david hughes_daniel richter and the problem of political painting today

Daniel Richter and the Problem of Political Painting Today

David Hughes

Is there a left-wing consciousness in abstract painting today?—Christopher Bannat, “Ich male alles und rede mit jedem”

Again and again the talk is of politics vis-à-vis Daniel Richter’s fi gurative pictures. But is it politics,

when topical, socially relevant content appears on the canvases alongside the thematization of

art-historical discourses and pictorial questions?—Beate Ermacora, “Öffentliche Bilder”

The political engagement that these themes suggest cannot be ascertained in Richter’s pictures. They deliver no commentary

on their running chronicle of politics and violence.—Fritz W. Kramer, “In Heterotopia”

Over the years, one question has irked critics of Daniel Richter’s work more than any other: are his paintings political? For a German artist who began his professional career producing abstract-expressive pictures in 1995, it seemed particularly hard to maintain a left-wing stance while working in a medium that belonged historically to the internationalist conformism of the 1950s, or else to the ideologically nullifying tradition of abstract works by namesake Ger-hard Richter from the mid-1970s on. The younger Richter’s turn to fi guration

New German Critique 108, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall 2009DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2009-014 © 2009 by New German Critique, Inc.

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134 Daniel Richter and Political Painting

around 1999–2000, however, only compounded the problem: how dare he raise sensitive political issues—the war in the Balkans, the move to the right in youth culture, vagrancy, the weakening of social relations under neoliber-alism, mass unemployment, terrorist bombings, the war in Afghanistan, police drug busts, the plight of North Africans trying to reach Europe, the challenges facing Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall—without offering a coher-ent commentary on them? To make matters worse, Richter’s turn (“Richters Wende,” as Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen labeled it) increased the market value of his work to such an extent that the German Financial Times (of all news-papers) ran a piece in 2002 noting that Richter had been nominated a second time for the prestigious Preis der Nationalgalerie—a.k.a. the German Turner Prize—and that of the 114 previously nominated candidates, only 4 had achieved this accolade, and their work had consequently skyrocketed in value.1 For a supposedly radical left-winger, it seemed, Richter was making quite a profi t while systematically avoiding taking a clear stance on what purportedly mat-tered most to him.

Consider, for instance, Why I Am Not a Conservative (Warum ich kein Konservativer bin, 2000), one of Richter’s better-known paintings shown in three major solo exhibitions in Germany between 2001 and 2003 (fi g. 1). In this large (225 × 145 cm) oil painting there are two fi gures in the bottom right quadrant, one naked, the other fully clothed, arms around each other. In the background, shady, indistinct fi gures look on from the top of some steps lead-ing up to the entrance of a building overhung by a canopy studded with lights. One fi gure, completely in shadow, carries a multicolored umbrella, while a female on the left looks at something to the right of the picture frame. In the foreground a monkey in a frilly costume looks in the same direction. What any of this has to do with Richter’s professed lack of conservatism seems a mystery to begin with. What exactly is this strange and otherworldly scene depicting, and what can it have to do with our political reality? Who or what are these ghostlike fi gures, and what are they doing? Why is one of them naked, and is he or she locked in a comforting embrace or a violent struggle? What is the monkey’s role, and what is drawing the fi gures’ attention beyond the picture frame? This seems a highly ambiguous work that does anything but make a clear political statement.

Some light is shed on the painting by the source material that Richter decided to exhibit alongside his work from 2001 on. In the Billiards at Half Past Nine (Billard um halb zehn) exhibition that year, three magazine pho-tographs were included that showed German field marshals tackling two

1. Judith Borowski, “Sex, Angst Ohnmacht,” Financial Times Deutschland, April 5, 2002.

David Hughes 135

people, one almost naked, at a military ceremony. In the background of the photographs, a woman holds an umbrella on which the words “Abolish the German Army” (Bundeswehr abschaffen) are legible. The bottom photo-graph in particular (fi g. 2) seems to have been an obvious inspiration for Why I Am Not a Conservative. The fi eld marshal intercepting the near-naked fi gure was surely the template for the couple in Richter’s picture; there are fi gures in the background, as well as a prominent umbrella; and the pose of the sol-dier about to give the address is replicated by the girl on the far left of Rich-ter’s picture. Although Richter offered no commentary on the signifi cance of

Figure 1. Why I Am Not a Conservative (Warum ich kein Kon-

servativer bin, 2000). Oil on canvas, 225 × 145 cm. Courtesy

of Contemporary Fine Arts. Photograph by Jochen Littkemann


these photographs, which were distributed randomly throughout the exhibi-tion, they in fact document a protest against the German military’s involve-ment in the Balkans, held in the Bendlerblock area of Berlin in July 1999. At the most solemn moment of a military ceremony attended by Federal chan-cellor Gerhard Schroeder, as recruits stepped forward to pledge their loyalty to the nation, two female antiwar protestors burst onto the scene almost naked, while a third opened the aforementioned umbrella. In total there were twelve protestors, one of whom produced another umbrella spelling out the words “Tucholsky was right” (Tucholsky hatte recht), referring to Kurt Tucholsky’s famous 1931 slogan “Soldiers are murderers” (Soldaten sind Mörder). Rich-ter’s studio is located on Tucholskystrasse in Berlin, and his interpretation of the umbrellas in terms of the rainbow colors conventionally associated with peace movements probably expresses his antiwar sentiment—Schroeder’s deci-sion to intervene in Kosovo being interpreted as a right-wing act by an osten-sibly left-wing chancellor.

Drawing on magazine photographs and other artifacts of mass culture to make a political point is, of course, nothing new in fi ne art. Richter’s men-tor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Werner Büttner, did

Figure 2. Photograph of an antimilitary protest in Berlin, July 1999, included in Richter’s

Billiards at Half Past Nine (Billard um halb zehn) exhibition (2001). Courtesy of

Contemporary Fine Arts

David Hughes 137

it to excess in the 1980s along with Albert Oehlen (for whom Richter worked as an assistant) and the other Neuen Wilden, or “new fauves.” The idea then was that avant-garde prescriptions for what constituted “cutting-edge” art had run their course, leaving punk artists to draw indiscriminately on whatever images they felt like. On account of the severe economic recession and the missile crisis in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) at that time, this individualism was coupled with a deep mistrust of industrialism and techno-logical progress. Many artists, accordingly, chose to look back to German expressionism for inspiration, bridging the fi fty-fi ve-year gap since the Nazis’ infamous “degenerate art” (entartete Kunst) exhibition. Richter, in his work, goes one stage farther. While incorporating all manner of imagery from his personal iconography into his paintings, his style evokes an even earlier moment in art history—symbolism—as is evidenced primarily by the recur-rence of masks, animals, carnivalesque imagery, and fantastical elements in his work.

In a superb reading of James Ensor’s symbolist masterpiece The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889 (1888–89), Stefan Jonsson compares that epitome of symbolist painting to the plays of August Strindberg and comments: “Strind-berg and Ensor use the confl icts they perceive in the social world as mate-rial for the construction of their own fantasy narratives. Restructuring society according to a new logic at once phantasmic and political, their work frees social events, persons, and collectives from the cognitive and ideological rep-resentations in which they are normally embedded.”2 Precisely the same could be said of Richter in Why I Am Not a Conservative. Taking the antiwar protest at the Bendlerblock as source material, Richter uses fantasy in his painting to depict an affl uent German society of the late 1990s in terms of the social con-fl icts underlying it, rather than show its gleaming, polished surfaces. Anyone who has visited Berlin will recognize, for instance, that the painting recon-structs the glitzy facade of the Galeria Kaufhof department store on Alexan-derplatz (fi g. 3). In terms of composition, the picture’s entire top half draws our attention to that unmistakable canopy, confronting us with the historical irony of one of Germany’s blue-chip companies smugly situated at the very heart of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Yet this is not the consumer paradise of the Galeria Kaufhof as we know it. The store’s sign has been torn from its canopy; half the lights glow orange instead of yellow; and the scene as a whole has a haunting, nightmarish quality.

