Gerhard Richter: Landscape 9783775747127, 9783775747134

Gerhard Richter’s paintings combine photorealism and abstraction in a manner that is completely unique to the German art

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Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword
Ingried Brugger
Foreword
Christoph Becker
Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes
Hubertus Butin
The World without Us: On the Topicality of Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes
Lisa Ortner-Kreil
Some Thoughts on Landscape in the History of Ideas
Cathérine Hug
Plates
Landscape as Debt
Matias Faldbakken
The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes
T. J. Demos
Biography
Selected Bibliography
Authors
List of Works
Acknowledgments
Colophon
Photo Credits
Recommend Papers

Gerhard Richter: Landscape
 9783775747127, 9783775747134

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Gerhard Richter Landscape

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Gerhard Richter Landscape

Edited by Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Hubertus Butin, and Cathérine Hug

Texts by Hubertus Butin, T. J. Demos, Matias Faldbakken, Cathérine Hug, and Lisa Ortner-Kreil

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Contents

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Foreword Ingried Brugger

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Foreword Christoph Becker

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Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes Hubertus Butin

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The World without Us: On the Topicality of Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes Lisa Ortner-Kreil

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Some Thoughts on Landscape in the History of Ideas Cathérine Hug

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Plates

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Landscape as Debt Matias Faldbakken

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The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes T. J. Demos

200 205 207 209 214 216 219

Biography Selected Bibliography Authors List of Works Acknowledgments Colophon Photo Credits

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Foreword An examination of Gerhard Richter’s large oeuvre beginning in the early 1960s causes time to recede more and more and results in an unusual concentration of simultaneity—though very much with an awareness of the chronology of this oeuvre. At every moment, Richter has the entire spectrum of his work available to him, and therefore he also has available all those moments in the history of art that he ever regarded as relevant. Nowhere is that clearer than in his landscapes, a historically highly-charged genre. This theme occupied him early on, from 1963 onward, and it has occupied him for a long time, almost up to the present. In the process, Richter has presented the landscape to us in the diversity of media available to the contemporary artist. And he presents “landscape” to us as mediated—whether via motifs from photographs (existing or taken himself), from images from magazines, or through key works from the history of art. Richter has not by any means developed a selfglossing historicism in the process, but rather adopted the role of a brilliant tester and modernizer. Its wealth of styles corresponds to that of his oeuvre: representational likeness or abstraction, sharpness or blurriness, fictive construct or overpainted realism. There is a necessity for “Everything is possible,” as well as equal value of the nonheterogeneous. In his landscapes especially, Richter makes the claim to reinterpret the object in the diversity of the possible appearances available to him, including their historical connotations. Viewed against that stance, it is not difficult to make out the temptation of the Hegelian call to inspect and uncover the truth of every field or the new thought patterns that killed off the problems of postwar art in Postmodernism—a movement of which Richter himself was a part of and which he was a part of in his very own way in the early 1960s. Gerhard Richter is celebrated—and rightly so—as one of the most important, influential, and successful artists of our time. In many respects, however, Richter remains, even today, a mystery for many, which is due in part to his refusal to make the private, his own personality, public. It is, however, above all his work itself, whose complex aesthetic range and the thinking underlying it, strongly resists being read in the ordinary ways of looking at art. Our exhibition is the most comprehensive Gerhard Richter show in Austria thus far. Using the theme of landscape, it reveals a concentration of his work, and it is in any case an opportunity to roam through and rediscover the continent that is “Gerhard Richter” with astonishment once again. These days, Richter can choose where and what he exhibits. It is therefore an honor for us to be able to present this exhibition at the Kunstforum, and I am also pleased that the show will travel on to Zurich.

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I am thankful for the engaged and friendly collaboration with the team of the Kunsthaus Zürich and its director, Christoph Becker. Once again it has proved that we can do great things together. I wish to thank all of the lenders for their assistance as well as the numerous colleagues who have supported us. I would like to express special thanks to Konstanze Ell of the Atelier Gerhard Richter and to Dietmar Elger and Kerstin Küster of the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden. We were able to persuade Hubertus Butin, an outstanding expert of the work of Richter, to curate the show; his competent and sensitive approach to the material, to our lenders and colleagues, and not least to Gerhard Richter himself guided the project. My profound thanks goes to Lisa Ortner-Kreil, who as curator represented the Kunstforum on the lead team, as well as to Cathérine Hug of the Kunsthaus Zürich. My heartfelt gratitude also goes out to the entire Kunstforum team, of which I would like to explicitly call out Veronika Chambas-Wolf, the head of exhibition management. I wish to thank the authors who contributed essays to the catalogue, the Hatje Cantz publishing house, and the graphic designer Martha Stutteregger for this beautiful book. As always, I owe thanks to the UniCredit Bank Austria, Signa, Ergo, and Amundi for their engagement as well as to our media partners, Kurier, Falter, and Ö1. Thank you, Gerhard Richter! For your support in every respect. Ingried Brugger Director Bank Austria Kunstforum Vienna

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Foreword Is it not difficult to organize a large Gerhard Richter exhibition? One might think so. Gerhard Richter usually appears very high up in the international rankings of artists. It is generally known that his works are among the most expensive works of contemporary art—museums guard them closely. The public loves and admires them. His paintings are not infrequently esteemed by private parties as investments in uncertain times. Regularly, people everywhere begin to hyperventilate when a major work comes on the market, and there are many of them. Richter has said he finds this strange, and although he is pleased by his fame, he tends rather to be publicity-shy and modest. Those are, so to speak, the preconditions for a Richter exhibition. We come to the strange part of the backstory: the Kunsthaus Zürich waited so unbelievably long for its first presentation of Gerhard Richter in the museum’s large exhibition hall, with its storied tradition, that it required considerable reflection to come up with suitable reasons. Explaining this now would take us too far afield. It was not as if we had to pluck up our courage: once we had decided to make landscape the subject of an exhibition, it was no longer very difficult at all. First, Richter not only agreed to that, but also lent an astonishing number of works from his own collection and commendably approached all of the institutional and private lenders, whom we wish to thank for their trust in us. Hubertus Butin, who is extremely well versed in the artist’s work, took on the role of mediator, always interacting with the artist successfully, and assisting us actively with ample information. Joint projects over the decades have connected us with our colleagues at the Kunstforum Wien. We were particularly pleased this time by their initiative and the invitation to cooperate. Sincere thanks to its director, Ingried Brugger, and her team for this highly stimulating and very collegial collaboration! Lisa Ortner-Kreil guided the project for the Kunstforum, as Cathérine Hug did for the Kunsthaus; together with Hubertus Butin they formed an inspired curatorial team whose intense work is truly evident. At the Kunsthaus, I am also grateful to Martina Ciardelli for project assistance and Franziska Lentzsch, head of exhibition organization, for coordination; to the publishing house; and to the invited authors, Matias Faldbakken and T. J. Demos, for their contributions to the beautiful catalogue for the exhibition, for whose successful presentation in Zurich Lukas Voellmy was responsible. Since funding also plays a central role in an exhibition, it called for a special effort to support such an ambitious project, and we are very pleased that this time our partners Credit Suisse and Swiss Re worked together harmoniously to ensure

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its realization—and it worked! I also take this opportunity to thank Bank Austria for its enduring and fruitful engagement on behalf of Kunstforum, which has had an effect that extends far beyond Vienna. Finally, then: Gerhard Richter at the Kunsthaus Zürich. It is truly rare that an exhibition has this long a run-up. Perhaps sometimes it takes the right people at the right time. My personal and sincere thank-you goes out above all to Gerhard Richter for having made this exhibition, the largest of his landscapes thus far, possible. We made every effort to ensure that our memorable premiere would be a sweeping success. See for yourself! Christoph Becker Director Kunsthaus Zürich

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Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes

Hubertus Butin

Fig. 1 — François Boucher The Four Seasons: Spring, 1755 Oil on canvas, 54.3 × 72.7 cm Frick Collection, New York, Henry Clay Frick Bequest

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Possibilities and Impossibilities for Landscape Painting Today

