an artist's long personal history? But one no longer knows if the history is his own, his family's, Germany's, or Modernism's.

So forget the classy conceptual categories. Slate grays? Not when the metal support and layered oils create a texture that puts that metaphor on trial. So avoid metaphors. Monochromes? Not when color fills the eye.

The viewer's dilemma instead? Perhaps, but call it the puzzle of now having to confront one's own history, too. Richter's painting refuses the avant-garde baggage of self-expression, but not a personal signature and a relationship to a larger culture. Irony and beauty may do battle, but that just gives them a way to live together quite comfortably. Modernism's old foes become Postmodernism's best of friends. It is the postmodern paradox.

It makes him a virtuoso, equally at home in genres that may seem diametrically opposed. He can comment on painting like a formalist, but from a distance that a postmodernist would envy. His color, clarity, and gesture have influenced even a photographer like Thomas Struth. And he can do it all without succumbing to sarcasm or dismissal. Art and irony still matter, because they get along together after all. For Richter, neither one can escape its past.

Postmodernism's heated pool

A 2001 gallery show held an old subject of his—near monochromes. As in work going back to the 1960s, slate grays once again wipe across a surface. Below lie bright colors, as seemingly random as can be, but never without a purpose. They accentuate the coarse-grained fabric and metal sheets used as ground. Paint reflects on its materials, just as Clement Greenberg might demand of Jackson Pollock. Yet the reflections and materials alike have a commercial veneer.

So why are these so gorgeous, and can paint still matter so much? In Richter's hand, the grain of the canvas adds a barely palpable texture, aluminum under glass an eerie sheen. His thick, almost casual flow of paint leaves small pools to collect light where the gray sinks down. As one steps back, color appears even more strongly, like rich valleys in the bleak landscape. Gray and ground announce uniformity of surface. The pools refuse it, like a place for the eye to bathe.

The paintings depend on mechanical layering. And yet the layers themselves, optically and physically, undermine each other and themselves. Painting becomes a window after all, but a clouded glass able to represent its own sheen. As for a mirror, one appreciates it all the more from seeing it as one more part of the trick. Richter makes one see modern art in his own image. And then he makes one see his image as a history of modern art.

If that give and take between Modernism and Postmodernism seems never-ending, where to begin? Critics have put one movement after another on both sides of the fence. When Julian Schnabel made his film about Andy Warhol, he could have been wondering at the place of both. Neo-Expressionism struck at gesture but also reveled in it. Before that, Minimalism made modern sculpture impossible—while reviving its geometry, its refusal of a pedestal, and even something of its grandeur. And so on.

Maybe Serge Guilbaut, the French critic, had it right when he accused New York of stealing the idea of modern art, only the chain of thefts began well before Abstract Expressionism—and has never ended. And that adds yet another dilemma. How long has anyone had to agonize over painting to get there? How long before a painter's sharp eye, appetite for self-criticism, and unsparing wit gain the experience to turn flippancy into irony. And how much longer, in turn, is that possible to maintain? How long before beauty turns into sentiment and irony into just one more art institution?

MoMA offers a chance to find out. Irony once meant not the cheap jokes of Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, but ambiguity and self-reflection, and it can again. Amid biennials like shopping plazas, with computer simulations alongside video art and everything in between, Richter can still look current. Then again, it took him years before he could pull that off. He painted a cow before Andy Warhol made one into wallpaper, but first he had to learn to distinguish beautiful from painterly, reflection from nostalgia, and irony from cleverness. At his retrospective, one hardly notices when the thrill starts to kick in, and by then it risks vanishing before one's eyes.

Too clever by half?

The retrospective covers almost forty years and two hundred works. It turns out that his ideas came early, but their execution took time. Yes, he can get too self-involved and too easy on his own emotions behind the art. But one should never stop watching the struggle. I had loved these, er, what do you call 'ems in the gallery just a few months before, and I could only love them all the more given their history. And that history began before his escape from East Germany and Soviet realism into the west and into art.

Richter refuses to show work from before his thirties. Like Barnett Newman, who burned early paintings, he thus began his career with Modernism's dream of rebirth. As a child in Nazi Germany, he knew the temptations of a false rebirth, too, a sacrifice for the common evil. As a student, though, he experienced a society more cynical about repression. It shows in the calculated way he plugs away at realism all while treating skill as a mechanical device. It may show, too, in hand-painted color charts from his late thirties, as if to stare down the rules of painting once and for all.