2. Stefan Jonsson, “Society Degree Zero: Christ, Communism, and the Madness of Crowds in the Art of James Ensor,” Representations, no. 75 (2001): 2.


Why I Am Not a Conservative rep-resents the perceived hell of bourgeois decadence. Its fi gures have a soulless, zombielike appearance (the one holding the umbrella being nothing more than a ghostly shadow). Those in the back-ground seem to be behind bars, impris-oned in a Hades-like setting, looking on maliciously as another lost soul joins their ranks. The scene indeed creates the effect of a gateway to the underworld, making it no coincidence that Richter called another, extremely similar paint-ing Zurberes (close to Zerberus, the Ger-man word for “Cerberus,” guardian of the portal to Hades in Greek mythol-ogy). Meanwhile, an Ensor-like skull lies at the top of the steps, and streaks and drippings cover the surface, giving the impression less of a Pollock action

painting than of some corrosive, downward infl uence exacerbated by the slant of the scene from top left to bottom right.

In effect, Why I Am Not a Conservative confronts us with a second fi n de siècle, replete with the same sense of decline that informed the fi rst, as well as an acute and terrifying sense of impending change, signifi ed by what-ever it is to the right of the picture frame that has mesmerized the fi gures on the left. The social order is breaking down, and carnival—otherwise a tem-porary suspension of that order—has become the norm, as symbolized by the freely roaming circus monkey. The painting is a crystallization of dis-continuity: the capturing of an interregnum that defi es all attempts to order it, including those of conventional modes of representation, yielding a fan-tasy scenario in which all things are possible.

Intertextuality and Contempt for TraditionWhy I Am Not a Conservative is the kind of work that has continued to con-found critics. Fritz W. Kramer, for example, plagued by the ambiguities in Richter’s paintings, could only conclude: “Presumably the real message is con-tradiction. It is left to the spectator himself to discover in which situations he

Figure 3. Galeria Kaufhof, Alexander-

platz, Berlin. Photograph by the author,

June 2006

David Hughes 139

fi nds himself.”3 Jan-Hendrik Wentrup went one stage farther by suspecting Richter of deliberately setting semantic traps for his unwitting viewer.4 Kinder critics like Julian Heynen, meanwhile, remained convinced that there must indeed be meaning beneath the euphoric excesses of Richter’s abstract work.5 Such responses are entirely understandable, given just a cursory glance at some of the titles of Richter’s paintings. Tuanus, for example, could refer to Frank-furt’s Taunus district; Phienox would seem an allusion to the mythical phoe-nix; and Zurberes may incline us to think of Cerberus. Yet there are slip-pages here: we read Tuanus and not Taunus, Phienox and not Phönix, Zurberes and not Zerberus. By the simple exchange of two vowels in each instance, any attempt to fi nd meaning in the titles is immediately complicated and perhaps frustrated altogether. Alternatively, the titles may appear arcane, as in Bil-liards at Half Past Nine or Verdigris (Grünspan), both of which doubled as titles of exhibitions by Richter in 2001–2 and are named after books that the viewer may or may not have read (the fi rst after Heinrich Böll’s famous story of 1959, the second after Detlev’s Imitations “Verdigris” [Detlevs Imitationen “Grünspan”], a 1971 novel by the almost forgotten Hamburg author Hubert Fichte). The title of a 2003 exhibition, Brain (Hirn), similarly takes its name from a 1986 collection of essays on subculture by Rainald Götz.

Intertextuality is, and has always been, a core ingredient of Richter’s work. As Beate Ermacora notes in the catalog to Billiards at Half Past Nine, even the abstract paintings brim over with art-historical citations:

In tumbling, mind-blowing simultaneity, citational references push toward the infi nite possibilities of abstract painting on the picture surfaces; shreds of images and mnemonic form and color sequences in the style of informel, tachism, or CoBrA stand side by side; Gerhard Richter– or Albert Oehlen–style gestures are superimposed on decorative patterns and ornamentations that are familiar to us from tattoos or graffi ti.6

Abstract art, that erstwhile ahistorical realm of ideal forms (or so the mod-ernists thought), now itself becomes historical and open to citation—and not

3. Fritz W. Kramer, “In Heterotopia,” in Grünspan, ed. Julian Heynen (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2002), 7. All translations in this article are my own.

4. Jan-Hendrik Wentrup, “Spinning the Wheel: Zur Dimension des Historischen im Werk von Daniel Richter,” in Heynen, Grünspan, 17.

5. Julian Heynen, “Grünspan oder Goldstaub,” in Heynen, Grünspan, 21.6. Beate Ermacora, “Öffentliche Bilder,” in Billard um halbzehn, ed. Beate Ermacora (Kiel:

Kunsthalle zu Kiel, 2001), 104–11.


just in its “high” forms based on the traditional fi ne arts. Richter is equally keen to incorporate graffi ti art, by painting spots of color bordered with con-tour strokes in the fashion of the graffi ti sprayer on house walls. Here, his origins in the Hamburg punk and squatter scene of the 1980s become evi-dent, for this kind of graffi ti on both inside and outside walls was typical of the punk aesthetic, intended as it was to make art public by eliminating pri-vate space. We also fi nd psychedelic touches, drawn from 1960s subculture: the most obvious example is Fool on a Hill (1999), which looks something like the cover of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour put through a blender (the painting takes its name from a song on that album). With Richter’s fi gura-tive work, the astonishing fullness of art-historical citation is extended, and critics have noted references to, among others, William Blake, Francisco de Goya, Théodore Géri cault, Ilya Repin, Vasily Surikov, Arnold Bücklin, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Manet, Pablo Picasso, Ferdinand Hodler, James Ensor, Edvard Munch, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, Philip Gus-ton, Robert Crumb, Gerhard Richter, Jörg Immendorff, Martin Kippenberger, and Peter Doig.

Kay Heymer, rather harshly, labeled Richter’s contrived mixing of styles “bastard painting” (Bastardmalerei). What bothered Heymer was Richter’s contempt for painterly tradition: “His attitude is that of the angry spurner of every painting tradition to have preceded him. He takes what he needs, sever-ing all connections in the process.”7 But in fairness to Richter, he was entirely in line with Hans Belting’s study The End of Art History? (1983) when he stated, “All that is left in painting is its history, the constant reinterpretation of what one has already seen and revised in one’s own work.”8 Of course, such a philosophy of art arouses what one critic called “the suspicion of historical kitsch,”9 and Richter recognized this when he claimed that the more historical citations a painting contains, the more it requires its own originality, however much of a Romantic anachronism that may seem.10 (Though of course Gerhard Richter’s attempt to drive out style completely from his photopaintings, gray

7. Kay Heymer, “Diebesgut,” Texte zur Kunst 9 (1999): 215. 8. Quoted in Harald Fricke, “Ein bisschen Horrorschau; Auf Augenhöhe mit Realität: Daniel

Richter zeigt in Düsseldorf einen Raum gewordenen Bilderpastiche, in dem sich hundert Jahre Kunst-ikonographie mit aktuellen Medienbildern vermischen,” Die Tageszeitung, October 11, 2002.

9. Stefan Heidenreich, “Die Wahrheit ueber die Berliner Mauer,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zei-tung, October 30, 2000.

10. Cited in Harald Fricke, “‘Priester lehne ich ab’; Weil das gemalte Bild nicht vorgibt, Wirklich-keit zu sein: Ein Gespräch mit dem Maler Daniel Richter über Medien, Tradition, verschwindende Menschengruppen und gesammelte Muscheln,” Die Tageszeitung, May 9, 2003.

David Hughes 141

paintings, and abstract work resulted, perversely, in some of the most instantly recognizable works in postwar art history.)