Fig. 2 — Andy Warhol Do It Yourself (Landscape), 1962 Acrylic, pencil, and Letraset numbers on canvas 177.2 × 137.5 cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Denis Diderot, one of the most important figures of the French Enlightenment and coeditor of the Encyclopédie, lamented as early as 1767 the progressive loss of our original rural existence. Wealthy city dwellers, he claimed, were creating gardens and parks to compensate for the loss of nature and decorating their salons with idyllic landscape paintings (fig. 1); he wrote that their walls were covered “with images of a happiness whose loss we grieve.”1 Because nature in the twenty-first century is for many people not just remote, but also threatened in its very existence by exploitation, poisoning, and destruction, the yearning for it described by Diderot is more present than ever—despite all of the differences in the historical circumstances. Does this mean that artistic representations of nature or of landscape remain possible, that there can still be visual equivalents for contemporary experiences of nature that are artistically convincing and in keeping with the times? The artistic genre of the landscape cannot, of course, be continued as in the nineteenth century with the immediacy of plein-air painting or in the form of an idyll, since both would seem anachronistic and naïve today. But the thesis that landscape painting has long since outlived its usefulness and has no right to exist any longer, as Gottfried Boehm, for example, asserted in 1986, has to be rejected.2 After high modernism, in which the landscape was certainly a common subject (for example, in Impressionism, Postimpressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, and Surrealism as well as in Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity]), we also find landscape motifs in the 1960s and 1970s in the work of—to name only a few relevant examples—Georg Baselitz, Vija Celmins, Franz Gertsch, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Anselm Kiefer, Roy Lichtenstein, Malcolm Morley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol (fig. 2). Even if the artists primarily engage with nature and the landscape in the media of photography, sculpture, installation, and video as well as in art in public spaces,3 representations of landscapes in paintings as well as in drawings and prints continue to be justified and are part of the current reflection on and production of art, as new, voluminous survey catalogues document.4 Landscapes can be found as pictorial motifs in Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre since 1963.5 Other than the portrait, no other subject has occupied him over such a long period and was produced by him in such diverse media: it appears not only in paintings, but also in prints, drawings, photocollages, and photographic editions, overpainted photographs, artist’s books, and even in a three-dimensional multiple. When Gerhard Richter works with a genre as rich in tradition as the landscape, he does not do so out of a backward-looking or naïve historicism. Rather,

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Hubertus Butin

he is interested in initiating a discussion of the possible status and contemporary character of this genre. Richter reflects very precisely on the historical conditions of artistic production and critically sounds out in this way the possibilities of contemporary representations of landscapes in various artistic media. To offer a brief definition: a landscape in the cultural historical sense is the detail of an area presented as a sensory totality, which can mean a natural area but also a completely denatured industrial landscape or even the hostile environment of a moon landscape. Animate nature, which is usually its subject, is constituted as a landscape when it can be experienced as a sensory object. In this view, landscape is not a simple piece of nature or of an environment; rather, human reception and hence our culturally shaped perception turn what we see into a landscape in the first place.6 In the artistic genre of the landscape, this perception obtains its culturally coded and most artificial determination.

Second-Hand Landscapes With many of Richter’s landscapes, it is easy to see that the artist based them on photographs. The works therefore depict, strictly speaking, not landscapes at all, but photographs of landscapes. In other words, that means that these paintings and drawings are not based on the direct, immediate experience of a real landscape but on the foundation of reality mediated by a medium, on photography as the primary medium of the production of images in our society. The early landscapes from 1963 to 1967 go back to black-and-white photographs reproduced in newspapers, magazines, and books or to old photographs that the artist found in family photo albums. In the mid-1960s, Richter stated with astonishment and enthusiasm that “copying a postcard could lead to a picture.”7 By appropriating motifs from others’ photographs and then transferring them to paintings, drawings, and prints, he dispensed with any subjective expression and at the same time ennobled the sometimes banal motifs though the artistic context. In several works, a text in the image makes it clear that a model was used. This is the case with the two earliest works in this exhibition: two graphite drawings on paper from 1964, Ausbruch eines grossen Geysir (Eruption of a Big Geyser) (p. 46) and Meran (Merano) (p. 49). On the former sheet, the typeset title can be read at bottom right, placed in the picture in such a way that it seems to be an explicit formal and aesthetic element inherent to the drawing. The title is obviously part of the original photograph, which was probably from a magazine or a book. The drawing Meran is presumably based on a postcard. The name of the city in Italian and German appears in mannered handwriting beneath the landscape motif and must also have been part of the source image that Richter used, since it does

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Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes

not conform to the artist’s handwriting. In the oil painting Ägyptische Landschaft (Egyptian Landscape) 1964–65 (p. 45), not only the typeset written elements but also the broad, white borders point to Richter having appropriated the motif from a book.8 The oil painting Familie im Schnee (Family in the Snow) of 1966 (p. 47) is based on a photograph found in Richter’s Atlas der Fotos, Collagen und Skizzen (Atlas of the Photographs, Collages and Sketches), which has served him for many decades as a kind of collection of models for his artistic work.9 Everything in the painting points to its origin in a banal photograph: the black-and-white tonality, the central positioning of the figures, the stiff poses and the smiling gaze into the camera, and the amateurish angle at which it was taken, which tips the group depicted to the left. A rural winter landscape forms the peaceful surroundings of this staged family idyll. In 1968, Gerhard Richter began to use his own photographs as models for his paintings. The photographs were taken on walks and while traveling in Germany and abroad. The temporal and biographical contexts are largely left out, since there are usually no recognizable narrative connections between the motifs and the artist-subject. They are usually snapshot-like, deliberately amateurish, by no means idealized landscape photographs. As early as 1966, Richter, in a text written with Sigmar Polke, stated provocatively: “I consider many amateur photographs better than the best Cézanne.”10 Many of these motifs he photographed himself have a decidedly photographic aesthetic, for example, in that they sharply cut off the subject of the photograph. This is the case with the painting Waldhaus (House in Forest) of 2004 (p. 59), in which, amid a dense forest, a white building is visible on the right—the house of the staff of the Hotel Waldhaus in Sils in the Engadine.11 In a classical artistic composition, such a striking detail would hardly be pushed to the edge in this way and cut off so sharply. Here, too, the technological medium of the photograph is emphasized, so that the painted landscape seems to be a second-hand visualization.

Romanticizing Images as “Cuckoo’s Eggs” No image can be perceived today any longer without a wealth of visual connections that relate it to other, already existing images—whether photographs, images from the mass media, or from the history of art. Rather than asserting art as an absolute origin that is legitimized only by itself, Richter appears to find it necessary to define his work not least by its relationship to works of art of the past: “I do see myself as the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting—of art in general—

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Hubertus Butin

Fig. 3 — Caspar David Friedrich Frau vor der untergehenden Sonne (Woman in Front of Setting Sun), ca. 1818 Oil on Canvas, 22 × 30 cm Museum Folkwang, Essen

which we have lost, but which places obligations on us.”12 In 1974, he identified as his motivation for grappling with the genre of the landscape and its rich tradition: “It does have something to do with recapturing a dream, or analyzing it.”13 A year earlier, he had cited a specific art-historical reference point that was important to him: Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840).14 By his own account, Friedrich aimed in his art for an “elevation of the spirit and . . . religious uplift.”15 He radically transformed the traditional Christian pictorial language by making it possible for the genre of the secular landscape painting to bear religious ideas. One almost paradigmatic painting in his oeuvre is the small-format oil painting Frau in der Morgensonne (Woman in the Morning Sun), also known as Frau vor der untergehenden Sonne (Woman before the Setting Sun), ca. 1818 (fig. 3). In the foreground of the painting, a woman is seen from behind; for her, nature has become the object of a religious devotion. The yearning to connect the finite to the infinite is fulfilled not only in the woman’s demonstratively receptive gesture but also in the uniting of figure and landscape, dark and bright, close and far, earth and heaven. In terms of the evolution of the genre of the landscape painting, this means the “secularizing of the sacred and the sacralizing of the secular,”16 as Werner Hofmann aptly remarked. Several of Richter’s works form the late 1960s in particular do indeed reveal formal similarities to paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, so that they are generally felt to be Romantic, atmospheric, and moody: a painting such as Ruhrtalbrücke (Ruhrtal Bridge) of 1969 (p. 71) corresponds to a pictorial structure like the one that can also be found, for example, in Friedrich’s drawings of Rügen Island from 1802.17 These works lack on both sides any compositional delimitations within the picture, which emphasizes the great expanse of the landscapes. Moreover, both Richter’s motif and Friedrich’s are characterized by a very deep horizon, a tall and almost empty sky, and an unaccentuated foreground. The association with Romanticism is, however, quickly relativized when one becomes aware of signs of modern civilization that are not atmospheric at all: an enormous autobahn bridge brutally cutting through the Ruhr Valley; or in the similar oil painting Landschaft bei Hubbelrath (Landscape near Hubbelrath) (p. 79), in which a street sign, black-and-white signposts, and an asphalt street wet with rain can be seen. Every conceivable Romantic symbolism is likewise negated in Richter’s oil painting Regenbogen (Rainbow) of 1970 (fig. 4).18 The only spatial point of reference to which the viewer can relate appears on the bottom edge: the dark roof ridge of a house, placed at an angle within the image. When Richter employs the aesthetic of a deliberately amateurish, sharply cut-off snapshot, it prevents the possibility of a unity with what is seen that could be experienced as contemplative. Although this depiction of a rainbow in the sky might be atmospheric and seductive, the motif is not a mystical, sublime phenomenon of light of the kind Caspar

