Gerhard Richter on his landscape ‘photo-paintings’: ‘I am seeking something quite specific’

Landscape is a genre that has occupied the German artist Gerhard Richter across his career. It began in earnest with a set of paintings from 1968-69 based on photographs he’d taken on a family holiday to Corsica with his then-wife Marianne and their daughter Betty.

Before long, he began to adopt the same practice in the German countryside, photographing different locations and then, back in the studio, working up paintings from his photographs. A rare early example, Grünes Feld (Green Field)  from 1969, is being offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale at Christie’s on 28 June 2023.

Richter revealed how seriously he took this type of picture when he said in 1986: ‘I see countless landscapes, photograph barely one in 100,000, and paint barely one in 100 of those that I photograph. I am, therefore, seeking something quite specific.’

What, though, was that specific something? A brief look at the history of Richter and his homeland will provide clues.

He was born in Dresden in 1932, the year before Germany came under Nazi rule. By the time he reached adulthood, the city was part of Soviet-influenced East Germany (GDR).

Richter saw no future for himself there, however, insisting that ‘art requires freedom… In dictatorships there is no art.’ He and Marianne defected to West Germany in 1961, settling in Düsseldorf.

In his new home, the artist’s freedoms included the ability to travel — and, as already noted, he took numerous trips to rural areas. Depictions of the German countryside have a lengthy history. Most famous of all are the canvases of the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, from the early 19th century.

Friedrich rejected the notion of a landscape providing only a pretty view. He believed that it could channel powerful feelings and convey to the viewer an experience of awe widely referred to as ‘the sublime’.

The times that Richter lived in were very different from Friedrich’s, of course. By the late 1960s, the religious or spiritual belief that infused Romanticism had largely disappeared from Western society.

It’s important to note, too, that Adolf Hitler had revered Germany’s Romantic artists for their exaltation of the native landscape. Their paintings became propaganda for a regime whose ideology culminated in the Holocaust.

With works such as Grünes Feld, Richter was posing the question of what it meant to paint a German landscape in a post-religious, post-Nazi era.

‘The pictures of the Romantic period still constitute a part of our sensibility,’ he told an interviewer in 1973. Grünes Feld  certainly conjures the sweeping drama of a Friedrich landscape. Bisected along the horizon, it depicts a rolling green pasture beneath a mottled sky.

Crucially, however, as much as the picture harks back to the age of German Romanticism, it only came into being because of the click of Richter’s camera. It counts as one of the myriad ‘photo-paintings’ in his oeuvre — that is, paintings inspired by photographs.

Since the mid-1960s, Richter has collected these photographs in a compendium called Atlas — and included within it is his snapshot of the landscape from which Grünes Feld  derived. The original image is actually quite blurred, and Richter replicated that effect in his painting by covering the scene in a slight haze. It appears to be semi-dissolving before our eyes.

Richter has always been interested in the links between the two media. In his view, following the advent of photography, ‘the painted picture was no longer deemed credible’ — and ‘photographs were regarded as true’ (that is, as accurate depictions of what they portrayed).

A photographer, however, chooses what to depict in much the same manner as a painter does. And in the case of Grünes Feld, Richter’s painting faithfully captured his photograph in a way that his photograph (with its blur) failed to faithfully capture the landscape itself. Where does the truth lie? The answer, Richter suggests, is far from straightforward. There’s usually a lot more to a picture than meets the eye.