It has been claimed that Daniel Richter “cites history to narrate his own.”11 After all, his personal iconography is hardly random or neutral. Very often it has to do with his own biography: with Schleswig-Holstein, where he grew up; with his affi nity to punk rock; with contemporary social issues that concern him (e.g., asylum seekers, protest actions, street fi ghts, and civil wars); or with a lineage of sociocritical artists from Goya, Honoré Daumier, and Gustave Courbet to Hodler, Ensor, and Dix—not to mention the more contro-versial socialist realism of the GDR, or communist sympathizers in the West, such as the Situationist International, CoBrA, HAP Grieshaber, or Immen-dorff (who, like Richter, now exhibits at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin). In 2003 Richter’s own take on his image archive was as follows: “It is quite simply the material through which the world has avowed itself to me. I am my own assemblage movement. A party line no longer exists, but I don’t infer from this that the party should be abolished; rather, I wonder how it could be improved.”12 I know of nowhere else where Richter’s political leanings surface quite as explicitly as they do here. Twentieth-century communism may have collapsed with the Soviet Union’s disintegration, but in Richter the spirit of left-wing radicalism lives on.

Celebrity RadicalsAccording to Johanna Drucker in her book Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (2005), “Artwork termed ‘political’ often serves a stabi-lizing function, helping to maintain the cultural status quo.” Throughout the twentieth century, Drucker argues, “the appearance of radicalism cloaked the careerism of many artists,” but now “the oppositional rhetoric of radicality in fi ne art and criticism has become formulaic and academic in the worst sense.” Given that fi ne art has become inseparable from the world system in which it is embedded, Drucker calls for an “admission of complicity, in which self-interest plays a part, rather than a claim to ‘resistance,’ or ‘aloof separation,’ or ‘distance.’”13 The debate about Daniel Richter fi ts well within this context, for self-interest is unquestionably a motivating factor in his aesthetic radicalism. Despite his origins in Hamburg’s autonomist and punk scene, for example, his

11. Wentrup, “Spinning the Wheel,” 19.12. Quoted in Fricke, “‘Priester lehne ich ab.’”13. Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2005), 3, 5, 11.


art has brought him considerable wealth and prestige, prompting allegations in some quarters that he only ever seems to produce large-format paintings that cannot be bought for less than ten thousand dollars each.14 But while reproaches of hypocrisy against Richter are not uncommon, it is surely worth questioning whether personal gain and left-wing politics need be incompatible in a post-modern era when it is impossible for the artist to stand “outside” global capi-talism. The case of Daniel Richter seems to suggest that the artist can indeed profi t from the very system he or she would rather see overthrown.

Besides, were not Richter’s predecessors, the new fauves, already celeb-rities in the 1980s—the darlings of the art market esteemed for their suppos-edly wild and spontaneous gestures both on and off the canvas? Was it not they who slaked that “Hunger for Painting”15 with their “heroic return” to the can-vas following the dominance of photography, video, installation, minimal-ism, and conceptual art in the 1970s? And were they not an integral part of that new international “style,” neo-expressionism, that began in West Germany with Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer and soon appeared elsewhere: in Italy with the “transavantgarde,” including Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, as well as in the United States with Julian Schnabel and David Salle?

The simple answer is no: they were none of these clichés. For a start, the very term Neuen Wilden, coined by Wolfgang Becker in his 1980 exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Aachen, is hopelessly misleading. That exhibition pointed to the similarities between French expressionism of the early twentieth century and the expressive tendencies of contemporary art, almost as though modern-ism had come full circle (hence Heinrich Klotz’s 1984 thesis of a “second mod-ernism” in art).16 Yet the new fauves themselves, especially the Moritzplatz artists in Berlin (Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, Bernd Zimmer), invoked quite alternative role models to the French expressionists, such as the American expressionists Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, as well as the English loner Francis Bacon. Neuen Wilden was also problematic insofar as it suggested the expressiveness of the artists themselves rather than of their paint-ings (the topos of the wild artist being easily applied to the Hamburg artists for their excessive alcohol consumption and to the Berlin artists for their unin-hibited erotic excesses). But in fact, these artists were not so much “wild” or “untamed” as they were fed up and disillusioned with the society in which they

14. An allegation made by the political fanzine 17 Grad, cited in Fricke, “Ein bisschen Hor-rorschau.”

15. The title of a 1982 exhibition of their work curated by Wolfgang Max Faust and Gerd de Vries.

16. First proposed in Heinrich Klotz, Moderne und Postmoderne: Architektur der Gegenwart, 1960–1980 (Wiesbaden: Vieweg und Sohn, 1984).

David Hughes 143

lived—a media society marked increasingly by cynical individualism and greed, in which art was appropriated and abused by the image-based politics of the Reagan-Thatcher era. Even these artists’ own work was not immune to such manipulation, not least because there never was any “hunger for painting” in West Germany, where many of the leading artists (Kiefer, Markus Lüpertz, and Gerhard Richter, to name but a few obvious candidates) continued to paint defi ning works throughout the 1970s. That label was, rather, part of an aggres-sive marketing strategy created by art dealers and galleries to promote neo-expressionism, the style that never was. Oehlen recently made clear that the Italian transavantgarde did not infl uence him and his Hamburg colleagues, as is often thought, and that there was little enough connecting expressive art-ists even within West Germany in the 1980s, where trends emerged regionally (the principal centers being Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne): “We never were a group, we never had a name for ourselves and never had our own publications, like a magazine or a manifesto. We wanted rather to confuse people.”17

Mission accomplished—but not for the reasons Oehlen and his contem-poraries intended. Perversely, the art market created a group name and identity for a disparate range of artists, then made stars of those artists even though they wanted, as far as possible, to opt out of, or vehemently assert themselves against, capitalist society. The lesson here is instructive: artists do not choose the market value of their works, or the amount of attention they themselves command, or, indeed, how others interpret their works. This may explain why, in 1984, Büttner claimed not to give a hang for what spectators thought of his work,18 and why, judging by the title he gave to a solo exhibition at the Deich-torhallen in Hamburg, he felt powerless to change a topsy-turvy world: “The world is upside down, you have to look at it inversely in order to see it prop-erly. . . . Only fools will try to change it. . . . It always was the way it is.” This verbose title was, in fact, a quotation from Baltasar Gracián, a seventeenth-century Jesuit priest notorious for his cynical worldview. That Büttner should have identifi ed with such a fi gure is telling, for it marks the main contrast between his work and the early German expressionism with which it is so often confl ated: whereas the Brücke artists and the Sturm circle in Berlin in the 1910s and 1920s never questioned the artist’s power to intervene in social relations, Büttner and his cohorts saw their only role as that of cynical witness. Their

17. Eric Banks, “Albert Oehlen Talks to Eric Banks,” Artforum, April 1, 2003, 182–83.18. “I don’t care if they understand the text, if they understand the illustrations, or if they create

a link between the two and think they understand it, or if they understand nothing at all. It can’t matter to me as a commonsense being, since I can no longer infl uence it. THE WORK OF THE ARTIST

EN DS BEFOR E T H E AU DI ENCE A R R I V ES” (Werner Büttner, La luta continua: Drei Beispiele [Cologne: Galerie Max Hetzler, 1984], 25).


work functioned as something like an existential seismograph, registering how their environment affl icted them mentally in the form of obsessions, aggres-sions, fears, and neuroses. It made no pretension to change the world, and Bütt-ner and Oehlen—unlike, say, Grieshaber or Immendorff—always regarded themselves as artists rather than activists.