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Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes

David Friedrich was able to convey around 1810 in his Gebirgslandschaft mit Regenbogen (Mountain Landscape with Rainbow) (fig. 5). In Friedrich’s words, it is a “bow of grace,” because it is a symbol about the eternal bond between heaven and earth, of God’s covenant with human beings, and hence can be understood as a visible revelation of the divine.19 Richter’s own depiction of a rainbow, by contrast, is entirely secular and hence offers no promise of a transcendence. The oil paintings Abendstimmung (Evening Mood) of 1969 (p. 78),20 the two works titled Teyde-Landschaft (Teyde Landscape) of 1971 (pp. 83, 85),21 Vesuv (Vesuvius) of 1976 (p. 87),22 and Davos of 1981 (p. 73)23 all have in common that they are presumably perceived by most viewers as particularly atmospheric, as Romantic. In the era of Romanticism in the early nineteenth century, mist, fog, and other diffuse weather phenomena were often depicted in art in order to produce a mood. Such effects dissolve the contours of things and in that sense correspond to the technique of soft inpainting and blurring of details (with a broad flat brush) in Richter’s landscapes. The sometimes more, sometimes less blurriness is a pictorial rhetoric of the indeterminate and of atmospheric transitions. Richter’s landscapes are full of longing and mood; they sometimes take up Romantic motifs and forms of experience, but they are not Romantic in the sense of the history of ideas. In 1973, Richter formulated this with all possible clarity: “What I’m lacking is the spiritual fxoundation that supported Romantic painting. We have lost the feeling of ‘God’s omnipresence in nature.’ For us, everything is empty.”24 He therefore called his landscapes “cuckoo’s eggs,”25 since they recall images by Caspar David Friedrich, without being able to repeat or renew their transcendental symbolism.

Fig. 4 — Gerhard Richter Regenbogen (Rainbow), 1970 Oil on canvas, 50 × 55 cm Fondazione Orsi, Milan (p. 51)

Fig. 5 — Caspar David Friedrich Gebirgslandschaft mit Regenbogen (Mountain Landscape with Rainbow), ca. 1809/10 Oil on canvas, 69 × 102 cm Museum Folkwang, Essen

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Hubertus Butin

Landscapes in Abstraction

Fig. 6 — Ferdinand Hodler Genfersee bei Sonnenuntergang (Lake Geneva at Sunset), 1914 Oil on canvas, 61 × 90 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, gift of the Alfred Rütschi heirs, 1929

In some works, Richter pushed his landscape motifs in the direction of a selfreferential abstraction, so that the function of the representational likeness, of mimetic depiction, is reduced. The development of abstraction in art history occurred around 1900, and not coincidentally featured landscape motifs in particular—from Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Ferdinand Hodler (fig. 6) by way of Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee to Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. That is because the fundamentally simple structure of the landscape, consisting of a body of land or water, a horizon, and a sky lends itself well to abstracting, simplifying, generalizing, and expressing the essential. In this way, the landscape could serve especially well the formal and aesthetic process of “art becoming self-aware,”26 through reflecting on its own pictorial means. Richter’s work is not about a classical abstraction in the sense of simply making form autonomous of the kind practiced by so many artists before him, but rather about the question how far one can push the form of a landscape motif—usually based on a photograph—to be independent of its form without ending up with an arbitrary and total nonrepresentationalism. Each of the works exhibited here is more or less a tightrope walk between realism and abstraction, between the imitation of the landscape and the autonomous value of form. There are landscape motifs that, notably, already entail such a high degree of nonobjectivity that an elaborate artistic modification would no longer be necessary. For example, the oil painting based on a photograph Waldstück (Okinawa) (Forest Piece [Okinawa]) of 1969 (p. 103) shows a dense, impenetrable forest that permits neither spatial orientation nor clear identification of details. The subject, which is also slightly blurred, is largely removed from our cognitive access. Likewise, the black-and-white paintings Stadtbild F (Townscape F) of 1968 (p. 99), and Stadtbild PL (Townscape PL) of 1970 (p. 96)27 already have a highly abstract look in the photographs on which they are based, which are taken from books. These townscapes are not vedute intended to be recognized, but can rather be traced back to aerial photographs that illustrate the structures of cities without them being identifiable by the titles. For example, Stadtbild PL is based on the topography of downtown Hamburg, which was not known until recently.28 The artist said of his townscapes in 1968: “a spot of paint should be a spot of paint, and the motif needn’t have a message or allow for interpretation.”29 The townscapes, with the roughly applied, pastose brushstrokes, merely offer a pretext for painterly complex pictorial structures whose subject matter is not or only barely identifiable, which oscillate between illusionistic representation and abstract autonomy.

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Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes

Even more abstract, and legible as landscapes with a representational reference only from a distance of several meters, are the oil paintings Parkstück (Park Piece) and Dschungelbild (Jungle Picture) of 1971 (pp. 117, 115). They are based on two photographs that Richter had taken in a park in the Himmelgeist district of Düsseldorf.30 In the paintings, the motifs were created with highly general brushwork, applying the paint thickly. The painting process itself is visualized and thematized here by drawing the eye to the inherent reality of the painterly means, even though the landscape aspect remains present. Remarkably, these works led seamlessly to the so-called Vermalungen (Inpaintings) (fig. 7), which are no longer based on photographs but—in Richter’s words—truly only “result from the making.”31 They are composed of irregular courses of paint that penetrate one another and are labyrinthinely interwoven. These nonrepresentational paintings form a self-referential allover of endless movements. For that reason, the landscapes from the period around 1970 can be regarded as a central point of departure for Richter’s path to total abstraction. The only painting in the exhibition that in fact embodies a visually autonomous, self-referential painting and thus refers to a reality outside the work in a way that is neither mimetic nor symbolic is the monumental work Sankt Gallen of 1989 (pp. 120–21), which was commissioned by the University of St. Gallen. Richter produced this painting with a squeegee: a long, narrow plastic strip with which paint is drawn over the canvas, resulting in a veil-like, multilayered, and complex painted structure. Because the 6.8-meter-wide painting has a nearly continuous horizontal line, and has the name of the city of Saint Gall in its title, it also becomes possible to associate a work that is actually entirely nonrepresentational with a landscape. Richter confirmed this when he said in 2009: “In a representational painting, I paint the look of an existing thing [with the aid of a photograph]; in an abstract one, the image of a landscape I do not know forms gradually.”32

Fig. 7 — Gerhard Richter Vermalung (grau) (Inpainting [Gray]), 1972 Oil on canvas, 250 × 250 cm Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt

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Hubertus Butin

Landscapes as Fictional Constructs Several works by Richter show landscapes that are based on photographs but on closer inspection prove unreal. The artist produced them on the basis of collages that are at first glance conveyed as seemingly realistic depictions but then turn out to be fictional constructions after all. The motif of Seestück (bewölkt) (Seascape [Cloudy]) of 1969 (p. 136) was composed from a photograph of the surface of the ocean and another of a sky and then transferred to canvas using oil paints. The photographs used were taken on the Canary Islands. It is striking that both parts of the painting result in an unreal appearance, above all because their colors do not go together and the cloud ceiling is perplexingly low. In the painting Seestück (Welle) (Seascape [Wave]) of the same year (p. 139), the clouds appear as a looming wall, and thus do not extend into the perspectival depth. Richter probably photographed the sky directly above him and then mounted it as a second motif above the horizontally arranged image of the sea, which in turn produces an alienation effect in the form of a contradictory pictorial construction. The offset print Wolke (Cloud) of 1971 (p. 140) reveals the unreal fiction of a landscape even more clearly, since here a compact cloud in an otherwise cloudless sky floats just a few meters above the sea, which is meteorologically impossible, since only diffuse fog can form at that altitude. And yet one is inclined to believe the apparent photographic identity of the sheet, since it is no longer possible to recognize that the photograph in the print is a montage even though the viewer has doubts about the reality of what it shows. The climax of fictional constructions of landscapes is the black-and-white Seestück (See-See) (Seascape [Sea-Sea]) of 1970 (p. 143), for which Richter once again mounted two photographs together.33 Both the collage and the oil painting version show a seascape whose sky has been replaced by an image of the sea rotated 180 degrees. The pictorial space thus no longer conforms to the perception of a real landscape, and yet our perception oscillates anyway: first, the upper sea motif is naturally and matter-of-factly seen as the sky and then again, in keeping with the montage, as an inverted body of water. The artist produces a visual dissolution of the boundaries of the sea that is inherently overpowering and undermines every certainty about spatial dimension, standpoint, and orientation. In the early 1970s, Richter realized not paintings but rather collages in connection with drawings in order to present landscapes in model-like spaces. In his Atlas der Fotos, Collagen und Skizzen, there are several photocollages with ery pathosladen landscape motifs. The two examples from 1971 selected here (p. 147), with their sky and cloud motifs, are mounted into drawings of extremely monumental interiors. Whereas plate 243 shows spaces with a very minimalist

