Andy Warhol # 39; Soup Cans: Why is it art?
Gerhard Richter Canvas Collection Brush with Greatness.
GERHARD RICHTER sits in the small library of Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, trying to understand how to talk about his latest abstract paintings, which hang in the well-lit space on the other side of the thick wall streaked with bright blurred color blue, yellow, green, purple and red made by dragging a giant squeegee across the canvas, their layers pulses with an ebullience that hasn ta marked his work for decades perhaps why the artist, long reputed to be disgusted by interviews, decided to surrender, as he joked to it, although it's great to be asked because it shows interest, I feel very incompetent to respond, said -it German English thickly accented by explaining his reluctance chronic.
At 84, the man regarded by many as the greatest living painter and more expensive, too, at least for auction, where his record is 46 Abstraktes Bild 4 million for 1986, just behind 58 4000000 sculpture of Jeff Koons world Dog orange ball is still vigorously create work but before he created these paintings, he had barely put the brush on the canvas four years now but is a few days off official opening of the fair, the gallery is crowded with critics, curators and collectors hoping to land one of the new creations Richter admits he hates the hype surrounding his performances the worst is after dinner sometimes, I go t Even when I was young sometimes I did not go Yet he always exciting to see the work the gallery This is fantastic, ja.
Richter's third wife, the artist Sabine Moritz, 46, is sitting next to him, watching protectively It's painted so many times, swathed in light as Vermeer in 1994 Lesende Reader or nursing their first son in 1995 S series mit Kind S with the child, his presence seems strangely familiar Richter comes first appear to be modest and polite, with cropped gray hair, a crumpled gray suit and a formal air, professorial at times it speaking through a translator, but it can also be fun, interspersing s conversation with Emotive ja, then degenerating into ironic laughter aside warm.
He began the paintings abstract oil in this show in 2014, after a pause when he had so many exhibitions, including a retrospective in 2011 Tate Modern, Panorama, who traveled Neue Nationalgalerie and the Paris Pompidou Center Berlin he d barely able to paint any crush bureaucratic responsibilities can be suffocating, he is best known, I am, the more work I have to do, I'm like a manager now, he said instead, during this time he has created tons of other jobs, including 300 psychedelic-looking Behind glass summarized some of which are also seen in the gallery, by pouring paint on the glass, and more than 80 eye-popping prints digital tape stripes some as long as 32 feet, produced by putting slices of a photograph of a painting in 1990 each a fraction of a millimeter through countless permutations on a computer.
Since Richter sometimes refers to himself as an image-maker rather than a painter, does it matter how his vision reached He looks shocked One is done by hand, and the other not, he said, when you do something with the hand he Sá something other than just design you do it with your whole body.
DRAWING Richter CAUTION photographed with his new designs in Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, is ambivalent about fame, it's old, and this picture is a million or two, he imitates supposedly Mario Sorrenti picture collectors for WSJ Magazine .
Indeed, in the paint documentary Gerhard Richter 2011, he's seen amazing on one side of the canvas to the other as he pushes a squeegee fresh coats of paint and then declined to consider the effect before assuming his office and repeat the task Richter said his judgments have become more confident with age is another job now, like life, it says it can be more difficult when you are old addition to the anguish of creation, physical effort takes more of a toll as he says, it's a reason these paintings are not as large as in the film.
THE EVENT CAREER ART exemplified the saying Be careful what you want, well maybe Richter s For decades it's been hailed and sometimes distrusted for his dazzling ability to move back and forth between figuration and abstraction, using a variety of modes.
He first became widely known for paintings blurred grisaille oil based on black and white photographs, including, in particular, covers 15 October 18 1977 1988 a series fashioned after new images of arrests and death of terrorist Baader Germany -Meinhof Richter Group has also produced a few white clouds, still lifes and portraits that suggest ancient Romantics and masters, landscapes reminiscent of surveillance photographs and untargeted resembling based on clichés that prefigure curiously contemporary obsession with mobile photography then there are the abstractions that include any of those heavily impastoed squeegee works in monochromatic gray cloth, colored mirrors, framed glass panels and paintings of conceptual colors based on industrial paint samples and flirt with abstractions both with reality, as the 2005 Series Wald, whose brushstrokes suggest tree trunks, or 1986 Cage series, which Richter made while listening to the Compose vanguard Dr. John Cage, whose ideas about the controlled creation chance, have long inspired.
I think Richter as a gymnast, says Neal Benezra, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which has one of the largest collections of the artist's work in the world The history of modern painting was the one of the painters who try to identify a Picasso signature style is the great exception, and Richter had a fundamental role to put that idea for good, it keeps the audience on their toes.