Violence, Intervention, and Global Civil WarThroughout his career Daniel Richter has held a consistent position on the rela-tionship between art and politics: “I insist on categorization. Politics remains politics, social action remains social action, and art remains art.”19 There is no doubting Richter’s political bent: he was affected by the Walser-Bubis debate and the xenophobic campaign waged by Hessen’s minister-president, Roland Koch;20 he has spoken of his “deep inner revulsion at central European politics and that repellent nationalist gibberish”;21 and he has claimed not to identify with nations, states, or ideologies.22 But like his mentors Büttner and Oehlen, Richter sees himself primarily as a painter in an age where art no longer serves as a template for a better world. On the contrary, in his acceptance speech for the Otto Dix Prize in 1998, Richter described painting as nothing less than a form of slavery: “For me, one of the biggest pleasures of not being a painter is freedom from slavery; the ability to enjoy my whole life instead of spending half of it lusting after a canvas and, immediately after daubing one, wishing I didn’t have to.”23 No sign here, then, of that profi t-hungry pasticher of past styles propagated by certain elements of the art press. Richter paints what he, and not the market, wants to see,24 and fi nds nothing pleasurable in his task. The reason: art should, he holds, always be brought into connection with social reality rather than indulge in design and surface,25 and in his work, this reality appears as violent and nightmarish.

19. Wentrup, “Spinning the Wheel,” 19.20. Cited in Kerstin Ehmer, “Glühende Bilderlust,” Stern, September 28, 2000.21. Daniel Richter in conversation with Beate Ermacora, Berlin, March 30, 2001, quoted in

Ermacora, “Öffentliche Bilder,” 110.22. “Daniel Richter und Raymond Pettibon,” taz, September 11, 2002.23. Richard Rabensaat, “Für ein paar Bagger mehr; Erst die Wirklichkeit und dann die Arbeit:

Was der Sicherheitsmann und ehemalige Betonfacharbeiter Horst Meyer und der Maler Daniel Richter miteinander gemein haben. Einige Bemerkungen zur Berlin-Biennale und ihrem schönen Schein,” Die Tageszeitung, June 8, 2001.

24. “I paint pictures that I myself want to see” (quoted in Fricke, “Ein bisschen Horrorschau”).25. “It doesn’t interest me when artists leave their ivory tower only to take up design. I just don’t

want to reproduce shiny surfaces in my work” (quoted in Rabensaat, “Für ein paar Bagger mehr”; see also Fricke, “Ein bisschen Horrorschau”).

David Hughes 145

Consider A City Called Authen (Eine Stadt namens Authen, 2001; fi g. 4), which depicts fi ve fi gures in the foreground, four of whom appear to be advanc-ing on the fi fth, about to push him off the cuboid structure on which they are standing. In the background loom a number of run-down tenement blocks, while down below, at ground level, a seminaked female stands beneath an over-size streetlight, two additional fi gures walk down the street clutching a box-shaped object, and a tall blue fi gure strides toward them, passing a garbage container. The painting’s perspective draws our attention to the fi ght scene on the left, where two males in garishly colored shirts, plus two more in much darker outfi ts, close in on their adversary, another male in gaudy red trousers, who brandishes a bottle, perhaps in self-defense. This is a kind of enforced close-up viewing that typifi es Richter’s work, whereby the spectator does not merely look at the painting in question but fi nds himself or herself right in the middle of the action as the space opens forward (a technique inherited from Beckmann). Seeing the actual painting itself, of course, the effect is all the more striking—instead of a picture in a catalog, one faces a four-meter-wide canvas with all its materiality and gestural multiplicity. The experience is

Figure 4. A City Called Authen (Eine Stadt namens Authen, 2001). Oil on canvas, 260 × 375 cm.

Courtesy of Contemporary Fine Arts. Photograph by Jochen Littkemann


then totally direct, “seeing as immediate confrontation with the picture exactly as it hangs in the exhibition.”26

Thrust into the action, the spectator effectively turns participant, and in A City Called Authen the imperative to intervene is immediate. My own fi rst reaction to the painting was to register the sheer vulnerability of the “victim,” who, easily outnumbered and completely exposed on top of what could be a tall building, seems only moments away from a potentially fatal fall. Yet no sooner did I feel the desire to act than multiple ambivalences and peculiari-ties in the picture began to present themselves. Why, in an otherwise dark and sinister cityscape, are the combatants wearing Bermuda-style shirts and shorts, almost as though they were on a beach holiday? Why is one assailant’s raised hand open wide, as if in a sign of surrender? Is the man with the bottle actually the aggressor, winding up to hit his opponent? (In another of Richter’s paintings from 2001, Justice [Das Recht], a man dressed in exactly the same clothing looks as though he is about to bludgeon a terrifi ed horse to death.) Is the strange surface the men are standing on really a rooftop, or is it a dance fl oor in a nightclub (hence the bright clothing and the bottle)? Why is there a bikini-clad woman standing unresponsive and rigid down below? What are the two fi gures with the box up to, and why do they not intervene given that one of them seems to have spotted the altercation? Can I reach the combat-ants from where I am, and would I place myself in peril by doing so? Am I safe in the fi rst place in this semifamiliar yet bombed-out-looking environ-ment? Then I notice dark fi gures in the windows of the tenement blocks—have they noticed the fi ght, and, if so, have they reported it? There is a small child reading on top of a different building or three-dimensional block—what is he or she doing amid this commotion? For that matter, why am I here, watch-ing this debacle?

The spectator of A City Called Authen is called on, quite out of the blue, and without guidelines, to intervene in a potentially life-threatening yet highly enigmatic situation. For Sigmar Polke, the sine qua non of moral responsibility was always confusion, and Richter, too, assigns central importance to that con-cept in his motto “Beauty through confusion, truth through collision.” Stripped of their classical transcendence, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful must now pass through the immanent fi lters of confusion and violence. Long gone are the days of an Otto Dix, who still saw absolute categories of good and evil as the standards by which to shock and provoke his audience, as he turned his lacerating pen and brush on the corruption which he found endemic to Ger-

26. Quoted in Fricke, “‘Priester lehne ich ab.’”

David Hughes 147

man society (prostitution and the vices of the ruling class numbering among his most frequent subjects). Richter, in contrast, makes no attempt to enlighten his spectator by means of shock; although fear and violence pervade his paint-ings, there is no disturbingly graphic realism—no blood and gore, war cripples, or disease-ridden brothels. Instead, the effect is one of creeping discomfort pro-duced by innuendo and ambiguity: is an attack taking place in A City Called Authen, or is it just that fi ve young men are having a rooftop party? Are the ghostlike fi gures in Your Night Needs No Moon (Eure Nacht braucht keinen Mond, 2001) wading through an idyllic sea, or are they on the run? In Con-struct (in That Dream) (Konstruktion [in jenem Traum], 2001), are the ghostly beings in a tree against which a boy sleeps watching over him or theatening to abduct him? In Dog Planet (2002), is the group armed with helmets, sticks, and dogs the riot police or a band of savage thugs? In Duisen (2004), are the fi gures’ upraised arms a sign of celebration, protest, or surrender?

Violence, or at least the threat of violence, haunts Richter’s work, yet it remains invisible and its perpetrators anonymous. In A City Called Authen we witness a tight, pressured scene full of seeming gestures of attack and defense, but we are unable to testify to a concrete act of brutality. Issues of victimhood and perpetration, which have plagued (West) German art since the early 1970s at least,27 evaporate here in a haze that obscures all possibility of moralizing about guilty parties or taking action to bring them to justice. We may recall the tragic fate of Catherine Genovese, the New Yorker who was murdered by repeated stabbings in the early hours of March 13, 1964, while numerous resi-dents of a respectable street in Queens simply watched from their windows and did not call the police for at least an hour. The problem there, it has been argued,28 was diffusion of responsibility: everyone assumed that the call had already been made. In A City Called Authen not only responsibility appears nebulous (how many people have noticed the altercation and who has reported it?), so too does the crime itself, to the extent that it is hard to know whether an offense is even taking place. Similar is true of Tuanus (2000), which we might assume from the title depicts a police raid in Frankfurt’s Taunus Park, a place notorious for its drug trade. Yet none of the fi gures wears a police uniform, and one aggressor appears to be taking drugs. It is impossible to discern who the

27. For instance, Anselm Kiefer gives an intensely problematic portrayal of himself as victim when dealing with Nazi and Holocaust-related themes in such paintings as Jeder Mensch steht unter seinem eigenen Himmelskugel (1970) and Dem Unbekannten Maler (1981).