His trademark styles turn up in the first room, but on a smaller scale, like tryouts for a school play. He forces gray paint casually down with his squeegee. He also starts collecting and projecting photographs, so that he can trace them, perfect his photorealism, and then lose it again in a blur. Is he hitting his stride or pretending? Doing both at once is half the game. He must have survived early on by knowing when to hide.

Even so, one has to wade through one's share of merely intriguing art. A hart in a landscape looks like the underlying sketch for a mural in any number of German traditions. But no, this one is supposed to look like a cartoon. Just in case one missed the point, a big swatch of background laps over the animal. Well, okay. That alone could make one long for a rebirth of abstraction.

Monumental color charts get one thinking longer,. They pick up on formalism, long before color wheels for John Mendelsohn, but as something out of a reference book. They take on Pop Art's appetite for appropriation in Robert Rauschenberg and his combines, but without a hint of culture outside the production of color. They inspired the austere vision of color in Donald Batchelor and the Brushstrokes of Roy Lichtenstein. They also offer a handmade art stuck in its own self-reproduction, like that of another Frankfurt artist, Thomas Bayrle. If they seem too clever by half, the cleverness can still make one linger—to see how many halves it will take to make painting whole.

I had the same leery fascination with the early photorealism. A woman in shimmering fabric, all the gaudier for an electric blue right out of Ross Bleckner, walks down stairs. Richter offers up his nude descending a staircase, only she wears clothes. A beautiful, smiling young woman on her way to prison, the barely recognizable blur of a crowded funeral, the stark shape of a corpse lying face up—they all suggest the temptation to take appearances for salvation. Newman said that "an artist paints so that he will have something to look at." Richter paints to sort out what he cannot escape seeing.

Modernism's final irony

Richter pays tribute to Marcel Duchamp and Nude Descending a Staircase in his blend of Cubism and stop-action photography, only the photograph refuses to sit still. He recalls Modernism's aspirations to shock, only as fashion statement. A second version of a woman without clothes, in full color, may work even better. Instead of a nude, one has the awkward materiality of a naked human being. Works like these plays with a male viewer's comfort with art that puts women on display. They have influenced artists embedded in both feminism and American pop culture, such as Judith Eisler.

Does art like this tempt one to feel superior? Fine, but it also makes one aware of the temptation. One gets up close to catch a realist's or an expressionist's way with paint, only to find blue haze. One steps back, the studied connoisseur, to watch it come into focus and to assume the sublime dimensions of art, but of course it never does. One has nowhere left to stand, but the work's temptations remain. Desire turns on distance.

Richter keeps returning to voyeurism and personal or national history. A woman's close-up has the bland quarter turn of a yearbook photo, as perhaps it was, and a student spreads her crotch. A series based on the Baader-Meinhof gang, dead or alive, dares one to pin art down to a single day of terror. A wall-sized series blows up Germany's past, in faces clipped right out of an encyclopedia. The Modern arranges these by the stairs to the exhibition's second floor, as if daring visitors to look back to something left behind, but Richter never loses his fascination with distance. He makes a realist like Close seem positively at home with brushstrokes.

When Richter addresses Germany, he means his own life, too. It could represent anyone's need for a past to call one's own. Uncle Rudi, who died in World War II, stands before a wall, wearing his Nazi uniform. He looks like a man at his own firing squad, and his foolish smile has the warmth of a dear, lost relative. He has all the naiveté of a young man about to discover the reality of fascism and war. It revives and represents a nation's debate just as troubled memories were about to die.

What helps it go beyond the simply clever is a growing need to engage the present as well. One can feel it in the blurred vision and then the return to abstraction. He spatters bright color as if released from a long, brooding captivity. Back in realism, clouds hover at an uncertain distance, all but in one's lap. They pay tribute to the patience and Romanticism of cloud studies for John Constable, but with a melancholy all his own. Not even rain can offer release.

A pair of candles blends a momento mori with the artist's most polished, richly colored illusion. A profile of his wife, Lesende (Reading), lingers over light falling on hair and clothes. She reads, a young woman with an inner world never free of his desires. Beauty and irony, it turns out, really are at odds, but in the sense of an old couple who have fought for so long that everyone around them has ceased to notice. In their own crazy way, they get along just fine. And that could be the final irony.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Gerhard Richter ran at The Museum of Modern Art through May 21, 2002, and at Marian Goodman through October 27, 2001. Related reviews pick up the story with later stripe paintings, an extensive show at the Met Breuer, and his series based on the Baader-Meinhof gang.