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Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes

Fig. 8 — Johann Heinrich Wüest Der Rhonegletscher (The Rhone Glacier), ca. 1775 Kunsthaus Zürich, 126 × 100 cm donated by Heinrich Escher-Escher zum Wollenhof, 1877

aesthetic, plate 249 reveals a space with large, classical coffers on the floor and ceiling that leave the white cube as the truly dominant paradigm of the modern presentation of art. Both plates have in common that they illustrate gigantically large, incredibly spacious exhibition spaces. If one relies on the tiny figures that Richter has placed in the drawings for a sense of scale, the mounted landscapes must be thirty to forty meters tall. With these visionary designs, Richter seems to be exploring the aesthetic category of the sublime,34 which played a big role both in Classicism and in Romanticism. Since the eighteenth century, the term “sublime” has been associated with, for example, the monumental appearance of mountains and glaciers as well as the natural forces of storms and volcano eruptions (fig. 8). “Sublime” is everything that is incomparably large and looming that exceeds any human scale. Such an experience of nature, whether real or conveyed in art, can trigger simultaneous admiration and shock, astonishment and horror. Richter’s two designs from Atlas could not be realized because the limits of representability in landscape had long since been crossed. The artist admitted in an interview: “That sort of thing only works in sketches, because the execution would be unendurable, overblown and bombastic. But it was good to design sanctuaries of that kind, for pictures with an incredible total effect.”35

Realism and Nonrepresentationalism in Overpainted Landscapes The final pictorial category to be investigated here is dedicated to landscape photographs, paintings, and prints that were worked abstractly with a squeegee. This technique of overpainting has nothing to do with coloring the motif, in the way we are familiar with from old photographs. In the nineteenth century, that was done to compensate for the lack of color in photographs, to make them even more realistic. Richter’s application of paint results in a very different way: since the mid-1980s, the artist has applied oil paint to some works with a squeegee or spatula.36 If we take small-format photographs as an example, we can distinguish five different techniques that create specific pictorial structures. Either the artist pressed a plastic squeegee to which oil paint stuck onto the photograph and the paint was applied to the motif as if in a transfer print (in a way similar to a monotype) (p. 152), or he pulled a squeegee or a spatula across the photograph, so that the paint clung to the surface in elongated streaks (p. 147)—a technique he also applied in landscape paintings and prints (p. 172). In several cases, Richter held the photograph in his hand and drew it through the paint on the squeegee (p. 148, left). In the next, rarely employed technique, the artist sprinkled tiny drops

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Hubertus Butin

of oil paint over the surface of the photograph (p. 154, bottom). The final variant consists of Richter applying oil paint to the photograph and then partially scraping it off, so that the photographic motif covered with paint is partially exposed (p. 153, left).37 In all of these works, Richter covered a representational, objective photographic motif with patchy, nonobjective paint. These two simultaneous levels of reality paradoxically form a close connection in these works; they appear to be an interlocking unity whose tension results from the clear contrast of the different forms of production. Although the motifs of the photographs as well as of the prints and photo paintings look realistic, they are merely illusionistic and hence intangible depictions; by contrast, the squeegeed paint on the images possesses a clearly material and hence tangible reality, precisely because it is communicated as its own pastose, nonrepresentational, autonomous structure. In these works, it results in a surprising ambiguity of realism and nonobjectivity, of illusion and reality, which have become categories of equal value in these landscapes. It is remarkable how diversely and discerningly Richter reflects on the artistic genre of the landscape in his works. He sounds out the possibilities of using photographs as models, critically questions the contemporary relationship to Romanticism, explores abstraction in landscape motifs, produces landscapes as fictional constructs and as a tightrope walk between realism and nonrepresentationalism by means of overpainting. Gerhard Richter impressively and enduringly demonstrates that the landscape has by no means become obsolete today, but rather still possesses artistic relevance and contemporaneity.

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1 Denis Diderot, The Salon of 1767, vol. II of Diderot on Art, ed. Thomas Crow, trans. John Goodman (New Haven, CT, 1995), p. 97. 2 Gottfried Boehm, “Das neue Bild der Natur: Nach dem Ende der Landschaftsmalerei,” in Manfred Smuda, ed., Landschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1986), pp. 87–110. 3 See, for example, Volker Adolphs, ed., Ferne Nähe: “Natur” in der Kunst der Gegenwart, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bonn (Cologne, 2009); Eva Schmidt and Kai Völckler, eds., Remembering Landscape, exh. cat. Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (Cologne, 2018); “Kunstnatur/Naturkunst: Natur in der Kunst nach dem Ende der Natur,” special issue, Kunstforum International 258 (January–February 2019). 4 See, for example, Todd Bradway, ed., Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism (London, 2019). 5 The most extensive publication on the subject has been published in two different editions edited by Dietmar Elger: Gerhard Richter: Landscapes, exh. cat. Sprengel Museum Hannover (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002); Gerhard Richter: Landscapes (Ostfildern, 2011). 6 See, for example, Eckhard Lobsien, “Landschaft,” in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Ästhetische Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2001), vol. 3, pp. 617–65. 7 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1964–1965,” in Richter, Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961–2007, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London, 2009), p. 31. 8 Gerhard Richter to the author, e-mail, October 2019. 9 Gerhard Richter: Atlas, ed. Helmut Friedel, V vols. (Cologne, 2015), plate 1. 10 Gerhard Richter, “Text for Exhibition Catalogue, Galerie h, Hannover, 1966, Written Jointly with Sigmar Polke,” in Richter 2009 (see note 7), p. 43.

11 Gerhard Richter to the author, e-mail, January 2020; Helmut Friedel, ed., Gerhard Richter: Atlas, vol. III (Cologne, 2015), plate 664. 12 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Richter 2009 (see note 7), p. 175. 13 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Gislind Nabakowski, 1974,” in Richter 2009 (see note 7), p. 89. 14 Gerhard Richter, “From a Letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann, February 1973,” in Richter 2009 (see note 7), p. 72. 15 Caspar David Friedrich, quoted in Werner Hofmann, “Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Landschaftsmalerei,” in Caspar David Friedrich, 17 74–1840, exh. cat. Hamburger Kunsthalle (Munich, 1974), p. 9. 16 Werner Hofmann, “Zu Friedrichs geschichtlicher Stellung,” in ibid., p. 78. 17 Oskar Bätschmann, “Landscapes at One Remove,” in Hannover 2002 (see note 5), p. 28. 18 Atlas 2015 (see note 9), plate 169. 19 See, for example, John Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Boston, 1993), pp. 93–115; Regenbögen für eine bessere Welt, exh. cat. Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart, 1977). 20 After a photograph by Gerhard Richter, taken in a marsh landscape near the coast in northwestern Germany; Gerhard Richter to the author, January 2010. 21 After two photographs by Gerhard Richter, taken on Tenerife. Atlas 2015 (see note 9), plate 136. 22 After a photograph by Gerhard Richter, taken from Capri. Atlas 2015 (see note 9), plate 312. 23 After a photograph by Gerhard Richter, taken in Arosa, Switzerland. Atlas 2015 (see note 9), plate 333. 24 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 1973,” in Richter 2009 (see note 7), p. 82. 25 Richter 2009 (see note 12), p. 185.

26 Werner Busch, “Einleitung,” in Busch, ed., Landschaftsmalerei (Berlin, 1997), p. 14. 27 Atlas 2015 (see note 9), plate 121. 28 For this previously unpublished information, I am sincerely grateful to the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden and the Neues Museum in Nuremberg. 29 Gerhard Richter, “Work Overview, 1968,” in Richter 2009 (see note 7), p. 53. 30 Atlas 2015 (see note 9), plate 155. 31 Gerhard Richter, “From a Letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann, February 1973,” in Richter 2009 (see note 7), p. 71. 32 Gerhard Richter, “Gerhard Richter über Schönheit,” an interview by Eva Karcher, Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 14–15, 2009, p. 8. 33 Atlas 2015 (see note 9), plate 194. 34 See, for example, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757); Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), in Kant, Werkausgabe, vol. X (Frankfurt am Main, 1974). 35 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1993,” in Richter 2009 (see note 7), p. 301. 36 Markus Heinzelmann, ed., Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs, exh. cat. Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen and Centre de la photographie, Geneva (Ostfildern, 2009); Gerhard Richter: Beirut, exh. cat. Beirut Art Center (London and Cologne, 2012); Stefan Gronert, “Reproduction as Production: On the Role of Photography in the Art of Gerhard Richter,” in Hubertus Butin, Stefan Gronert, and Thomas Olbricht, eds., Gerhard Richter: Editions, 1965–2013 (Ostfildern, 2014), pp. 114–17. 37 I wish to thank Gerhard Richter sincerely for several conversations in 2017 and 2020 on these artistic techniques.