28. See Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History (London: Penguin, 2003), 411–14.


good actors are and who are the bad—is the fi gure on the right, for example, frisking his suspect, or is he committing sexual assault? Into this incredibly sinister environment, meanwhile, stumbles a backpacker—perhaps a student, perhaps a picnicker. “What should I do? How should I save her?” Richter asks rhetorically.29

Violence in A City Called Authen may be anonymous, but it seems ubiq-uitous because of the catastrophic backdrop of burned-out buildings, looters, and an overfl owing garbage container. Civil war could be breaking out (much of Richter’s source material included in the Billiards at Half Past Nine exhi-bition involved images of civil war), yet somehow everything seems horri-bly familiar, even banal, because we are used to such images from the media. In Richter’s own words, “The paintings may brutally attack the spectator, but they reproduce a reality that is present daily in the news whenever there are racially motivated attacks on foreigners somewhere in Germany again.”30 There are shades of Tom Holert and Mark Terkessidis’s book War as Mass Culture in the Twenty-fi rst Century (Krieg als Massenkultur im 21. Jahrhun-dert, 2002) here: war is no longer just an instrument in the arsenal of the state, but has diffused down into social life via mass culture (one critic accordingly drew a parallel between Richter’s work and Michel Foucault’s theorization of the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control).31 Richter has indeed been interested in the relationship between war and culture since 1997 at least, when he showed images of war alongside his abstract paintings in the catalog for Seventeen Years of Nosebleeds (Siebzehn Jahre Nasenbluten). This may have been a comment on the growing complicity of culture with warfare (in what has become known as “full spectrum dominance”), as well as on the increasingly violent tendencies of culture itself, which were, in the eyes of Ulrike Rüdiger, already manifest in his own work: “The pictures that Richter leaves on the canvas after meticulous close combat are battle fi elds of colors, forms, styles.”32

Violence is everywhere in Richter’s work, then, for the artist himself is keen for us to recognize the mounting anarchy: “Everything is running out of the rudder. Let’s not kid ourselves.”33 The contrast between this attitude and the general tone of West German art before reunifi cation could hardly be more

29. Quoted in Ehmer, “Glühende Bilderlust.”30. Quoted in Rabensaat, “Für ein paar Bagger mehr.”31. Wentrup, “Spinning the Wheel,” 18.32. Ulrike Rüdiger, ed., Otto-Dix-Preis ’98 (Frankfurt an der Oder: Kunstsammlung Gera,

1998), 4.33. Quoted in Fricke, “‘Priester lehne ich ab.’”

David Hughes 149

34. Vostell once claimed that “by releasing hidden impulses, the Happening also releases those that tend toward barbarism” (quoted in Karin Thomas, Deutsche Kunst seit 1945 [Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2002], 149).

35. Cited in Fricke, “‘Priester lehne ich ab.’”36. Stephen Mueller, review of Daniel Richter: The Morning After (2004), www.artcritical

.com/mueller/SMRichter.htm (accessed July 1, 2009).

pronounced. Following the war crimes and genocidal barbarism of the Hitler years, the prevailing consensus in the FRG until the early 1980s at least was that violent currents were to be marginalized or preferably expunged from West German art. Of course, there were exceptions: among others, Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck sought to violate the national taboo on violent and obscene imagery with their pathetic realism in the early 1960s; Wolf Vostell conceived of the Happening to liberate repressed impulses including those that might lead to barbarism;34 and in the early 1970s the critical realists in Berlin held up the alternative reality of torture and brutality from Vietnam and South America to the pinup clichés of pop and photorealism. But by and large, the fi rst three decades of the FRG produced art that was averse to dealing with violence, even despite the terrorist atrocities committed by the Rote Armee Fraktion and Baader-Meinhof Gruppe during the 1970s. It took seven years, indeed, before the Stammheim suicide pact was thematized by artists, fi rst in Gustav Kluge’s Stammheim Duet (Stammheimer Duett, 1984) and Olaf Metzel’s wall installation Stammheim (1984), and then in Gerhard Richter’s more famous work 18. Oktober 1977 (1988). And although Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, and Bernd Zimmer earned the tag “violent painting” (heftige Malerei) for their work via an exhibition of that name in 1980 shown in the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, that epithet applied more to their vehement paint-ing gestures than their subject matter itself.

Richter hates it when his paintings are reduced to situations of violence,35 and he does not mean to glorify confl ict. But he does want the Left, and the German Left especially, to open its eyes to the mounting chaos of an increas-ingly deregulated, unpredictable, and globalized world. The old mantra of marginalizing violence is not just ineffective today, it is positively crippling, because it fails to recognize the unruly energies that govern every level of social reality. “Wicked entertainment” was how one critic described Richter’s work,36 whose characters are subject to any number of forces beyond their control. In paintings such as Gedion (2002) and Punktum (2003), for example, they stand paralyzed by fear, gazing in terrifi ed awe at an unknown source outside the picture frame. In other works, like Billiards at Half Past Nine (Billard um halbzehn, 2001) and Through the Forest toward Loneliness (Zur


Einheit durch den Wald, 2001), they are driven like demoniacs by a kind of hyperkinetic nervous energy. Or in Tarifa (2001) and Flash (2002) they fi nd themselves hopelessly exposed to the elements, set adrift on the ocean in the black of night with nothing but a rubber dinghy or overturned lifeboat for pro-tection. These scenes are striking for their laconicism: Richter makes barely any comment on the plight of his characters; he shows no sympathy, outrage, or other strong emotion, but rather presents the characters’ agonized state sim-ply as it is. There is no didacticism or hope of redemption in these pictures, no rallying call to arms against the burgeoning social inequalities generated by late capitalism—none of the attributes, in other words, traditionally ascribed to left-wing artists. If anything, Richter can seem cruel and merciless toward his characters—but only because of the unforgiving nature of the world system that infuses his every scenario.

The Politics of Citation: Democracy versus TechnocracyTypical of Richter’s oeuvre, A City Called Authen brings together all manner of source material. The painting’s milieu was lifted from a photograph of East German Plattenbauten (buildings made with precast concrete slabs), while the postures of the aggressive male fi gures come from a photograph of hooligans clashing with riot police. There are stylistic nods toward expressionism (in the bold colors), constructivism (in the cool straight outlines of the buildings), sur-realism (the female fi gure beneath a disproportionately tall street light), abstract expressionism (the drippings and streaks that cover the surface), minimalism (the white cube-shaped structure), and pop art (the Jasper Johns–style targets on the blue shirt). Popular culture also enters the frame via the grimacing face on the back of the blue fi gure in the bottom right corner, which appears to have been taken from John Carpenter’s horror movie They Live (1988), although it could just as easily be seen as a reference to Munch’s Scream (1893). In terms of composition, there are surprising similarities with Jesus Drives the Mer-chants Away from the Temple, an early Renaissance painting by the Floren-tine artist Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337), whom Richter has listed among his art-historical infl uences. The gestures of attack and defense in the center of Giotto’s picture, as well as the group of men on the left-hand side, the large building in the background, and the cuboid structure at the front are all repli-cated in Richter’s painting. In a postmodern age where styles and images of all kinds are being recycled faster and more aggressively than ever, Richter’s cita-tional cornucopia constitutes an entirely appropriate mode of representation.