With the ability to larger sizes Richter came sizes large fortune and glory, and the potential for idolatry, which has soared with the market for his paintings Picasso loved, and Gerhard did not, said the critic and Commissioner Robert Storr, who organized Richter's 2002 retrospective at the Museum of modern Art, which has boosted the visibility and helped start its transformation into a hot auction Gerhard product has tremendous artistic ambition of the artist, but he did not seek the kind of artist's personality as Picasso and others of this generation sought he lives modestly, he is a family man.
Gerhard artistic ambition, but he does not seek the kind of personality of the artist Picasso sought, he lives modestly.
Richter met Moritz in 1992, when she became his last student at the Art Academy of Düsseldorf, where he taught for 23 years; they married in 1995, after having to separate from his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken They now have three children, Moritz, 21, Ella, 19, and Theo, 9 Richter also has a daughter, Babette, 49, of his first marriage to textile designer Ema Eufinger Today, his life centers around his house and his workshop next door, boxy concrete building on the outskirts of Cologne, he is there almost every day for 8 hours and works up to 6 or 19 hours leaving only to eat his regular lunch of bread, yogurt and tomatoes, I know that even on holidays or Sundays I can call his studio and he'll be there, said Dieter Schwarz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and a close friend.
Richter is known for his paintings entirely on himself, without the help of his two studio assistants His wife is one of the few people that it is based on comments in the documentary, she visits new look paintings, and after a thoughtful evaluation, suggests that it has a far before he's tried to change it.
Richter is an editor without thank you, stopping, starting, reworking paintings again and again until it is satisfied Throughout his career he has also been known to destroy the finished work, even after that he was exposed, I think it has always been a struggle, Schwarz said he always had that kind of attitude skeptical of what he did for this reason, he adds, Richter is not impressed by the trends current art, he thinks you should be aware of the art and history of art, and you have to be really critical to you and to what is going to find a position for anything today is going attitude is very foreign to him.
Indeed, his tastes in the Richter art tend towards the history and painterly He and Moritz living with Courbet landscape, and is a fan of Velázquez On this trip to New York, he saw a show Edgar Degas monotypes at the Museum of modern Art I was very taken with him, he said, and had plans to see an exhibition of works by Robert Ryman at great admirer of Chelsea he Dia Ryman says Storr, I think partly because Ryman fact that the things he can not do Bob has a kind of blind faith in abstraction, and Gerhard has always questioned the abstraction he's been drawn to and at the same time doubted.
But despite his chronic self-questioning and doubt, his worst moments come, says Richter, when there is no work at all times when I am very unhappy and I'm not afraid to start over, he says I'm simply empty.
BORN IN DRESDEN in 1932, a year before Hitler came to power, Richter seems to have always been a fundamental need to work against the grain of artist After training in East Germany, he established a successful career as a muralist, working mainly in the socialist realist style Soviet approved, but in 1959, he saw his first Jackson Pollocks and Lucio Fontanas the art exhibition Documenta in Kassel, West Germany, and realized that it was released two years later, in 1961, he fled to Düsseldorf with his first wife, he enrolled at the Art Academy, an avant-garde hotbed soon dominated by Joseph Beuys, the sponsor shamanic conceptualism that Richter has always been very skeptical hero worshiper claqueurs Beuys gathered around him, he never saw his family east again, but Richter was able to find common ground with other German artist Blinky's like the Pale rmo and Sigmar Polke He quickly made his name by painting blurred versions of family photos as Onkel Rudi U NCLE Rudi 1965, showing preferred his mother's brother, who died of a few days into the war, proudly posing in his uniform Wehrmacht dig and purulent history that many have tried to forget.
BIG PICTURE From top left Tisch Table, 1962; 4 Glasscheiben 4 Plate, 1967; Domplatz, Mailand, 1968; 1024 1024 Farben colors, pictured left in 1973 Tisch, 1962 Oil on canvas, 90 x 113 cm, 2016 1127 Gerhard Richter, 2016; 160 Perspectives 3, 4 Glasscheiben 1967 glass and iron, 4 glass plates in each steel frames 190 x 100 cm, Gerhard Richter 2016 1127, 2016; Domplatz, Mailand, 1968 Oil on canvas, 275 x 290 cm, 2016 1127 Gerhard Richter, 2016; 1024 Farben, 1973 enamel on canvas, 299 x 299 cm, 2016 1127 2016 Gerhard Richter.
In 1971, Richter was teaching at the Kunstakademie itself the photographer Thomas Struth, who entered his class in 1974, remembers him as an intense taskmaster Judgments about what was good and bad were often very difficult, Struth says it is obviously important to create a foundation for your own 20 or 19. It was not so easy and it was at the time an ironic man you had to guess what was said.
Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, met with Richter as a teenager in 1986 with the opening of a retrospective in Switzerland Until then, the artist has added many different series in his quiver j ' was completely fascinated by all these parallel realities, Obrist says the 80 abstract paintings, monochrome gray work, photo-painting, glass art, it was almost like quantum physics In their first conversation, Richter told him the painting was a game, it's like bowling, Obrist remember him saying every time you create new situations they have been friends for fast, though Obrist a recent curated shows that Richter kept his studio retrospective series Pictures 2014 the Beyeler Foundation in Basel.
Richter's relationship with Marian Goodman representing the worldwide, but Japan was also endured They first worked together during the market boom of the 80s, when New York was a frenzied interest in neo painters German -expressionnistes as Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorff I everyone was looking performed in the wrong direction, she said, and the great artist of our time was Gerhard.
After an awkward encounter in Richter's studio, then in Düsseldorf, during which both were so shy they hardly spoke, they began to work together Gradually his other galleries have fallen along the way Today ' hui, Richter continues to be treated exclusively by the 88-year -old dealer itself.
He is not an artist who just takes a brush and produced a work, Goodman said is this intellectual exercise Although Goodman suspect to computer generated pieces of tape could help Richter radically rethink its use of color, the period he was unable to paint every day was very difficult for him, she said, i mean, it's the work of his life this daily practice of painting and have time to let things come to the surface and experiment and change.
TRUE COLORS Abstraktes Bild From left, 1986; Betty, 1988; Strip, 2013; Abstraktes Bild 938-4, 2014 Photo Left Abstraktes Bild, 1986 Oil on canvas, 300 x 250 cm, 2016 1127 Gerhard Richter, 2016; Betty, 1988 Oil on canvas, 102 x 72 cm, Gerhard Richter 2016 1127, 2016; Strip 2013 digital print on mounted between aluminum and Perspex, 120 x 140 cm, Gerhard Richter 2016 1127, 2016; 938-4 Abstraktes Bild, 2014, wood oil; 8 x 16in 15-11 14-1 36 x 40 cm Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, photo by Cathy Carver.
In summer 2014, after the retrospective Beyeler opened, he finally could push an idea that had possessed for years making tables from four fuzzy black and white photos hand-made by a prisoner in the camp concentration of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which documented the advance to a gassing and its consequences buried the ultimate moment in German history As a boy, Richter was forced to join a junior branch of the Hitler youth They are fascinating, and various photographs taken by liberators and documentary photographers, Richter said illegal, taken in very bad conditions, shaky But his attempts to make them as photo-paintings, as he made of the material Baader, failed.
I tried to make them realistic, Richter said, but he quickly realized that they were not to be improved I t do the best I could do could make them worse.
The paintings he has finally created, gloomy abstractions in black and white, streaked with green and red, layered on photo paintings, tours in Germany and will be presented at the Jewish Museum Tolerance Moscow this autumn Center After painting them, says Richter, he began to feel free Soon after, he found his way into the news more colorful abstractions on view in new York that by some accounts, it probably still known and frustration while making them.
Gerhard Richter in New York Photo Mario Sorrenti for WSJ Magazine.
Another kind of frustration is obvious when he discusses the current state of the art world, a topic that rankles him clearly we don t have so many painters now, Richter said painters are so entertaining now, with performances, with that and sometimes it makes me angry, because museums seek only to catch people, he added, referring to their growing social transformation in collection centers that he would rather, be more serious, he said it is not so much interest in painting.
The attention of his own work receives, Richter believes, centers around a money thing, he said.
He's old, he imitates someone said, and this picture is a million or two, it is also good heart sick people tell him all he does is wonderful people are so impressed by the success that I 'they have lost their ability to make a judgment and there's so many people who just want to buy a photo they don t see not even care they just want to check it s so many forgers and so many people who do kind of art they're just sign their name cards.
People are so impressed with the success I have that they lose their ability to make a judgment.
A few days later, Richter arrived obediently, with Moritz at his side, the glittering dinner in his honor at the Rainbow Room in New York after private opening of issuance Among those who came to honor the Conservatives MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art collectors like Glenn Fuhrman and Charles and Helen Schwab and old acquaintances like the artist Bruce Nauman files from the crowd in the dining room to eat, the youngest son of Richter, Theo, who accompanies his s Parents on one of these trips for the first time, suddenly bolted Leavens mood around the tables and zipping down the stairs.
But there is still a long way from Cologne serene studio Richter Back to the gallery, separated by only a wall or two of his paintings as they hang in the light of the glorious day in space, Richter smiled at the thought of get back to work I'm happy that I'm able to paint, he says to do something, ja Normally, like all of us.
Brush With Greatness Canvas Collection Gerhard Richter, canvas, collection, Gerhard.