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The World without Us: On the Topicality of Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes Lisa Ortner-Kreil

“I don’t mistrust reality . . . I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect.” —Gerhard Richter 1

Fig. 1 — Gerhard Richter Tisch (Table), 1962, Oil on canvas, 90 × 113 cm Harvard Art Museum, Boston, Collection of Anne Simone Kleinman and Thomas Wong

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Fig. 2 — Gerhard Richter Seestück (See-See) (Seascape [Sea-Sea]), 1970 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie (p. 143)

Gerhard Richter marks a singular position in the history of painting with his oeuvre, which according to his catalogue raisonné begins in 1962 with his painting Tisch (Table) (fig. 1). The artist belatedly elevated that painting, which shows a frontal view of a white table, the depiction of which Richter partially obliterated with circular movements, to catalogue number one in the catalogue of his oeuvre of paintings. It is considered indicative of the direction of Richter’s entire artistic concern. Educated in both East and West Germany, Richter set out to subject to radical innovation everything that had characterized “painting” until the 1960s. Like few other artists before him, Richter excluded from his oeuvre, as it were, all of the categorizations, isms, and pigeonholes that art history and criticism had thought up for painting,2 so that already from 1969 the dictum of “stylistic rupture as stylistic principle” applied—which is, after all, also a categorization, just one that classifies Richter’s work as unclassifiable..3 In his oeuvre, the different stylistic periods do not replace one another but rather recur in a kind of cyclical movement. This is particularly striking in the landscapes, which Richter has painted since 1963. Photorealism, blurriness, abstraction, montage, enlargement, and overpainting serve him as tried and true means for representing nature. They do not preclude one another but coexist side by side on equal footing—a fact that seems to be announced already in the painting Tisch mentioned above. Richter wrote in 1966: I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no programme, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that least 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.4 If one recalls that in the late 1960s he was entering that phase of his painting in which most of his landscapes to date were produced, it is perhaps no coincidence that he uses the metaphor of the boundless here. After a series of fifteen seascapes produced in 1968 and especially 1969, Richter painted Seestück (See-See) (Seascape [Sea-Sea]) in 1970 (fig. 2). This monumental painting in shades of black, white, and gray shows a slightly moving surface of the sea and a horizon that divides the canvas roughly in the middle. Next to the blurry horizon line, which radiates a bright glow, as if the sun was about to rise, is a sky covered by massive clouds. Closer inspection reveals that i t is a photomontage—to which Richter also explicitly alludes in the title (See-See): the “sky” is actually a body of water. On the basis of two photographs glued together, as revealed by several pages with photographs in Atlas (fig. 3), Richter

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Lisa Ortner-Kreil

produced a boundless, artificial waterscape. The surface of the sea reflects not only the sky, but also water, which in a sense turns one’s orientation within the rectangle upside down—the top could be the bottom and vice versa. This painting is characteristic of Richter’s overall artistic project insofar as it strangely unites several seeming contradictions: it is at once representational and abstract. A motif can be made out clearly; nevertheless, the surface of the water turns before our eyes into a liquid allover: “The wavy structure is thus at once a ‘nonobjective’ pattern and a mimetic depiction of nature.”5 Richter is not interested in depicting a natural drama or the old rift between the human being or culture and nature, as had been emphasized above all by Romanticism. The visual impression, which at first seems familiar, of a painting reproducing a sublime image from nature is unsettled by a vexation and specifically “not abruptly but usually gradually and in varying dosages. The artificial stands out increasingly and makes it impossible to overlook the combination.”6 Painting draws attention to itself by unmasking its illusionistic ability; at the same time, however, it also reclaims a status that seems more relevant than ever before, especially since the existence of possibilities of digital generation. Looking at Richter’s constructed or manipulated waterscapes today (pp. 136, 139, 142, 143), entirely different chains of thought are triggered than those of the period around 1970 when they were created, when these images represented a conscious defensive attitude on the part of the artist against the dictum of socially engaged painting. After he had produced a series of seascapes between 1968 and 1975, Richter returned to this subject in 1998 (p. 61), but decisively expanded their format, which further underscores both their message and their topicality: a feeling of familiarity paired with a certain alienation. Though usually it appears to be slightly elevated, the viewer’s standpoint remains unclarified: no bank, no coast is in sight; even the horizon seems unclarified and blurry. The eye no longer finds a point on which to settle, resulting in a lack of orientation. In the Seascapes he has been producing since the early 1980s (fig. 4), the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto addressed issues similar to Richter’s. It is astonishing

Fig. 3 — Gerhard Richter Atlas, No. 191 4 collages from color photographs 66.7 × 51.7 cm Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich

Fig. 4 — Hiroshi Sugimoto Boden Sea, Utwill, 1993 Gelatin silver print, 42.3 × 54.2 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1994

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The World without Us: On the Topicality of Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes

Fig. 5 — Gerhard Richter Große Teyde-Landschaft (mit zwei Figuren) (Large Teyde Landscape [with Two Figures]), 1971 Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm, Crex Collection, Zurich (p. 82)

how well these groups of works by the two artists complement each other: whereas Richter starts out from photographs as models and always seems drawn by the objectivity that photographs seem to have over painting, Sugimoto’s photographs, much like the photographs of Pictorialism around 1990, make a profoundly painterly claim. Both artists, however, have in common that they regard the borders between the media as fluid. Dispensing with color, which Sugimoto does consistently and Richter does primarily in his early work, is another parallel.7 By means of Minimalism and the artificiality of representation, Richter’s and Sugimoto’s seascapes also annul the factor of the era in which they were created in that they permit no signs of civilization at all. From today’s perspective, associations with science fiction, goth, and gaming aesthetics and their computergenerated landscape images are permissible.8 Richter has formulated the division that is inherent in viewing his images of nature as follows: “Of course, my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all ‘untruthful’ (even if I did not always find a way of showing it).”9 They are stubbornly anachronistic and cite a style of representation from the past, but are at the same time impertinently topical. Already in his of Seestück (See-See), Richter countered the image of the sea, which is often laden with kitsch and called “overpowering” and intimate, with an artificially produced landscape—a virtual reality—to which we can surrender with fascination or from which we can turn away, disappointed and deceived. In 1971, Richter produced Große Teyde-Landschaft (mit zwei Figuren) (Large Teyde Landscape [with Two Figures]) (fig. 5). A horizon divides the canvas in the middle; in the lower half of the painting, earthy and green tones suggest a landscape, while the top half of the painting is taken up by an ice-blue sky. As plate 136 of the Atlas shows (fig. 6), Richter again used a photograph as his point of departure, in this case one he had taken on a family vacation on the volcanic island of Tenerife in 1969. On comparing the photograph with the executed painting, it becomes clear that Richter crucially altered the proportions for the painting. Two dark, figure-like spots in the lower left of the painting, together with

Fig. 6 — Gerhard Richter Atlas, No. 136, 1971 color photographs, 51.7 × 66.7 cm, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich

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Lisa Ortner-Kreil

Fig. 7 — Gerhard Richter Große Teyde-Landschaft (mit zwei Figuren) (Large Teyde Landscape [with Two Figures]), 1971 detail (fig. 5)

the title, make the illusion perfect (fig. 7): the “photograph of a collection of little bundles of grass”10 becomes as a result of a blow-up in the painting a blurrily contoured earth landscape whose schematic execution cannot be grasped in greater detail. It is as if the representationalism in this painting closes itself off all the more, the longer one tries to identify it, until it finally dissolves into an abstract plane of color, much like in Seestück (See-See). This jumping back and forth between illusion (in the sense of a representation with tangible objects) and abstraction (in the sense of a nonobjective plane of color) is produced by Richter on one and the same canvas. An effect that we know from digital photography in which an image becomes blurry at low resolution when it is enlarged too much (becoming “pixelated”) seems to have been anticipated by Richter using the means of painting. Paintings such as this one make it unmistakably clear that he, as Hubertus Butin writes, “saw nature first through the medium of mechanical reproduction of photography”11 and hence is not necessarily interested in nature as such but rather in an image of nature that can be formed and altered that he generates from photography and painting in equal measure. In 1981, Gerhard Richter painted Davos (fig. 8) as part of an eponymous series; the photographs on which it is based are also documented in Atlas (fig. 9). The painting shows a snow-covered massif in its lower third and above that, relatively central, a sun low in the sky. The complete visual impression is dipped in soft light by fog. The observer’s viewing point is once again slightly elevated. Through the fog we see that behind the closest mountain ridge a second massif is suggested, but the prospect on it is blocked. This is one of those paintings by Richter that have repeatedly been related to German Romanticism and especially to the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. Richter’s choice of motif, his structure with its low-lying horizon, and the highly atmospheric lighting should be identified as clear references. The reception of Richter’s romanticizing landscapes initially met with a reserved reception from art historians, which Dietmar Elger explained as “speechlessness and helplessness,” “since the pictures do indeed seem to provide (ersatz) satisfaction in such a misleading way to a broad audience’s expectations that art should have recognizable motifs and its desire for an atmospheric experience of nature.”12 Many authors, including Butin, Armin Zweite, and Mark Godfrey, have subsequently addressed Richter’s relationship to Caspar David Friedrich and found different interpretative approaches.13 Considering Richter’s critical and high ambitions for his own work, it seems we can rule out accusing him of worshipping icons or mourning a lost epoch. In Richter’s work, painting is rather stripped of all drama and all pathos. But why then did he nevertheless paint so many landscapes, all of which have reminiscences of German Romanticism? Julia Gelshorn has proposed understanding these romanticizing landscapes as “types, patterns, and set pieces”14 in order to reflect on them as a variation on the

