GERHARD RICHTER, quotes by the German artist on painting art, photography and life in Germany + biography facts
Gerhard Richter (1932 -), his artist quotes on painting art and artistic life – including biography stories, Richter is a German visual artist (painting, photography, graphic art) and one of the pioneers of the New European art movement that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Richter has produced abstract as well as photo-realistic paintings, many photographs and glass pieces. He wants to undermine the general concept of the artist’s obligation to develop and maintain one single cohesive style.
* At the bottom art links for more biography facts and art images of Gergard Richter. – the editor
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Gerhard Richter, painting: Abstraktes Bild 1997 |
Gerhard Richter, his quotes on artist life in Germany and his visual arts; painting and photography + biography facts
– To defend painting: One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is pure idiocy.
* source of the quote: ‘Gerhard Richter, The daily practice of painting, Writings and Interviews’, 1962-1993 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ed., Cambridge Mass: Mit press, London 1995 p. 78
– I was enormously impressed by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana.. ..the sheer brazenness of it! That really fascinated me and impressed me. I might almost say that those paintings were the real reason I left the GDR. I realized that something was wrong with my whole way of thinking.. ..I lived my life with a group of people who laid claim to a moral aspiration, who wanted to bridge a gap.. ..And so the way we thought, and what we wanted for our own art, was all about compromise. (circa 1959) .
* source of quote on Richter’s early artistic life in communistic GDR: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 37
– Dada is a farce, a legend, a state of myth. A badly behaved myth whose subterranean survival and capricious manifestation upset everyone.. ..The aesthetic of absolute negativity has been changed into methodical doubt, thanks to which it will finally be able to incarnate new signs.. ..After the NO and the ZERO, there is a third position for the myth; the anti-art gesture of Marcel Duchamp has been charged with positive energy. The Dada spirit identifies itself with a method of appropriation of exterior reality of the modern world.. ..The ready-made is no longer the height of negativity or of polemic, but the basis element of a new expressive repertoire. Such is the New Realism: a direct means for getting one’s feet back on the ground but at 40 degree above Dada zero.
* source of his artist quote on Dada, and similarity with New Realsim, from: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 41, note 30
– I painted (circa 1960-1962, fh) through the whole history of art toward abstraction. I painted like crazy (and) I had some success with all that, or gained some respect. But than I felt it wasn’t it, and so I burned the crap in some sort of action in the courtyard. And then I began. It was wonderful to make something and then destroy it. It was doing something and I felt very free.
* source of the quote on his period of abstract painting: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 42, note 34
– It was no accident that I found my way to Götz at the time (1960-62, fh). This ‘Informal’ element runs through every picture I’ve painted, whether it’s a landscape, or a family painted from a photograph, or the Colour Charts or a Grey picture. And so now it is a pursuit of the same objectives by other means.. ..As I now see it, all my paintings are ‘Informal’.. ..except for the landscapes , perhaps.. ..The ‘Informal’ is the opposite of the constructional quality of classicism – the age of kings, of clearly formed hierarchies.
* quote on his period of Informal art: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 42, note 45
– My first photo Picture? I was doing large pictures in gloss enamel.. ..One day a photograph of Brigit Bardot fell into my hands, and I painted it into one of these pictures in shades of grey. I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic.. ..thing that everyone could do.
* quote on his start with photography: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 43, note 36
– He (his mate, the German painter Sigmar Polke,fh) was very different, he was not cool.. ..He had irony. He was very funny. The things we did together (around 1963 – 1970, fh) were a kind of craziness (see, note 40).. ..We thought everything was so stupid and we refused to participate. That was the basis of our understanding.. ..he was able to paint those little dots in his raster paintings by hand with such a patience while he was living with his two children and his wife in a small subsidized apartment.
* source: his quote on differences and similarities with his German art-mate, the artist Sigmar Polke: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, pp. 45-46, note 43
– Contact with like-minded painters (the German famous artists, Lueg and Polke, fh) a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through.. .. One depends on one’s surroundings. One depends on one’s surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists – and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke – matters a lot to me.
* artist quote on his artistic surrounding in Germany with art-mates Sigmar Polke and Lueg: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 47
– Shocking, absolutely shocking – they (the German Fluxus artists, fh) pissed in the tub, snag the German national anthem, covered the audience with paper, poured laundry detergent into the piano, attached microphones to fountain pens.. (note 47).. ..it was all very cynical and destructive; it was a signal for us and we (the German artists Lueg, Polke and Gerhard Richter himself, fh) became cynical and cocky (see, note 48) .
* artist quote on the former German Fluxus artists in Germany, from: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 47
– I did not come here (Richter moved from communist GDR to West-Germany, fh) to get away from ‘materialism’; here (West –Germany, fh) its dominance is far more total and more mindless. I came to get away from the criminal ‘idealism’ of the Socialists (Gerhard Richter’s quote, circa 1962).
* source of his quote on leaving the GDR, moving to West Germany: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, pp. 49-50, note 57
– The photograph reproduces objects in a different way from the painted picture, because the camera does not apprehend objects: it sees them. In ‘free-hand drawing’ the object is apprehended in all it parts.. ..By tracing the outlines with the aid of a projector you can bypass and elaborate this process of apprehension. You no longer apprehend but see and make (without design) what you have not apprehended. And when you don’t know what you are making, you don’t know, either, what to alter or distort.
