Gerhard Richter ”Kleine Teyde-Landschaft”. 1971

Oil on canvas. 50 × 60 cm (19 ⅝ × 23 ⅝ in.). Signed and dated on the reverse in black chalk: Richter 1971. Also inscribed there in red chalk with the work number: 287. Inscribed on the overlap (faded): reserviert Herzogenrath. Catalogue raisonné: Elger 287. [2001] Framed We would like to thank the Gerhard Richter archive, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, for kindly providing additional information. Oil on canvas. 50 × 60 cm (19 ⅝ × 23 ⅝ in.). Signed and dated on the reverse in black chalk: Richter 1971. Also inscribed there in red chalk with the work number: 287. Inscribed on the overlap (faded): reserviert Herzogenrath. Catalogue raisonné: Elger 287. [2001] Framed, We would like to thank the Gerhard Richter archive, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, for kindly providing additional information. Wulf Herzogenrath Collection, Berlin (received directly from the artist), Wulf Herzogenrath Collection, Berlin (received directly from the artist), Gerhard Richter. Landschaft. Vienna, Kunstforum; Zurich, Kunsthaus, 2020/21, ill. p. 84, Exh. cat.: Gerhard Richter: 36. Biennale (German Pavilion). Venice, 1972, ill. p. 68 (here as no. 261/1 and with a different date and title: Regenbogen, 1970) / Ulrich Loock and Denys Zacharopoulos (eds.): Gerhard Richter. Munich, 1985, ill. p. 42 / Gerhard Richter. Bilder/Paintings 1962–1985. Düsseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1986, p. 378, ill. p. 128 / Gerhard Richter. Catalogue Raisonné 1962–1993. Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1993, vol. III, p. 287 / Armin Zweite: Gerhard Richter. Leben und Werk. Das Denken ist beim Malen das Malen. Munich, 2019, pp. 210, 350, Intimacy and Contradiction – Gerhard Richter paints the romantic landscape “I felt like painting something beautiful.” This was Gerhard Richter’s answer in 1970 when asked why he had turned to landscape painting. Two years earlier, Richter had painted his first small group of works based on photographs he had taken during a holiday on the island of Corsica. These seascapes, with narrow strips of coastline set against mountainous backgrounds, were soon followed by large-scale landscapes depicting the Rhineland. These featured a low horizon and a dominant expanse of sky, a compositional arrangement reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting that Richter would retain for most of his subsequent landscapes. After a series of artificial seascapes combining montages of cloudy skies and turbulent seas, Richter returned to holiday photographs. In 1970 and 1971, he worked with images of landscapes taken during a stay in the Canary Islands. The result was a dozen paintings, most of whose titles refer to the islands, with the exception of “Evening Landscape with Figure (260)“, which also evidently derives from this group of photographs. Four individual prints and two portfolios of prints were also produced. As he had done with his earlier landscapes, Richter painted the entire group in colour rather than limiting this approach to individual works. The greyscale paintings based on photographs had become too familiar to him. They had led to an appealing aesthetic with which he had come to be identified and which he now wanted to shed. Colour offered a way forward. Richter followed the photographic source material in his palette, drawing on its characteristic slight reddish cast. This distanced the paintings both from an intuitive, colour-driven approach and from naturalistic representation. Richter mounted a number of the photographs he used, including the source image for “Kleine Teyde-Landschaft” (Small Teyde Landscape), on panels that he incorporated into his collection of images, known as the Atlas. The photographs mostly show the mountainous formation of Pico del Teide on Tenerife, but from a distance and with limited visibility, often with a heavily shadowed foreground, at dusk or against the light. The majestic Teide is barely discernible in the distance, while the foreground consists of barren, undeveloped land without any distinctive feature to attract the eye. Without their titles, the landscapes could not be assigned to any particular region. It may have been precisely this interchangeability that led Richter to select them for a prominent group of works. What mattered was probably less the location itself than the memory of the atmosphere associated with these motifs. While the structure of the landscape remains discernible in the first paintings of the group, Richter progressively renders it more indistinct in the works that follow, further obscuring the contours through the blurring and overpainting that he applied at the end of the painting process. What remains is a dark brown foreground beneath a cloudy sky. „Kleine Teye-Landschaft“ is the final painting in the group. Unlike the other views, it almost entirely dispenses with the distant vista and introduces the suggestion of a pale rainbow in the grey sky. Here, the foreground is divided into a brown hill on the left and a light-coloured area on the right, crossed by a road. These features are more clearly discernible in the photograph, which was cropped slightly on the right to create a more compact composition. In the painting, by contrast, the sky above the brown earth mound is reduced to just a few nuances, a mixture of reddish-brown tones through which the slightly lighter arc passes. Unusually, an oil sketch also exists for this work, executed in the impasto technique that Richter experimented with occasionally during these years. The arrangement of the landscape remains somewhat more legible in this version, while the rainbow is rendered in shades of grey with a single sweep of