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| January, December, and November. Large abstracts by Gerhard Richter. 1989. |
The ultimate reason for my recent trip to St. Louis was to
see three large abstract paintings by Gerhard Richter. Long-time readers know I have a great
appreciation for Richter's diverse oeuvre.
The St. Louis Art Museum features a trilogy from 1989 entitled January,
December, and November. These enormous
paintings were created as the Berlin Wall opened. Richter was born in East Germany and escaped the communist bloc in the early 1960's, making these paintings
representative of a particularly poignant moment for him.
These are my favorite abstract paintings by my favorite living artist.
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| Me admiring the paintings; affords a sense of their massive scale. |
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| I spent a long time in the room with the paintings. Other viewers came and went but sometimes I had the whole room to myself. The accent pieces to my right are not works by Richter. Off camera, to my left, was Richter's Gray Mirror and Betty. |
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| January, my favorite of the three. Followed by details of the painting... |
“Measuring 320 x 400 cm each, these paintings all but envelop the viewer. In January, streaks of lead white and light grey cascade across the canvas, covering all but small amounts of the vivid oranges, yellows, greens and blues underneath. These are arranged in such a way that, especially in the lower left-hand corner, they evoke distant memories of landscapes and their reflection in water. December plays on the dynamic of vertical and horizontal movements. The painting is in a state oh heightened restlessness. Where there is a calmer blur of greys running across, this is disrupted by lighter smears running the opposite direction. The colors seem to have dissolved further than in January, rare hints of orange, yellow and blue becoming rapidly absorbed into overall tonality. The direction of November is decisively horizontal. As the viewer ‘reads’ the painting from left to right, the stop-and-go motion of Richter’s trademark squeegee gives way to a continuous blur in which solid darks and the clean whites of the left-hand panel fuse into different shades of grey.
“Given the distinct position that this color occupies within Richter’s oeuvre, the leaden grey of November not only appears like an amalgamation of the lighter January and the darker December, but also echoes other parts of the artist’s work, including this mirrors and the grayscale of photography. In his abstract paintings, Richter has largely avoided the beauty that his subtle use of color produces in figurative works such as Betty….In January, December, and November the neutral surface layers appear to all but smother the discord amongst the colors in previous layers.” (Panorama: A Retrospective, page 170)
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| December. Followed by details of the painting... |
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| My attention was drawn, among other places, to this particular patch of blue and yellow. |
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| Closer... |
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| Closer... |
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| Closer...this gives you some idea of how the viewer can spend a great deal of time appreciating the many diverse nuances of each great abstract piece. |
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| Other details of December... |
“Conventionally, abstract painting is understood as a process of essentializing. Richter takes the very opposite approach by adding layer after layer of paint, dragging large quantities of materials across the canvas in a highly physical and energetic process. Hence, paintings such as January, December, and November do not represent essentialist reductions but, on the contrary, the accumulation of countless visual phenomena.” (page 171)
“Through making the tug and pull between conscious control and its surrender a central part of his approach to image construction, Richter allows ‘chance as theme and as method’ into his painting: ‘A method of allowing something objective to come into being; a theme for creating a simile (picture) of our survival strategy.’ Dogmatic orthodoxy – in painting as in life – is nothing but a cover-up to shield us from that which cannot be known apriori. Hence, the meaning of Richter’s large abstracts resides in the very manner of their making, their openness and indeterminacy, in ‘a more modern truth: one that we are already living out in our lives (life is not what is said but the saying of it, not the picture but the picturing).
“This sense of openness and indeterminacy is endemic to both the process of making and the process of perceiving paintings such as January, December, and November. Richter thus establishes a position of empathy between himself and the viewer. His paintings convey a shared understanding of humanity experienced through the communal act of looking” ‘What counts isn’t being able to do a thing; it’s seeing what it is. Seeing the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.’” (page 173)
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| November, the darkest and most minimal of the three. Followed by details... |
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