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The World without Us: On the Topicality of Gerhard Richter’s Landscapes

power of images or of aesthetic experience. One could therefore say that Richter is developing a metalevel of the concept of the landscape with which he reflects on the genre and at the same time legitimizes painting in the way he paints by citing the stylistic means of German Romanticism. Richter integrates this the metalevel in various ways: on the one hand, effects of blurriness, as in the form of fog in Davos, truly seem to be work-immanent interferences that make it impossible to see the motif in all its beauty. On the other hand, Richter uses unromantic details in the work to torpedo any drifting off into an uncritical immersion in the atmosphere of the landscape. In Landschaft bei Hubbelrath (Landscape near Hubbelrath) of 1969 (p. 79), for example, we are again dealing with a low-lying horizon and a spectacular, indirectly lit sky. But we also see a road wet with rain including traffic signs and signposts on the right side of the painting, which Richter has painted in the same closed-off, delicately smeared style as the rest of the painting. These details, which show Landscape near Hubbelrath to be a human-made landscape, nevertheless work decidedly against an idealized reception of the landscape. In Ruhrtalbrücke (Ruhrtal Bridge) of 1969 (p. 71), too, Richter does not allow us to perceive the beauty of the landscape as a false idea: the overwhelming majority of the painting is again occupied by the sky. On the lower edge of the painting, a landscape in shades of dark green can be seen with the Ruhr River running through it. Horizontally, the landscape is spanned by an enormous bridge, which in the painting, however, as a consequence of the perspective, shrinks into a simple line supported at regular intervals by vertical piers. The human structure dovetails with nature.15 Whereas in the case of Landschaft bei Hubbelrath the traces of human civilization could still be understood as an interfering factor, here Richter chose another approach: the enormous structure that in reality cuts through the landscape appears in Richter’s work to be almost decorative and in any case aestheticizing. The bridge piers divide the lower quarter of the painting into equal segments and recall a grid, which once again turns the photorealistic depiction into an abstraction. The choice of the viewpoint—the Ruhr runs into the horizon at the exact center of the bridge—further

Fig. 8 — Gerhard Richter Davos, 1981 Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm Private collection (p. 73)

Fig. 9 – Gerhard Richter Atlas, No. 333, 1972 16 color photographs, 51.7 × 73.5 cm Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich

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Lisa Ortner-Kreil

supports this impression of the almost mathematically balanced composition of the painting. In all of these paintings, Richter is not criticizing civilization; rather, in them he cites a painting style from the past and at the same time transfers it to the present—and, I would even say, into the future—by allowing a glitch in the painting.16 An irregularity, a vexation, a “violation of the coding” becomes visible that gives us to understand that an unambiguous image of the world cannot be determined and that consequently painting cannot and should not provide one either. Richter places at our disposition—and the landscapes discussed here make that especially clear—the possibilities and tasks of a painting. His landscapes are loaded with alienation effects that are expressed in very different ways. “A landscape idyll in Richter is at once the reflection on and parody of itself,” writes Wolfgang Ullrich and explains Richter’s enduring success by noting that he “ knows how to code his pictures twice, namely, as pictures and as pictures about pictures.”17 If Richter notes in the quotation in the epigraph that he mistrusts the picture of reality that our senses convey to us, this statement is manifested in nearly every single one of his works. This is especially evident in his landscapes, which in their artificiality, blurriness, constructed quality, their simultaneous representationalism and abstraction, provided with various details of “interferences” can be understood as arguments for looking at images of “reality” reproduced in the media with considerably more skepticism than we already do.18 Richter’s artistic practices, moreover, produce images whose color gradients and blurring and smoothing tools are imitated in the digital cosmos that surrounds us and thus anticipate since the 1960s visual aesthetics that are omnipresent today. The present text was written in the first days after the coronavirus crisis reached Europe. At a time when we are becoming drastically more aware than almost ever before of the speed, networking, and globalization, but also the fragility of our world, the “slow” medium of painting and the depiction of landscape offers an opposite pole. Gerhard Richter’s landscapes always draw attention to their status as a visual medium by evading unambiguous interpretation and teaching us to permit doubt and uncertainty—things we can accept only with difficult today, as the current situation shows us. The human being is left out of these paintings; they sketch a world that takes place without us and thereby demonstrate once again their topicality.

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1 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Rolf Schön, 1972,” in Richter, Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961–2007, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London, 2009), 60. 2 In an interview in 1973, Gerhard Richter responded to the question “Do you feel as if you belong to any particular tendency in contemporary art?” by saying “Yes, but that tendency doesn’t have a name.” He then mentioned Robert Ryman, Gilbert & George, Walter de Maria, Bruce Nauman, and Sol LeWitt and found: “They don’t have a ‘common denominator.’ That’s why we have to reject this obsession with classifying everything, with confining artists to categories.” Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 1973,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 80. 3 The German art historian Klaus Honnef organized a Richter exhibition in Aachen in 1969 and first employed this expression, which has become a popular one in Richter scholarship, in his text “Schwierigkeiten beim Beschreiben der Realität: Richters Malerei zwischen Kunst und Gegenwart,” in Gerhard Richter: 27.3–22.4. 1969, exh. cat. Gegenverkehr, Aachen (Aachen, 1969). 4 Gerhard Richter, “Note 1966,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 46. 5 Julia Gelshorn, Aneignung und Wiederholung: Bilddiskurse im Werk von Gerhard Richter und Sigmar Polke (Munich, 2012), p. 126. 6 Armin Zweite, Gerhard Richter, Leben und Werk: Das Denken ist beim Malen das Malen (Munich, 2019), p. 229. 7 Cf. Armin Zweite, ed., Hiroshi Sugimoto: Revolution, exh. cat. Museum Brandhorst, Munich (Ostfildern, 2012), pp. 37–38.

8 Hiroshi Sugimoto’s oeuvre also operates decidedly close to popular culture: for example, the artist granted permission to use the photograph mentioned available on the cover of U2’s 2009 album No Line on the Horizon. The photograph was thus used for the album cover, albeit cropped and without any text covering it, and was thus disseminated in the mass media. 9 Gerhard Richter, “Conversation with Mathias Schreiber, 1972,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 158. 10 Dietmar Elger, “Landscape as a Model,” in Elger, ed., Gerhard Richter: Landscapes (OstfildernRuit, 2011), pp. 17–28, esp. p. 22. 11 Hubertus Butin, “Gerhard Richter’s Editions and the Discourses of Images,” in Butin, Stefan Gronert, and Thomas Olbricht, eds., Gerhard Richter: Editions, 1965–2013 (Ostfildern, 2014), p. 95. 12 Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter, Maler (Cologne, 2018), p. 305. 13 Cf. Hubertus Butin, “Romantic Landscapes as ‘Cuckoo’s Eggs,’” in Elger 1998 (see note 10), pp. 121–29; Zweite 2019 (see note 6), p. 235; and Mark Godfrey, “Damaged Landscapes,” in idem and Nicholas Serota, eds., Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat. Tate Modern (London, 2011), pp. 73–88, esp. pp. 79ff. 14 Gelshorn 2012 (see note 5), p. 71. 15 The bridge was built beginning in 1963 and dedicated in 1966. On July 11, 2019, the Landesbetrieb Strassenbau Nordrhein-Westfalen (State Enterprise for Road Building of North-Rhine-Westphalia) officially announced that the bridge would be demolished and replaced by a wider bridge. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2024. 16 On the concept of the glitch, see Michael Betancourt, Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics (London, 2016).