* source of his quote on the characteristics of working with photography: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 51, note 60
– I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent).
* source: ‘Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting’, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 51, note 63
– I would rather paint the victims than the killers.. ..When Warhol (the famous American Pop Art artist, fh) painted the killers I painted the victims. The subjects were of poor people, banal poor dogs.
* source of Richter’s comment on his painting ‘Eight student nurses’ compared with Warhol’s ‘Thirteen most wanted man’ in 1964): Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 56, note 79
– I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.
* his quote with the source: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 60, note 92
– Do you know what was great? Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture. And then the freedom to paint whatever you felt like. Stags, aircraft, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting – color, composition, space – and all of the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art.
* from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, pp. 60-61, note 94
– It makes no statement whatever.. ..It has the capacity that no other color has, to make ‘’nothing’ visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).. ..but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.. ..The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color (Richter’s comment on working in grisaille).
* his quote on gray color, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 62, note 100
– Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass (like his work ‘4 Panes of Glass’, 1967), etc.. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.
* quote on his art works Doors, Panes etc…from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 86, note 12
– I don’t mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed. Our eyes have evolved for survival purposes. The fact that they can also see the stars is pure accident.
* Gerhard Richter is questioning the ‘picture of reality’ in this quote, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 87, note 13
– All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and the tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings. If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts.
his quote on tonal sequence and gray, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 93, note 24
– * It was the ultimate possible statement of powerlessness and desperation (Richter is referring to John Cage’s famous ‘Lecture on Nothing’, fh). Nothing, absolutely nothing left, no figures, no color, nothing. Then you realize after you’ve painted three of them that one’s better than the others and you ask yourself why is that. When I see eight pictures together I no longer feel that they’re sad, or if so, they’re sad in a pleasant way.
* source of the quote, referring to Jonh Cage’s famous lecture, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 95, note 28
– His constructive pictures have remained in my memory because they particularly appeal to me, because I can’t produce such a thing. I always found it very good how he made it and that he made it – this astonished me. There was an aesthetic quality which I loved and which I couldn’t produce, but I was happy that such a thing existed in the world. In comparison, my own things seemed to me somewhat destructive, without this beautiful clarity. (on Blinky Palermo, fh)
* his artist quote on the famous artist Blinky Palermo, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 96, note 30
– We could really just speak about painting. The main thing was about the surface of color or the proportion of color. It was impossible for me to talk to Polke about the opacity of color. With Palermo, yes. We supported each other, we comforted each other a little bit. We thought this really could not be true that everything was supposed to be over (the painting as an expression of art, around 1970s). Art had to be relevant, and our art was not relevant.
, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, pp. 96-97
– I only identified with (Rothko’s) seriousness, which was absolutely to be admired. At that time, in the 1970s Barnett Newman, with his non-hierarchical structures, his non-relational Colour Field painting, seemed (in the 1970s) more interesting because his work was less pretty.
* quote on the American artists Rothko and Newmann, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, pp. 96, note 31
– Simply because I liked it so much I saw it in Venice and thought: I’d like to have that for myself. To start with I I only meant to make a copy, so that I could have a beautiful painting at home and with it a piece of that period, all that potential beauty and sublimity.. ..Then my copy went wrong, and the pictures that finally emerged went to show that it just can’t be done any more, not even by way of a copy. All I could do was to break the whole thing down and show that it’s no longer possible (Richter’s quote refers to his ‘Annunciation after Titian’, he made in 1973, fh).
* source: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 104, note 52
– * A painting by Caspar David Friedrich is not a thing of the past. What is past is only the set of circumstances that allowed it to be painted.. ..it is therefore quite possible to paint like Caspar David Friedrich today.
* source of his artist quote, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 106, note 58
– I believe that art has a kind of Rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false. And that’s why classical paintings, which are right in their own terms, are so necessary for me. In addition to that there’s nature, which also has this rightness.
* source of his quote, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 106, note 59
– I even went all the way to Greenland, because C.D. Friedrich painted that beautiful picture of The Wreck of the ‘Hope’. I took hundreds of photos up there and barely one picture ( Richter’s quote refers to his artwork ‘Iceberg in Fog’, 1982) came out of it.
* source of his remark: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 107, note 60
– Of course, my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all ‘untruthful’. ..By ‘untruthful’ I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature – Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves.
* source of Richter’s famous quote on ‘untruthful’:, from Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 108, note 61‘
– What I lack is the spiritual basis which under girded Romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of God’s omnipresence in Nature. For us, everything is empty. Yet, these paintings are still there. They still speak to us. We continue to love them, to use them, to have need of them.
* his quote on God’s omnipresence in Nature, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 109, note 62
– Their permanent presence (the old traditional paintings out of the past, fh) compels us to produce something different, which is neither better nor worse, but which has to be different because we painted the Isenheim Alter (Grünewald, 14th century, fh) yesterday.. ..the better we know tradition – i.e., ourselves and the more responsibly we deal with it, the better things we will make similar, and the better things we will make different.
* his quote on tradition in painting art, from: Gerhard Richter, Doubt and belief in painting, Robert Storr, MOMA, New York, 2003, p. 107, note 60
Gerhard Richter, artist links for more biography facts and images of his visual art, by the famous German artist
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