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Lot Essay
'Towns and mountains from a bird's-eye view (abandonment of the concept of interesting content and illusionistic painting; a spot of paint should be a spot of paint, and the motif needn't have a message or allow for interpretation)'
(Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London, 2009, p. 53).
In the same collection virtually since its creation forty years ago, this is the first time that Stadtbild has been on public view. From distance, the extraordinary photo-real depiction of Stadtbild gives one the feeling of a reconnaissance photograph of a cityscape. However as one steps closer the photographic quality begins to blur and eventually deconstruct completely into a mass of abstract, gestural brushstrokes of rich charcoal, pale grey and soft creamy white clearly overlaid over a bare primed canvas which itself acts as a pictorial plane in the top right and bottom left hand corners. Meticulously arranged yet expressively applied with a bold application of thick impasto which describes a painter of incredible vision and technique, this work was part of a group of works executed by Gerhard Richter between 1968 and 1970 which defined an entirely new direction for painting. Ever since Ad Reinhardt's Black paintings of the 1950s, critics had been predicting the demise of painting, but here in this bold three years spell of intense creativity, Richter found a new, Post- Modern way which has re-enlivened painting over the last thirty years and inspired generation after generation. Taking a conceptual approach, Richter's deconstruction of style as a stylistic principle has seen him investigate a whole range of approaches to the canvas, from figurative to abstract, constructive to conceptual, Minimalist to photo-real and in turn define totally new aesthetics for this simple liquid colour.
Richter's own notes explain the process of Stadtbild and its importance: 'Towns and mountains from a bird's-eye view (abandonment of the concept of interesting content and illusionistic painting; a spot of paint should be a spot of paint, and the motif needn't have a message or allow for interpretation)' (Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London, 2009, p. 53). It is this incredible ability to hover between abstraction and figuration that marked out the small series of Stadtbilder which Richter painted between 1968 and 1970, works in which the artist moved away from the constraints of his earlier Photo Paintings and towards the multiplicity that has marked him out as one of the most important pioneers of post-modern art while retaining the subjective perspective that has allowed him to probe the nature of painting so extensively. This painting is therefore a direct conceptual forerunner of the abstract paintings that he would come to develop from the late 1970s onwards.
The origin of these works came in the form of a commission from the German industrial giant Siemens. Originally, Richter sought to create a vast, expressionistic image of a townscape based on a photograph. The decision to paint in a more gestural manner was in part an economy that would allow him to work faster on such a scale. Richter was disappointed by the result, and cut it into nine smaller segments. It was looking at these that Richter realised the incredible power of this new genre, and accordingly he developed the Stadtbilder over the following two years. On the more intimate scale that is shared by Stadtbild, the expressionistic nature of the brushstrokes is intensified and thrown to the fore where it had dissipated in the larger commissioned work. As Richter has explained, it was the fact that he had been asked to leave his comfort zone that led to this revelation: 'sometimes I've enjoyed doing commissioned work, in order to discover something that I wouldn't have found of my own accord. And so, when Siemens commissioned my first townscape, that led to all the townscapes that followed. It's also very nice when pictures have a known place to go to' (Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London, 2009, p. 301).
With Richter's paintings, nothing is never quite as it seems, and this is especially the case with Stadtbild and its sister works. The pictures in this series were largely based on photographs culled from architectural magazines; they invoke the world of town planning and the idealism that often goes with it, be it in the designs of Haussmann or of Speer. In the remodelling of East Germany in the wake of the Second World War, the idea of the promised urban utopia gradually deflated, and the population became increasingly aware of the bankruptcy of the vision so tantalizingly presented to them. Richter has taken some of that disillusionment and condensed it into the quasi-abstract forms of Stadtbild; like the contrast between the urban plans and their reality, this picture reveals its foundations in photography yet veers from them. At the same time, the Stadtbilder also recall the aerial photography that recorded the bombardment of so many cities during the Second World War. Richter himself had seen the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden. He admitted that this was at the forefront of his mind when he painted these pictures only two and a half decades after the end of the hostilities, when the traces were still evident in the scarred cityscapes of Germany: 'When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war' (Richter, quoted in ibid., p. 262).
(Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H.-U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London, 2009, p. 53).
In the same collection virtually since its creation forty years ago, this is the first time that Stadtbild has been on public view. From distance, the extraordinary photo-real depiction of Stadtbild gives one the feeling of a reconnaissance photograph of a cityscape. However as one steps closer the photographic quality begins to blur and eventually deconstruct completely into a mass of abstract, gestural brushstrokes of rich charcoal, pale grey and soft creamy white clearly overlaid over a bare primed canvas which itself acts as a pictorial plane in the top right and bottom left hand corners. Meticulously arranged yet expressively applied with a bold application of thick impasto which describes a painter of incredible vision and technique, this work was part of a group of works executed by Gerhard Richter between 1968 and 1970 which defined an entirely new direction for painting. Ever since Ad Reinhardt's Black paintings of the 1950s, critics had been predicting the demise of painting, but here in this bold three years spell of intense creativity, Richter found a new, Post- Modern way which has re-enlivened painting over the last thirty years and inspired generation after generation. Taking a conceptual approach, Richter's deconstruction of style as a stylistic principle has seen him investigate a whole range of approaches to the canvas, from figurative to abstract, constructive to conceptual, Minimalist to photo-real and in turn define totally new aesthetics for this simple liquid colour.
Richter's own notes explain the process of Stadtbild and its importance: 'Towns and mountains from a bird's-eye view (abandonment of the concept of interesting content and illusionistic painting; a spot of paint should be a spot of paint, and the motif needn't have a message or allow for interpretation)' (Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London, 2009, p. 53). It is this incredible ability to hover between abstraction and figuration that marked out the small series of Stadtbilder which Richter painted between 1968 and 1970, works in which the artist moved away from the constraints of his earlier Photo Paintings and towards the multiplicity that has marked him out as one of the most important pioneers of post-modern art while retaining the subjective perspective that has allowed him to probe the nature of painting so extensively. This painting is therefore a direct conceptual forerunner of the abstract paintings that he would come to develop from the late 1970s onwards.
The origin of these works came in the form of a commission from the German industrial giant Siemens. Originally, Richter sought to create a vast, expressionistic image of a townscape based on a photograph. The decision to paint in a more gestural manner was in part an economy that would allow him to work faster on such a scale. Richter was disappointed by the result, and cut it into nine smaller segments. It was looking at these that Richter realised the incredible power of this new genre, and accordingly he developed the Stadtbilder over the following two years. On the more intimate scale that is shared by Stadtbild, the expressionistic nature of the brushstrokes is intensified and thrown to the fore where it had dissipated in the larger commissioned work. As Richter has explained, it was the fact that he had been asked to leave his comfort zone that led to this revelation: 'sometimes I've enjoyed doing commissioned work, in order to discover something that I wouldn't have found of my own accord. And so, when Siemens commissioned my first townscape, that led to all the townscapes that followed. It's also very nice when pictures have a known place to go to' (Richter, quoted in D. Elger & H.U. Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London, 2009, p. 301).
With Richter's paintings, nothing is never quite as it seems, and this is especially the case with Stadtbild and its sister works. The pictures in this series were largely based on photographs culled from architectural magazines; they invoke the world of town planning and the idealism that often goes with it, be it in the designs of Haussmann or of Speer. In the remodelling of East Germany in the wake of the Second World War, the idea of the promised urban utopia gradually deflated, and the population became increasingly aware of the bankruptcy of the vision so tantalizingly presented to them. Richter has taken some of that disillusionment and condensed it into the quasi-abstract forms of Stadtbild; like the contrast between the urban plans and their reality, this picture reveals its foundations in photography yet veers from them. At the same time, the Stadtbilder also recall the aerial photography that recorded the bombardment of so many cities during the Second World War. Richter himself had seen the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden. He admitted that this was at the forefront of his mind when he painted these pictures only two and a half decades after the end of the hostilities, when the traces were still evident in the scarred cityscapes of Germany: 'When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war' (Richter, quoted in ibid., p. 262).