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拍品專文
Clouds have something of the Romantic and, indeed, something of the romantic about them. Looking at the paintings of Ruysdael, Constable, Turner and Friedrich, we see a long-held fascination with the sky and its effects. Richter's paintings of clouds, then, play a strange part in this art historical pageant. While some of them are openly photographic, like his seascapes, in Wolken, painted in 1968, Richter deliberately punctures such notions by using a style of painting that deliberately mimics the print media, limiting his palette to flat areas of black, white and grey. Despite the scale of the canvas, the romance and mystique of these clouds is gone, replaced by the more prosaic appearance of newspaper print or photography. This is not nature, but instead looks deliberately man-made.
Looking at the brushstrokes on the canvas, there is an expressly deceptive echo of Abstract Expressionism-- the gestures of the artist appear clear in their jerkiness, despite the fact that each area remains bold and discrete. And yet these Action Painting-like abstractions coalesce, the further we stand from the picture surface, into the forms of clouds floating over a landscape... Richter used this flattened manner of reproduction in several of his cityscapes in part because it heightened the sense of the geometrical abstraction of the represented buildings, while also removing much of the sense of texture or perspective. Wolken is very rare in its use of this deliberately newspaper photo-like idiom in a painting of clouds.
The strange tension between seeming abstraction and the print media heightens the interrogation of the nature of art and the artist that has long been a feature and motivation in Richter's art. In a sense, by painting from a found image, Richter was deliberately undermining all the grandiose assumptions about originality and inspiration that had been the stock in trade of artists for so many generations, reducing himself to the status of a machine, or a camera:
'if I disregard the assumption that a photograph is a piece of paper exposed to light, then I am practising photography by other means: I'm not producing paintings that remind you of a photograph but producing photographs' (Richter in interview with Rolf Schön, 1972, in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt, London 1995, p. 73).
But crucially, Richter's relationship with his own vocation is strangely ambivalent. He is not only demeaning the status of the artist but is also, by portraying the clouds in a means that echoes both Ab Ex and contemporary print, is reconciling the Romantic with the modern age, and in an act of democratic rectification is raising the most humble of image sources to the status of high art.
Looking at the brushstrokes on the canvas, there is an expressly deceptive echo of Abstract Expressionism-- the gestures of the artist appear clear in their jerkiness, despite the fact that each area remains bold and discrete. And yet these Action Painting-like abstractions coalesce, the further we stand from the picture surface, into the forms of clouds floating over a landscape... Richter used this flattened manner of reproduction in several of his cityscapes in part because it heightened the sense of the geometrical abstraction of the represented buildings, while also removing much of the sense of texture or perspective. Wolken is very rare in its use of this deliberately newspaper photo-like idiom in a painting of clouds.
The strange tension between seeming abstraction and the print media heightens the interrogation of the nature of art and the artist that has long been a feature and motivation in Richter's art. In a sense, by painting from a found image, Richter was deliberately undermining all the grandiose assumptions about originality and inspiration that had been the stock in trade of artists for so many generations, reducing himself to the status of a machine, or a camera:
'if I disregard the assumption that a photograph is a piece of paper exposed to light, then I am practising photography by other means: I'm not producing paintings that remind you of a photograph but producing photographs' (Richter in interview with Rolf Schön, 1972, in Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, ed. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, trans. David Britt, London 1995, p. 73).
But crucially, Richter's relationship with his own vocation is strangely ambivalent. He is not only demeaning the status of the artist but is also, by portraying the clouds in a means that echoes both Ab Ex and contemporary print, is reconciling the Romantic with the modern age, and in an act of democratic rectification is raising the most humble of image sources to the status of high art.