the brush. When Richter first presented his landscapes at an exhibition in 1971 at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and again the following year in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, they initially met with incomprehension and rejection. Had Richter now decided simply to paint conventional, even somewhat overly harmonious views, critics wondered. They overlooked the fact that the landscapes followed a period of experimentation during which Richter had pursued a wide range of approaches, from colour charts and panes of glass to his first grey paintings and cityscapes, in an effort to shed the “allure of the subject” and investigate the illusionistic effects of painting at a fundamental level. Landscape painting, which Richter took up after his figurative paintings and other subjects of the 1960s, was simply another stage in this process. The traditional framework of artistic genres offered the academically trained painter a historical point of reference and a degree of distance from painting governed solely by subjective impulses. To paint landscapes was to return to art history, but it was also a subtle way of expressing doubts about the representation of reality through different means. Richter ultimately chose a genre that had only secured its place in the history of painting relatively late, having previously served merely as a backdrop. By the end of the eighteenth century, according to the art historian Werner Busch, landscape had become the defining genre of modernity, “as a mirror of all human feelings, needs and longings, and ultimately as a medium that, more than figurative painting, serves to make art conscious of itself”. For Richter, these new landscapes also differed from his first attempts at the genre in 1964, which he later described as “anonymous, like illustrations in a travel brochure, not individually experienced: Sphinx, pyramids, etc.” The Canary Islands Landscapes, by contrast, possessed this individual quality. Their photographic sources, taken by Richter himself, supported this impression, as did his repeated admission that he painted landscapes because they were “simply beautiful. They are probably the most wonderful thing there is”. Yet Richter’s statements of this kind should be treated with caution, for his landscape painting is anything but as straightforward as he suggested. “Kleine Teyde-Landschaft” is, rather, an example of the contradictions inherent in Richter’s approach to what appears to be directly perceived and felt. Unlike his early paintings, deliberately conceived to be unartistic and based on arbitrary images taken from magazines or newspapers, the photographs from the Canary Islands reveal his engagement with the spatial organisation and formal balance of traditional landscape painting, whether consciously or unconsciously. The ostensibly authentic quality of Richter’s photographs clearly points to historical precedents. One is the already mentioned rainbow, barely visible in the painting, which quite literally draws an arc back to Romanticism. It is tempting to think of Caspar David Friedrich’s “Mountain Landscape with Rainbow” of 1809, in which this atmospheric phenomenon serves as a symbolic elevation of the landscape. Richter confirmed this historical connection in an interview: “There is indeed a historical reference to Romanticism in my work. This is what distinguishes me from the hyperrealists, who depict the contemporary world with its cars, motorways and so on. I, for my part, paint historical pictures.” Yet Richter was aware that he could not truly achieve this, because the shared framework that had once made such paintings credible no longer existed: “What I lack is the spiritual foundation on which Romantic painting was based. We no longer feel the ‘omnipresence of God in nature’. For us, everything is empty. And yet these paintings are still there and continue to speak to us. We still love them, use them and need them.” Friedrich’s painting therefore does not serve as a direct reference in “Kleine Teye-Landschaft”, but at the very least as a reminder of an era in the history of painting, and of the fact that the choice of motif is not entirely innocent. As Richter observed, “landscapes, and candle paintings, for example, are almost like quotations”. Individual experience and personal states of mind are not reflected in a direct image, but in a quotation. This ambivalence lies at the heart of Richter’s painting, for copying photographs meant from the outset that he approached his subjects indirectly, through the mediation of an image. Beneath the paintings’ immediate appearance lies a second level, that of the quotation, which calls into question the coherence of the first. The image of the landscape stands in a relationship of doubt to its own presence, for it refers to something that has happened, not in the sense of history continuing to shape the present, but as something definitively past, vanished and remote, which appears dreamlike in its pictorial repetition. Richter’s landscapes point towards something that has been lost, in the relationship between past and present, experience and image, desire and its unfulfillment. “Kleine Teyde-Landschaft” depicts something and employs a particular visual language, that of Romanticism, to attune us to it and, at the same time, to disappoint our expectations. For this landscape, painted from a photograph, translates the painter’s individual experience into a universal language intended for us as viewers. By bringing the distant, or even the lost, to the surface of what seems familiar, Richter gives landscape a quality that promises, once again, to make it present. Dieter Schwarz

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