Yet as far as politically engaged art is concerned, the effect of excessive citation can seem derogatory. For example, one critic drew a parallel between

David Hughes 151

37. Olaf Peters, “Der malende Reaktionär am linken Motiv? Zu einigen Werken Daniel Rich-ters,” in Heynen, Grünspan, 11.

38. Robert Rigney, “Daniel Richter at Contemporary Fine Arts,” Art in America 89, no. 2 (2001): 152.

39. Quoted in Rabensaat, “Für ein paar Bagger mehr.”40. Quoted in Christopher Bannat, “Ich male alles und rede mit jedem,” taz, October 21, 1998.41. Fricke, “Ein bisschen Horrorschau.”42. Holger Liebs, “Grüner Star; Daniel Richter malt die Welt, wie sie ihm missfällt—eine

Ausstellung in Düsseldorf,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 10, 2002.

Richter’s stylistic pluralism and that of Dix, noting that the art historian Carl Einstein once branded Dix a “painting reactionary on the Left” for producing a stream of reportage whose arresting motifs had grown banal and kitschy.37 Along similar lines, another commentator noted the apparent disjunction between form and content in Richter’s fi gurative work, which he characterized in terms of “a garish expressionist style that is at odds with its subject matter, as if the artist were completely oblivious to the drama at hand.”38 Certainly, it does seem remarkable to treat such issues as xenophobia and antisocial behav-ior, or terrorism and civil war, as Richter does, using a playful postmodern citational art that is inscrutable and sometimes verging on the hokey. But to some extent, Richter’s approach simply mirrors today’s culture, in which news broadcasts about civil unrest, war, and catastrophe are interspliced with swim-wear commercials, trailers for horror movies, and other pop-culture images. Moreover, kitsch need not necessarily be a bad thing, as it can make artworks more accessible to a wider audience than even, say, Immendorff’s barricade slogans, which he had hoped would be comprehensible to everyone. Richter thus described the diverse elements of A City Called Authen as “things that even my cleaning lady could begin to make sense of,”39 a sentiment in keeping with his mandate of producing art that is completely open and inclusive: “Above all . . . the goal should be to overcome hierarchies in communication. I am primarily engaged in painting and less with the allures of the various hip-ster clans. Or to put it quite bluntly: I talk with everyone.”40

Richter is the sampler supreme, employing an expansive archive of found images that include reproductions of artworks, book covers, fi lm stills, news-paper clippings, comics, magazines, news broadcasts, and record album cov-ers. Critics have read Richter’s sampling, rightly, as a comment on the never-ending fl ood of images in contemporary society. Harald Fricke saw Richter’s work in Benjaminian terms, as testifying to the “catastrophe unerringly pil-ing up as an image archive”;41 Liebs saw its numerous citations as “compo-nents of a now virulent image arsenal”;42 and both commentators recognized the violence with which image production now operates. Richter, for his part,


43. Quoted in Bannat, “Ich male alles und rede mit jedem.”44. Quoted in Uta Grosenick, ed., Werner Büttner (Cologne: Taschen, 2003), 26.

spoke out in 1998 about what he regarded as the technocratic manipulation of images:

Society does not analyse images, it self-evidently deals with images in a very manipulative way. . . . While everything socially operates more and more via images and de-historicized contexts, offi cial, pragmatic discus-sion is only ever about the technocratic improvement of tempo, accelera-tion, etc., which I indeed try to refl ect in my work. But the disparity between the volume of information and actually being informed is paradoxical.43

It is not diffi cult to see where Richter acquired his attitude toward image prop-agation. Büttner, too, voiced dismay at the debasement of images through their mass reproduction and circulation: “I fi nd there are so many images, more than one can fi nd pleasant, that we don’t need to keep inventing new ones. Rather, as a true friend of the essence of the image, one should worry about the misery that the accumulation of images has caused and show that they contain nothing apart from what is used in glossy magazines, adverts, etc.”44 Richter rose to Büttner’s challenge, transplanting everyday imagery into new contexts in the attempt to make it speak the language of the Left. A drab news-paper photograph of an East German tenement block is transformed into the image of civil war raging everywhere and nowhere (A City Called Authen). The Clash’s White Riot album cover becomes part of an all-too-sinister police drug bust (Tuanus). The horror house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is merged with a photograph of a center for asylum seekers to yield the eerily compelling backdrop to Billiards at Half Past Nine. Signifi cantly, these ref-erences are not meant to be arcane, since Richter makes his picture archive public in his exhibitions and catalog—a very different proposition from, say, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962–), which compiles some of the absent source material for the artist’s photo-paintings as a separate, experimental work in and of itself. Daniel Richter does not fetishize the absent cause; he wants us to have some idea of his point of departure, although the haphazard and laconic arrangement of source material in the exhibitions ensures that we do not read too much into it.

Figurative Painting and the Legacy of Socialist RealismRichter’s antitechnocratic attitude was perhaps also a partial reaction to the dominance of photographic art in Germany in the early 1990s. Trained by

David Hughes 153

45. See Bannat, “Ich male alles und rede mit jedem.”46. Daniel Richter, “Der Status quo deprimiert mich,” in Melancholie und Eros in der Kunst

der Gegenwart, ed. Axel Murken and Christa Murken (Cologne: Sammlung Murken, 1997).47. Douglas Crimp, “The End of Painting,” October 16 (1981): 76. We might also think of Ben-

jamin Buchloh’s reproval of Kiefer’s paintings as displaying “retardation and regression” (“Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” October, no. 16 [1981]: 39–68).

Hans and Hilla Becher, photographers such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Ruff enjoyed great success during that period, much as Dieter Appelt, Jürgen Klauke, Ulrike Rosenbach, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Gerry Schum, and others garnered considerable acclaim for their photographic and video art in the late 1970s. Then, it was Büttner, Kippenberger, Oehlen, and others who helped shift the emphasis back to painting; in the mid-1990s, the same feat was achieved by a new generation of painters including Franz Ackermann, Michael Majerus, Martin Gerwers, Corinne Wasmuht, Katharina Grosse, and, of course, Daniel Richter. As exemplifi ed by the 1994 exhibition The Broken Mirror (Der zerbrochene Spiegel) at the Deichtorhallen in Ham-burg, much of this new painting limited itself to a purely formal investigation of its own possibilities, ceding the task of representation to the image media. In 1998, indeed, Richter still thought that photography and fi lm were more appropriate for depicting people than painting,45 and he displayed full aware-ness of painting’s limitations when claiming: “Painting is the most lethargic, slowest and most tradition-burdened medium and the hardest to expand. There, the challenge is greatest.”46

On the other hand, of course, painting has always found ways to respond to technological advances in the visual media ever since Paul Delaroche famously pronounced it dead in 1850 in response to the invention of photogra-phy. In fact, that death warrant was periodically reissued throughout the twen-tieth century: by Marcel Duchamp in 1912–13 in response to the crisis of refer-entiality in painting; by the constructivists in 1920–21 after heroic abstraction had culminated in Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) and Alexander Rodtschenko’s Black on Black (1919); by minimal artists around 1960–62 fol-lowing a second round of monochrome canvases by Robert Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, and Ad Reinhardt; and again by art critics in the early 1980s in response to photography’s hegemony the previous decade (“Photography may have been invented in 1839, but it was only discovered in the 1970s”).47 Despite all this doom mongering, however, painting continues to thrive because, in the context of art history since the 1970s, it constitutes a political act as a deliberate rejection of the ideology of technological progress. This is why Richter took


48. Ermacora, “Öffentliche Bilder,” 110.49. Rigney, “Daniel Richter at Contemporary Fine Arts.”50. Heidenreich, “Die Wahrheit ueber die Berliner Mauer.”51. Alexander Tolnay, “Vorwort,” in Hirn, ed. Alexander Tolnay (Ostfi ldern-Ruit: Cantz, 2003), 5.52. Quoted in Wentrup, “Spinning the Wheel,” 14.53. See Thomas, Deutsche Kunst seit 1945, 151.

up the gauntlet of painting in a world assailed by technologically produced images—though his astounding inventiveness had some surprising origins.

