Gerhard Richter

Talking to William Furlong, Jill Lloyd, Michael Archer and Peter Townsend (in order of being heard)

In this rare recording, Gerhard Richter discusses his new series of works; 'The London Paintings'; exhibited at the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in 1988.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 10, Number 4, 1990

Transcript

In this rare interview recorded at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London in 1988, Gerhard Richter discusses his series of works ‘The London Paintings’ with Michael Archer, William Furlong, Jill Lloyd and Peter Townsend. The relation between his use of highly literal and descriptive titles for the abstract paintings is examined, as well as the two strands that comprise his recent work; namely, highly figurative representational paintings of the landscape on the one hand and, on the other, the abstract series.

William Furlong: Gerhard, can we talk about the ‘London Paintings’ that you are exhibiting here at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery? The first thing that intrigues me is the very literal titles they have, such as Salt Tower; Brick Tower; St James. The paintings themselves one could describe as being completely non-figurative. I don’t know whether you are happy with the term ‘abstract’ but I was wondering if you could start by talking about how the paintings came about and what their relationship is to the titles.

Gerhard Richter: These are just names, and a name doesn’t mean so much.

Jill Lloyd: But the religious titles are very provocative. If you have a religious title for a painting it makes people think that they are about religious experience.

GR: The meaning comes from the chapels, from Westminster Abbey, and not from the person. No, they don’t know it when they see and read the titles.

JL: Are the paintings meant to have some religious dimension?

GR: I have nothing against this meaning.

WF: Are you happy to accept the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ as describing the two primary focuses of your work?

GR: Abstract and figurative are very simple terms and may be wrong. Abstract has another meaning, but we use these terms to say non-figurative and figurative. I don’t mind.

WF: It is just that I get the sense that the paintings really aren’t abstract; they are non-representational and seem to be about something very specific in terms of their surface and the way the paint is applied and the images that are created.

JL: Perhaps you could tell us something about the relationship between the two different types of painting. Do you see them as opposites or as related?

GR: They are both realistic in a way. The art shows the artificial reality and the other also.

JL: You don’t see the paintings about nature as being natural, then?

GR: About nature, more natural, yes, yes.

WF: Yet there seems to be something that is very specifically non-natural, if you like, about them. When one looks at them one is in a sense looking through a filter at nature, and I get a very strange sense of time from them, but they seem to be very removed as well. They seem artificial.

GR: Yes, that is true.

JL: The paintings seem to be very different from the abstract paintings that you have been making over the last few years.

GR: The new abstract paintings are quite different. The paintings before had more structure, more composition. I am not able any more to give composition.

JL: Are these the beginning of something new or are they the end of a particular abstract phase?

GR: Yes, I have the feeling that I have to start with new things but I don’t know what. Maybe I will continue. I really don’t know. I am in a state now without any idea.

JL: But you seem to like painting in that state – you like to paint without any idea. When we talked before, it seemed that you didn’t want to bring any preconceived ideas to what you were doing.

GR: Yes, but then I had the idea to have no ideas. This is a bit different – now I really have no ideas, no vision for a new painting.

JL: But when you said you had the idea to have no ideas, it is a very conscious thing. You have to avoid having ideas. At the moment you are not avoiding it, it is just that you don’t really know what is coming.

GR: Yes, yes.

Michael Archer: Do you find it worrying that you don’t have any vision at the moment?

GR: Yes, yes. It is not so nice, but I know these interruptions from the past, longer or shorter.

WF: Can I just develop a point about the paintings? It is interesting how you have actually made them, because there doesn’t appear to be a ‘signature’, if you like, of the artist’s actual activity which leaves a trace behind that reveals the identity of the artist. That certainly doesn’t seem to be present in the photographic paintings but neither in the abstract paintings, which I find interesting. I was wondering if this was a very conscious thing on your part, not to actually create any identity for yourself in the marks, in the way the paintings had been produced.

GR: Do you think they are anonymous?

WF: They are not anonymous but they certainly don’t reveal the hand, if you like, of the artist.

GR: My handwriting is visible in the painting, even when there is no brush stroke in the painting.

JL: I suppose you associate the brush stroke with subjectivity, like the Expressionists, and you seem to try to avoid that type of expression of your own self or feelings.

GR: I never liked the Expressionists. Neither the old German nor the modern.

MA: You said that there is little structure in the abstract paintings. Certainly in the ones you were doing up to ten years ago you started off with a very small, quite heavily worked painting and then enlarged a photographic section of that to make the painting. Is there any way in which you do structure the paintings that are here?

GR: No, these are absolutely different from that time. You mean the blow up? No, there is nothing. When I mentioned that there is less structure in these paintings, I thought of the paintings only three years before or five years before. They had a composition and they were built differently.

WF: Is it something that you feel strongly about now: the idea of making paintings that are associated with a particular site, a particular building which has associations, such as the churches and the towers, and so on? Is that link important to you, that there is a reference at least in the title to a particular place?

GR: In this case, yes, for the ‘London Paintings’. [Translated by Lloyd] It has to do with other things I was interested in at the particular time I was doing them: the Kafka that I was reading, or the fact that I was coming to London to do the series. It was on my mind and the titles became coloured by that.

JL: Is this to give an extra dimension to the painting as well, so that we don’t see them just as formalist abstractions?