17 Wolfgang Ullrich, Die Geschichte der Unschärfe (Berlin, 2002), p. 141. 18 James Farago wrote in his review of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition Painting after All at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: “For 60 years, he has treated uncertainty as an ethical duty. . . . That is the priceless example he offers today’s young artists whose every mistake or hesitation gets pounced on by digital Savonarolas,” The New York Times, March 5, 2020, https://www. nytimes.com/2020/03/05/arts/ design/gerhard-richter-review-metbreuer.html.

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Some Thoughts on Landscape in the History of Ideas

Cathérine Hug

“I felt like painting something beautiful.” —Gerhard Richter 1

Fig. 1 — Konrad Witz Wundersamer Fischzug (The Miraculous Draft of Fishes), 1444 Oil on wood, 134.6 × 153.2 cm Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva

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When we speak about landscape—whether when extravagantly describing our impressions of a vacation, contemplatively catching our breath on a hike, or looking at Gerhard Richter’s paintings—our approach to it is always embedded in a broadly ramified discourse on aesthetics. We cannot help but reflect on a landscape within normatively conditioned parameters. It quickly becomes clear that it usually has a positive connotation: one would hardly call a landscape “ugly”—at most, “unspectacular” or “branded” or “scarred” by human intervention. This essay is intended to explore, using examples and especially Richter’s own statements, the question why that is. From the perspective of the reception aesthetics—that is to say, from the viewer’s point of view—everyone will surely agree that Gerhard Richter’s landscape paintings seem beautiful to us, or at least do not contradict our idea of what is understood to be beautiful. The artist’s motivation for continually making room for this genre in his work is discussed in this volume by Hubertus Butin (pp. 12–23) and Lisa Ortner-Kreil (pp. 24–31). That Richter’s statement from 1970 that with landscapes his intention was to paint something “beautiful” also has a subversive character has been noted by the art historian Dietmar Elger and is the starting point for the present essay.2 In the most recent broad analysis of the theme of landscape painting, the art critic Barry Schwabsky shows why artists even today choose landscape painting as a suitable metaphor, first, for our relationship to nature and, second, for our relationship to painting itself; he also cites Richter as a seminal example.3

Landscape: Real Design or Virtual Idea? The concept of landscape is a relatively recent invention from the early modern period, and praising its beauty is of an even more recent date, which became common only with the rise of tourism in the nineteenth century, when hiking as physically real striding through a landscape began to occupy a special place (as it still does).4 The interrelationship of the Western concept of the landscape, claims of territorial authority, and cartography is problematized in the present volume by T. J. Demos (pp. 190–99). Although it is surely difficult to agree on “the first landscape in the history of art in the West,” there is consensus on which landscape is the first geographically “confidently locatable” one, namely, Konrad Witz’s Wundersamer Fischzug (The Miraculous Draft of Fishes) of 1444 (fig. 1). On this altarpiece produced for St. Peter’s Cathedral in Geneva, Jesus Christ is seen striding on the water toward a fishing boat; this Biblical scene, which Christian’s claim took place on the Sea of Galilee,5 was relocated by Witz to Lake Geneva, where the peaks of the two mountains Le Môle and Petit Salève are clearly recognizable. The painter’s iconographic program makes sense to us even today: in

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order to establish identification between the viewers and the scene, it was necessary to have a specific place as a point of connection, and this “strategy of identification” retains its relevance even today: geographical closeness also makes it possible to regard the elated hero as “one of ours.” Astonishingly, these two factors of proximity and cult of personality correspond to the “news factors” that have dominated the mass media since the 1960s.6 Using this strategy, Witz caused viewers of this scene to establish a personal connection to a place familiar to them as a community. This leads us to a dilemma inherent in landscape painting: the contemplative aspect takes place in a movement of individual sensation, but the motif is, as a rule, part of a collective idea. This assumption in the aesthetics of reception presumes that nature as an entity independent of the human being and the landscape as perceived by the human being do not necessarily coincide and can indeed exist and be negotiated independently of each other. No one in the nineteenth century made it more emphatically and influentially clear that this did not have to be the case than Henry David Thoreau. As he writes: “I love nature, I love the landscape, because it is so sincere. It never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest.”7 It is notable of this diary entry, first, that the author used landscape and nature synonymously and, second, describes it not as a fixed image but rather as a fleeting impression that is difficult to grasp and for that reason all the more valuable. Thoreau saw himself not as an opponent or conqueror of nature, nor as an observer of a physically distant landscape, as was the case in the discourse concerning the sublime at the time.8 Rather, Thoreau, saw himself—and this makes his position so relevant to the current discourse on the Anthropocene—as part of a difficult to define, constantly changing concept of nature and the landscape that permits no certainly about its true form. With that, we can connect the circle to Richter: “I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”9 Whereas Lisa OrtnerKreil discusses in this volume the topicality of Richter’s understanding of “uncertainty” in relation to our use of media and the coronavirus pandemic that dominates all the headlines today (p. 30), she is concerned with uncertainty as one of several constitutive, positively connoted factors to describe the “beautiful” in Richter’s landscapes. In this view, “uncertainty” can mean leaving as many options open as possible and thus sounding out one’s own stylistic pluralism— in the viewer, according to Ortner-Kreil, this is intended to mean a critical engagement with seeing without any effort to have a successful experience. The genre of the landscape, according to Richter, offers an ideal room for play to that end: “I don’t want to see the world in any personal way. I have no aesthetic problem, and the technique of making is immaterial. There’s no distinction between the paintings, and I would like to change my method as often as appropriate.”10 Richter’s productive but also unsettling relationship of tension in the trench

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combat in the ideological war between advocates of representational and those of abstract painting or Art Informel is expressed in his ideas in his text for Documenta 7 from 1982: “Every object, being part of an ultimately incomprehensible world, also embodies that world; when represented in a picture, the object conveys this mystery all the more powerfully, the less of a ‘function’ the picture has. . . . So, in dealing with this inexplicable reality, the lovelier, cleverer, madder, extremer, more visual and more incomprehensible the analogy, the better the picture.”11 The seemingly contradictory—lovely, mad, incomprehensible—is a constitutive element of the artistic attitude here, as Oskar Bätschmann has shown: “Society recognized artists by their habitual resistance, just as artists derived their authority from the fact that they posed a challenge and were subversive and misunderstood.”12 The way the adjective “subversive” is accented or even placed differently here—for the general viewer, in abstraction; for the art historian, in Richter’s alternating use of abstraction and figuration—is clarified by Richter’s statement of 1981: “If the Abstract Pictures show my reality, then the landscapes and the still-lifes show my yearning. . . . [B]ut though these pictures are motivated by the dream of a classical order and a pristine world—by nostalgia, in other words—the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality.”13

The Beautiful Is the Ephemeral In its day, the art known as classical modernism, represented by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Claude Monet, completely turned the common idea of beauty upside down, but it has long since been accepted into the canon. It would exceed the scope of the present essay to go into this complex genealogy in detail, but roughly speaking it can be said that what was criticized back then—the clearly defined evolved into something fleeting in the concept of landscape—can be perceived as beautiful today, which was not the case in an age dominated by academicism. This apparent paradox—since, after all, in retrospect it can be easily shown that taste, too, changes as visual habits change— was the point of departure for the pioneering exhibition Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, in which Gerhard Richter was also represented with four landscapes; the foreword to the exhibition catalogue asks: “How could it be that the Parisian critic J. Claretie, after visiting an exhibition in 1874 what later came to be known as the first Impressionist Exhibition, would write that: ‘M. Monet, . . . Pissarro, Mlle Morisot and others appear to have declared war on beauty,’[14] while today Impressionist paintings have become the very embodiment of beauty in the art of the Western world?”15 The genre of the landscape

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illustrates with great clarity how much its qualification as beautiful depends on the relationship between the viewer and the object being viewed. Whereas in the nineteenth century it was still assumed that the human being had to authorize wild nature and its socialized form, the landscape, that changed considerably in the postwar period and especially as ecological awareness has grown since the 1970s. The discourse in the debate over the Anthropocene no longer sees human beings and nature or the landscape as separate systems, but rather in interdependence and in the best case in a symbiotic constellation: human beings are part of a larger whole; they need nature, but in fact nature does not really need them. Do we look at Claude Monet’s Houses of Parliament, Sunset of 1904 (fig. 2) today with different eyes than its author did? In this painting, the Impressionist captures the atmospheric mood in London, then the world’s largest metropolis, whose air was severely polluted by coal. We nevertheless perceive the painting as beautiful, but so did his contemporaries, at the very point of the painting’s creation. Monet largely enjoyed public respect. Despite all of that, a criticism is also echoed in this visually supposedly charming assessment: already at this early point, the artist had withdrawn to the countryside—first to Argenteuil and Vétheuil and ultimately to Giverny—and was pursuing a new passion of gardening, which had just become very fashionable, as a counterbalance and reaction to progressing industrialization. This passion for nature both in a manageable private space and in extremely spacious parks found direct expression in Monet’s art. Like forests and parks, gardens had also become sites for leisure time.16 Richter does not restrict his interest in landscapes to gardens; rather, he exploits their entire spectrum, as this exhibition is intended to show.17 In particular, large format paintings such as Parkstück (Park Piece), 1971 (p. 117), or Sankt Gallen, 1989 (pp. 120–21), can be cited in a comparison to Monet, in which he more or less consciously explores, all the more rigorously, the allover concept in the sense of painting across the entire surface but also a painting’s “own reality.” Our admiration for landscapes and their aesthetic qualities grew in the nineteenth century and even boomed in parallel with their devastation—whether from