The real breakthrough in Richter’s career came, as we know, with his turn to fi gurative painting in 1999–2000, a move that confounded the critics. Consider, for example, Ermacora’s interpretation of Richter’s work: “To evade the naturalist trap, Daniel Richter moves right on the border between still rec-ognizable fi guration and free painting.”48 This is what artists were undertaking thirty or forty years ago, not today—just take Baselitz with his upside-down paintings of classical genre motifs that gave abstract form to still recogniza-ble fi gures, or Lüpertz’s dithyrambic paintings that gave concrete form to an abstract concept. In the eyes of Robert Rigney: “Richter’s stylistic transforma-tion is in many ways a capitulation to traditional painting. He has stopped play-ing postmodern games with painterly modes and has fi nally allowed mean-ing, however ambiguous, to triumph.”49 As I have shown, this is not true: the postmodern citation of styles and motifs fl ourishes in Richter’s fi gurative work. Stefan Heidenreich sees Richter’s fi gurative work as a development of his abstract work but fails to explain how,50 and although Alexander Tolnay rightly identifi es the gradual appearance of fi gurative motifs in Richter’s abstract work and residual abstract elements in the fi gurative work, his claim that Richter sought to take a more political stance in the latter is belied by the punk aesthetic that Richter brought to the former.51 Perhaps it would be easier, then, to let Richter himself do the talking: “The break with abstract painting came from the need to get closer to a reality that I experience as unsavory. My need to express myself as a social entity was so strong that I wanted to con-vey it to others. I’ve always thought the same about the world.”52

Figurative painting, then, as a way to express sociality—but was not that painting driven out decades ago by the triumphant march of abstract expres-sionism and informel, to be forever barred from returning by a lingering mis-trust of that outmoded bourgeois ideology, representation? So Western critics of Cold War art history would like us to believe. Yet in the wake of that great confl ict, and now that the visceral retrospective debates about the moral integ-rity of East German art have passed in the FRG,53 a new generation of East German painters is achieving widespread recognition for its innovative con-

David Hughes 155

54. Fricke, “‘Priester lehne ich ab.’”55. Ibid.56. See Bannat, “Ich male alles und rede mit jedem.”57. Grieshaber made sure that his Totentanz (Death Dance) series (1965–66) was printed in

Leipzig and published in both the FRG and the GDR. Immendorff and Penck tried to build bridges between East and West German artists at a time when inter-German relations had more or less frozen because of the Cold War.

frontation with the old and much-maligned model of socialist realism. Eber-hard Havekost, Franz Nitzsche, Neo Rauch, and Thomas Scheibitz are perhaps the best-known names, but it is also conspicuous that painters like Mat thias Weischer and Thomas Henninger, who grew up in the West, chose to study traditional painting forms at academies in the GDR. Richter was not one of these painters, but the infl uence of socialist realism on his work is undeniable. For example, when Fricke pointed out to him that there are rarely individuals depicted on his canvases, only ever groups, he responded with unusual anima-tion: “That’s the legacy of GDR painting! In postwar modernism the topos of human beings as groups was abolished, it no longer existed, at best with Gut-tuso or Immendorff. And in the GDR it was the norm for the working class, which marched into the promises of socialism under the leadership of Will Stoph.”54 For Richter, socialist realism was superior to Western art in at least one key respect: it treated people as social creatures, much as early modern painting did—“at the beginning of modernity, pictures were full of human beings!”55 Richter was dismayed at the failure of a social welfare committee established to promote the integration of East Germany and West Germany after reunifi cation,56 and his works read as attempts to encourage the same integration in artistic terms, an enterprise long since undertaken by the likes of HAP Grieshaber, Immendorff, and A. R. Penck.57 It is no surprise, for instance, that he models his paintings on such settings as Alexanderplatz in East Berlin (Zurberes, Why I Am Not a Conservative), an asylum center that was burned to the ground in East Germany (Billiards at Half Past Nine), or some run-down East German tenement blocks (A City Called Authen). Nor is it any wonder that he draws on a long tradition of group painters, ranging from Giotto and Cara-vaggio, through Repin and Surikov, to Dix and Picasso.

Let There Be NightI want to conclude with a brief look at one of the most remarkable and unset-tling of all Richter’s fi gurative paintings, which also happens to be his fi rst. Phienox (fi g. 5) shows two dozen or so ill-defi ned fi gures gathered around a wall or barricade beneath a dramatic blood-red sky. In the center, a fi gure


rendered in glaring yellows and pinks is being lowered over the wall by two other brightly hued characters, while dark faces with bright eyes and con-torted expressions look on aghast from the background. The top-left to bottom-right movement that typifi es Richter’s fi gurative work is especially pronounced here in the form of the arch made by the fi gures in the foreground. But this time the downward motion is not just compositional, it is also a metaphor for the descent of man, who devolves from being a clothed, upright fi gure with negroid features to become a hunched, club-wielding life form and fi nally a low-down creature with apelike visage set in front of a gorilla-like outline painted on the wall behind. The fi ery volcanic sky indeed suggests something primal about this scene, in which the blurry, indistinct characters merge together like crea-tures from the swamp, robbed of the comforts of civilization and forced to sur-vive in a terrifyingly hostile environment. Despite Richter’s aversion to tech-nology, there is no primitivizing impulse here, as there was with early German expressionism and even (though to a far lesser extent) the new fauves. This is, rather, atavism of an apocalyptic, or postapocalyptic, fl avor: alpha and omega, with temporality having fallen out completely. The strange title Phienox, for example, resembles the Latin fi at nox (let there be night) rather than fi at lux

Figure 5. Phienox (1999–2000). Oil on canvas, 252 × 368 cm. Courtesy of Contemporary

Fine Arts. Photograph by Jochen Littkemann

David Hughes 157

58. Kramer, “In Heterotopia,” 6.59. Cited in Fricke, “‘Priester lehne ich ab.’”

(let there be light). Crucifi x shapes on the far left of the picture evoke Calvary, while the glowing yellow form being pulled over the wall brings to mind the limp body of Christ being held by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea at the Deposition.

The mood of Richter’s paintings has certainly grown darker over time. His early abstract paintings, like Frankie and Mike (1997) and 20th Century Girl (1998), were light and playful, brimming over with color and a poplike cheerfulness. In subsequent abstract works such as Fool on a Hill and To Err—Human? (Irren—menschlich? 1999), dark outlines pick out much thinner streaks of color. Tripartite (Dreigeteilt, 1999) appears drained of color, Black-and-White Scam (Schwarz-Weissbeschiss, 1999–2000) is mostly black, and the fi gurative pictures have taken us to thoroughly unpleasant, dismal places that are increasingly without hope. In Phienox, the fi gures’ skull-like faces exude a sense of terror, but it is unclear what they are afraid of—a trait that derives from Egon Schiele’s work. But whereas Schiele and his contempo-raries painted with a sense of imminent cataclysm before the Great War, here the violence is low-level and ongoing. Be it the primitive cudgel, the possible burned trees and gas masks reminiscent of Verdun, or the irradiant glow of postnuclear catastrophe, there seems to be no beginning or end in sight to human destructiveness. Nor is there any escape from it,

for the horizon [remains] closed. The space does not open out. There are no perspectives, no vistas, not even accessible paths. It is neither a place for sweeping movements nor for a sovereign view that imparts a foothold and orientation. All indications of a third dimension only strengthen the feeling that there is no room to move; the more we pursue the illusion of abstract geometric space, the more clearly the setting turns out to be a heterotopia, a place of a different order.58

A heterotopia: a place in which multiple spatialities coexist, a place without depth or perspective—a place with no way out. Who should stand in the mid-dle of such a place but the artist himself? Like the backpacker in Tuanus who fi nds himself in a place he would rather not be, an ethereal image of Richter at the center of Phienox placidly observes the surrounding chaos. “Everyone in this society lives out his or her differentiations, it’s an undeviating system of individualizations,” Richter once explained. “I stand in the middle of it and observe, because this condition interests me. In the end, everything is echoed in my painting as fascinated paranoia.”59 Not just the artist but also


60. Mark Leonard and Louise Lippincott, “James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889: Technical Analysis, Restoration, and Reinterpretation,” Art Journal 54, no. 2 (1995): 21.