GR: Yes, yes, there is a hope or wish to give them another dimension. I have a similar experience when I paint from a photo and I destroy the image more and more, but still the title is there, so with the tourist paintings you can hardly see the tourists and the drama of this terrible thing, a man eaten by a lion, but you have the title and it is interesting.

Peter Townsend: There is a passage in your catalogue, which is a translation of one of your letters, where you refer to nature as being without intelligence, without sympathy, but also being inhuman. Do you mean inhuman or do you mean ahuman, because inhuman is a very human term?

GR: This human we don’t have in German, this difference. So I think I mean ahuman.

PT: As in amoral?

GR: Yes.

MA: I read that and found that quite interesting. Does that mean you don’t see us as really being connected with nature in any way as physical beings?

GR: We are connected with nature. This is a very polemical sentence.

PT: It is. It means that the only interpreter of nature is ourselves as human beings, and in a way your abstract paintings seem to throw landscape back onto the viewer to look inside him- or herself for a response to the landscape which has nothing to do with the landscape. Is that so?

GR: Yes, yes.

MA: How important is it in this show to have the two types of imagery together, the abstract and the figurative?

GR: I think it is more understandable. They are realistic when you show both, but it is also possible to show only one type. JL: Would you ever show the photo landscapes by themselves now? GR: Not at the moment, no. I am more interested in the abstract paintings.

JL: So the landscapes are really there to throw an extra dimension on the abstract painting, rather as the titles give an extra dimension.

GR: Yes, yes. It has to do with this hope that I mentioned that they have more meaning, more importance for us. I feel always a lack of importance. I am just a painter.

JL: And you mean that we have to create this importance?

GR: Yes, I could do more. Paintings are limited in their effect.

JL: In their effect on the audience or in the potential they have to express something?

GR: We have a lot of problems in the world and the paintings cannot do very much.

WF: There were just one or two things about the photographic paintings. I saw that very large installation of the portraits in the Museum Ludwig last year, which I think is a very impressive piece, and I was just wondering about your particular thoughts about the photographic level of representation. Your painting in a way consciously emulates the photographic process, or is very close to it. What is the distinction, do you think? What makes your portraits substantially different from the photographic equivalent?

GR: I have two versions. Painted portraits from photographs and then photographs from the paintings. Sometimes I like the photographic version more – it is more modem, more of our time.

WF: But what are you thinking when you are actually making those very tight, very accurate paintings that are so close to the photograph?

GR: It is the only method I can use. The best except for colour. They are not coloured, and a lot of photographs I had at that time were not in colour.

JL: Are you trying to make them look as realistic as possible?

GR: As realistic as possible, and sometimes I was able to do them better than the photographs – more clear. They were very small, some of them. It made it a bit better.

JL: But often there is a slight blur to everything that looks deliberate, as if you don’t want it to be a perfect illusion.

GR: They become more realistic with this effect.

MA: When you say you want them to be as realistic as possible, do you mean you want them to look as much like photographs as possible or as much like reality as possible?

GR: I don’t know a picture that was better than a good photograph.

WF: But they are conscious paintings of the surface of the photographic print. As an alternative you might for instance paint the actual portrait of the person.

GR: This is a facility we didn’t learn. We are not able to paint. Only very few painters, like Lucian Freud, can do this but all the others are not able. They didn’t learn it. We have no school teaching this.

PT: But actually, when I look at those paintings of yours based upon photographs my response is an emotional one, not to the landscape you have painted but to the way I would look at a landscape like that.

GR: Yes, I think I understand. It comes from the photographic apparatus, yes?

PT: It is almost as if you have transferred a mood to me as I look at your work. You make me respond to that landscape in the way you know I will respond to a landscape locked inside me.

GR: It is good.

JL: I find the landscapes disorientating because they seem very romantic and beautiful but they also seem very emotionless. There is a sort of aimlessness about them; they are too far away or they are too close, or something isn’t quite right. Do you want us to see the landscapes as romantic things or do you like us to feel a little disorientated?

GR: Both is right. I think we have these two feelings at least when we see a landscape. We feel nostalgic and nostalgia means this double feeling.

MA: To go back to Bill’s mention of the series of portraits, they are all of famous people. Is that a very personal list, as it were – are they all your favourites?

GR: No. Some of them I don’t know and some of my favourites I didn’t paint. They are not in this series.

MA: There is a painting of Kiefer’s, Hermanns-Scblacht, which seems to me to be very closely related to that. It seems as if he has looked at that series of yours. Again it is monochrome – grey, black and white – and it has a whole series of portraits of his personal heroes.

GR: You said that these were his personal heroes and that was not the case with me. He showed a direction and an ideology but not me. I tried to make the opposite of a direction. I want to destroy.

WF: Mike mentioned Kiefer, and I was wondering whether you felt that there were any links or relationships between your work and that of any other current German painters. I was wondering also whether you had any views retrospectively about Beuys, because you lived in Düsseldorf at the same time as Beuys. Did you feel you shared any common ground with those artists?

GR: I liked Beuys very much, and sometimes I loved him, but also I tried to avoid him and not to be too close to him.

JL: In your diary notes, when Beuys died you said that you thought there was a new task for you, or for German painters, now that Beuys was dead, and somehow you had to carry on what he was doing in your own way.

GR: Now we are doing it. We have at this moment to think again, but at the moment I don’t have a new experience.