61. Jonsson, “Society Degree Zero,” 25.62. Ibid., 10.

the spectator is trapped in this total space: several fi gures look right at us, denying us any distance from their plight, and in other works, such as Jawohl und Gomorrha, the same device is used to make it seem as though the spec-tator had caught the characters in some seedy and illicit act.

The ethereal appearance of Richter in the middle of the heterotopia in Phienox also evokes Ensor’s painting The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1889. As Mark Leonard and Louise Lippincott have shown in an article about their recent restoration of The Entry, the central fi gure of Christ in the painting in fact appears to be a self-portrait of Ensor himself and would have glowed a brilliant chrome yellow when fi rst executed.60 According to Jonsson, Ensor’s Christ is a utopian pathbreaker who enables a new world of freedom to come into being: “He enters the drama not so much as a sovereign individual but as part of the multitude, acting as a mediatory representative of a social system as yet without any mechanisms of political representation and hence also aesthetically unrepresentable.”61 The revolutionary signifi cance of Ensor’s painting is undeniable, postdated as it was in 1889, the centennial of the French Revolution and the inaugural year of the Second International. When Ensor produced The Entry in 1888, the situation in his native Belgium resembled the one in France in 1871, following widespread civil unrest in the country in 1886 after anarchists in Liège marched to commemorate the anniversary of the Paris Commune and the military responded by killing several demonstrators. Ensor never publicly proclaimed his political views, but he associated with anarchists from the beginning of his career and was a founding member of the anarchist group Les XX. His anarchist beliefs are refl ected in The Entry:

In everything, from the sheer dimensions of the canvas to the juxtaposition of various crowds, to the stark contrasts of colors and the different ways in which the paint is applied—by brush, knife, fi ngertips, drippings, cloth, or tube opening—Ensor maximizes the contrasts and oppositions of the visual plane, as though exploring how much heterogeneity a limited piece of two-dimensional space can tolerate before it disintegrates. This lack of organiz-ing structure corresponds to the absence of any authority in the social drama itself.62

More or less the same could be said of Phienox, which, like so much of Rich-ter’s work, incorporates all manner of painting techniques, from thin washes

David Hughes 159

63. Ibid., 15.64. Borowski, “Sex, Angst Ohnmacht.”

to elaborately decorative impastos to loose, broad brushstrokes. As a hetero-topia, Phienox also stretches two-dimensional space to the breaking point, while it further alludes to The Entry via the peculiar monochromatic fi elds in the lower left corner of the canvas—seemingly unfi nished areas that “elicit the impression that the image represents a society in the process of rebuild-ing itself.”63

Richter’s heterotopias blur the boundary between the urban and the nat-ural. In Phienox, for example, primal nature is copresent with what looks like the Berlin Wall; Billiards at Half Past Nine shows an asylum center and the gestures of neo-Nazi ravers in the midst of a wild natural environment; and in Justice (2001), offi ce storage boxes appear haphazardly stacked in the middle of the woods. “Richter’s nature is a nonplace, his city too”64—and in this respect, his work marks a departure from the fascination with the big city exhibited by his predecessors, for instance, the Moritzplatz artists in Berlin in the 1980s (especially Fetting and Middendorf) and their teacher Karl Horst Hödicke—or, originally, Dix, Grosz, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Wherever Richter’s paintings take us, however, the atmosphere is always oppressive and menacing. Breaking with the long-standing Romantic topos of nature as refuge from the urban environment and place in which to experience unity with the world, these works are always affl icted by a frightening sense of dislocation. Richter’s sea paintings, for instance, show none of the Romantic desire for adventure or the will to pit heroic man against the primal forces of the ocean. Rather, in works like Tarifa and Flash, the fi gures appear hopelessly isolated, afraid and exposed to swirling black maelstroms. In other paintings, such as Junas and Tuanus, German forest painting is demythologized with similar ruthlessness: no inspiration or identity is to be found here, just clandestine acts of brutality.

Phienox can be read in terms of the Deposition, of the beginning and end of history, and of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But a more surprising inter-pretation presents itself when we discover that the painting was based on a press photograph of the bombing of the U.S. embassy in the Tanzanian capi-tal of Dar es Salaam on July 7, 1998. Twelve people were killed and eighty-fi ve wounded (almost all the injured were African civilians), and their bodies had to be pulled over a wall surrounding the embassy site. The attack may have brought Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to international attention for the fi rst time, but for Richter it bore relation to the events of October 9, 1989: “The events in Tanzania and Berlin were each about the erosion of seeming absolute structures. I believe that the structural decay that symbolically set


65. Wentrup, “Spinning the Wheel,” 17.66. Heynen, “Grünspan oder Goldstaub,” 23.67. Heynen was reminded of “synesthetic intense experiences in dreams, trances or rushes”

(“Grünspan oder Goldstaub,” 22); Ermacora described Richter’s fi gures as “uncanny dream fi g-ures” moving through “the unreality of the picture spaces” (“Öffentliche Bilder,” 110); and Liebs characterized Richter’s paintings in terms of a “middle zone . . . between dream and reality” (“Grüner Star”).

68. Raphael Rubinstein, “Allegories of Anarchy,” Art in America, December 2004, 120–23.

in with the fall of the Berlin Wall was a condition for the attacks on the U.S. embassy.”65 Both events were symptoms of the globalization of capitalism, a process that tendentially interconnects all places in the world, exposing us to the effects of actions taken in many places simultaneously.

So what is more “real” in Richter’s work: allegory and myth (apocalypse and the Deposition), or history (the fall of the Berlin Wall and the bombing in Dar es Salaam)? The answer, perhaps, is neither, for the Real here vanishes in a sea of citation, or, as Heynen put it, “The Real appears in the double of a dream sequence, and fantasy becomes graspable as media reality.”66 Numer-ous critics, indeed, have remarked on the dreamlike quality of Richter’s paint-ings,67 in which it is impossible to tell which reality, or level of reality, we are looking at. Are the fi gures in paintings like Phienox human beings, for exam-ple, or are they ghosts, zombies, and/or supernatural entities? Their fl uores-cent, psychedelic, almost astral glow certainly lends them a paranormal, other-worldly quality. On the other hand, they can also give the impression of being viewed through heat-sensing surveillance equipment or night-vision goggles, like criminals about to be intercepted by police in a nighttime raid. Either way, these fi gures are robbed of individual identity; their physiognomies remain virtually unrecognizable, and it is often unclear whether they are meant to be men, women, or androgynes. Their bodies tend to fuse together and become hardly recognizable as such, melding into an inchoate mass of color and form. As one critic remarked: “It’s a chromatic riot of high-key violet, blue, green, orange, yellow and red shapes. Colors eat into the contours of neighbouring shapes like sulfuric acid poured onto Styrofoam.”68 Through this manipula-tion of color chemistry, many of the fi gures look as though they have achieved but a momentary existence, fl ickering and shimmering like a fl ame about to be extinguished any second. Their existence is a precarious one as they move between different realities exposed to unforeseen perils. Emerging anony-mously from the shadows, these wretched fi gures form no part of the social order they threaten to reconstitute.

david hughes_daniel richter and the problem of political painting today

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billard um

ein bisschen

dar es salaam

contemporary

city called

grnspan oder

early german

richters abstract