Fig. 2 — Claude Monet Le Parlement de Londres, soleil couchant (Houses of Parliament, Sunset), 1904 Oil on canvas, 81 × 92 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, gift of Walter Haefner, 1995

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Some Thoughts on Landscape in the History of Ideas

war or ecological catastrophes such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Hambach open-pit coal mine. One particular momentum of their history came in the eighteenth century when people began to explore the landscape. The phenomenon was subsumed under the concept of the Grand Tour and is considered an elitist precursor of mass tourism.18 This educational trip by way of France and Switzerland to Italy was taken primarily by well-heeled, intellectually curious, and, as a rule, artistically predisposed men—and on returning home they usually entertained their compatriots with their literary and visual impressions. This fashion was adopted by people in other countries, the most famous of whom was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.19 The remarkable thing in his descriptions of his impressions of landscapes is how difficult it is to capture the atmosphere of the Alps as influenced by meteorological conditions:

Fig. 3 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Die Mythen (The Myths), June 17, 1775 Graphite on paper, 34.7 × 43.2 cm Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Museum collection

When we look at the mountains, either closely or from a distance, and see their summits above us at one time glittering in the sunshine, at another enveloped in mist, swept round with strong clouds, or blackened with showers, we are disposed to ascribe it all to atmosphere. For instance, I believe that the mass of earth generally, and, therefore, also in an especial way its more considerable continents do not exercise a constant and invariable force of attraction, but that this attractive force manifests itself by a certain pulse. Though all other attempts by other objects to determine this oscillation may be too limited and rude, the atmosphere furnishes a standard both delicate and large enough to test their silent operations.20 When Goethe put those lines to paper, he had already been preoccupied visually with the beauty of the ephemeral and the difficulty of capturing it in drawings (fig. 3). Yet language does not stand above the drawing; rather, Goethe’s searching hand, as it probes the topography and the natural atmosphere, supports the linguistic formulation that follows.

Sublimely Beautiful, Because Intangible Goethe’s remarks make it clear how difficult it is to capture ambiguities realistically in words and writing, and that accounts for their artistic appeal and their topicality in today simultaneous timelessness. In his much-admired reference work on the history of beauty, Umberto Eco summed up the proximity of the incomprehensible to the beautiful: “At this point in the eighteenth century, however, the idea of the Sublime was associated primarily with . . . nature, an experience that contained within itself a bias toward formlessness, suffering, and dread. . . .

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[A]rt has often been praised for having produced beautiful portrayals or imitations of ugliness, formlessness and terror, monsters or the Devil, death or a tempest.”21 The diffuse, the ambiguous, the mysterious, and the melancholy— all these adjectives describe, sometimes more, sometimes less, Gerhard Richter’s landscapes as well. But why, really? Empirical aesthetics, a relatively young research discipline (for example, the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt am Main dedicated to the subject was only founded in 2012), offers an answer to that question: The perception of nature is always definitively positive. But there is this abutment. There is something about it that is perceived as slightly sad. Or when we have the feeling that is something threatening. Mind you that landscapes that are judged beautiful also have something melancholic or sentimental was not an attribution of researchers but of the experimental subjects themselves who described the landscapes in that way. Negative feelings are not simply the mirror image of positive ones. They are fundamentally different. Negative emotions seize our attention more—the daily news is a typical example of that. Negative factors also create stronger memories.22 These very recent, empirically confirming findings are of enormous power in view of the incessantly cited thesis that wants to associate the general Western feeling of beauty with harmony and realism because they represent statistical evidence that our sense of beauty is also influenced by imperfections and ambiguities. In the immediate postwar period, art was supposed to be everything but unambiguous in order to avoid any suspicion of propaganda. As in geopolitics, North America set the tone in the art world as well with the Abstract Expressionists, at least in the Western hemisphere.23 It would, however, be too simplistic to disqualify these artists as a soft-power instrument of the American government

Fig. 4 — Barnett Newman Tundra, 1950 Oil on canvas, 182.2 × 226 cm Private collection

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Some Thoughts on Landscape in the History of Ideas

Fig. 5 — Jackson Pollock Moon Vibrations, 1953–55 Oil on canvas, mounted on masonite 109.2 × 86.4 cm Private collection, courtesy of Gagosian

and thus belittle their art-historical achievement. The revival of the discourse on the sublime could, after all, also be observed in artists far less commercially successful than Jackson Pollock. Richter, who did not settle in West Germany, coming from Dresden, until February 1961, that is, six months before the building of the Berlin Wall, and so could not follow this discussion seamlessly since it began in the late 1940s, repeatedly referred in later interviews to the importance that American artists such as John Cage,24 Barnett Newman (fig. 4), Jackson Pollock (fig. 5), Mark Rothko,25 and the slightly younger Robert Ryman had for him. The second Documenta of 1959, which Richter attended, established crucial parameters, since it was the first time one could see on a grand scale representatives of Abstract Expressionism, such as Newman and Pollock,26 and of Art Informel.27 Richter said of the Abstract Expressionists: “Barnett Newman was always important. He came to me straight after Mondrian and Pollock. Newman was an ideal, because he created these big, clear, sublime fields.”28 But did he mean in relation to Newman himself, and what was Richter’s relationship to this ideal that can be produced by external and internal images of landscape? Newman’s manifesto “The Sublime Now” of 1948 offers the answer: “We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident.”29

The Change as Constant One long-underestimated European painter and proponent of the stylistic pluralism for which Richter strives is Francis Picabia. A pioneering role in the overcoming of the taboo against the figurative in Western Europe was played by the Picabia retrospective curated by Jean-Hubert Martin at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1976. In a conversation with the present author, the exhibition organizer remarked in retrospect: “Many of the visitors to our exhibition in 1976 found it difficult to engage with those [realistic] works. But for artists such as Gerhard Richter, for instance, as well as open-minded, clear-sighted art lovers, that exhibition was an incredible discovery.”30 Richter himself, who according to Martin had seen the exhibition, including several landscapes such as Plumes (Feathers) (1923–25, fig. 6),31 mentions Picabia for the latter’s talent for the “changeable.”32 That Richter would have a solo exhibition at the same institution as Picabia just one year later makes it clear that its director, Pontus Hultén, had a continual interest in this “dialectical oscillation”33 of abstraction and figuration in one and the same artistic personality.

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Cathérine Hug

In summary, it can be said that the genre of the landscape in favor of an experience of art that is not culturally pre-coded is very well suited to taking advantage of the richly nuanced spectrum in the tension between abstraction and realism and making this supposed dichotomy seem obsolete. The evocation of a strong emotion is thus what the viewer of art and of landscape have in common. In his essay “Painting a Landscape” of 1966, the art critic John Berger provided a lucid explanation of why this formal osmosis of abstract and figurative in the landscape painting has become so suitable for the masses in the postwar period: “The ‘legibility’ of the image is something which must be approached with extreme caution. The cult of obscurity is sentimental nonsense. But the kind of clarity which two centuries of art encouraged people to expect, the clarity of maximum resemblance, is irrevocably outdated. This is not the result of a mere change of fashion but a development in our understanding of reality. Objects no longer confront us. Rather, relationships surround us.”34 The year 2020 stands under the sign of the coronavirus crisis, whose worldwide most tangible consequences on the personal level are social distancing35 and massive restrictions on movement. Especially against that backdrop, we are certainly becoming aware how precious and ultimately irreplaceable sensual experiences in a mutually shared process of reception are, especially when they can become projection screens of freedom, as in thecase of landscapes.

Fig. 6 – Francis Picabia Plumes (Feathers), 1923–25 Enamel varnish on canvas 119 × 78.7 ×17.5 cm Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

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1 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Rolf-Gunter Dienst, 1970” in Richter, Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961–2007, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London, 2009), p. 56. 2 Dietmar Elger, “Foreword,” in Elger, ed., Gerhard Richter: Landscapes (Ostfildern, 2011), p. 5. 3 Barry Schwabsky, “Painting with the Flow of the World,” in Todd Bradway, ed., Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism (London, 2019), pp. 22, 25. 4 Claudia Selheim, Frank Matthias Kammel, and Thomas Brehm, eds., Wanderland: Eine Reise durch die Geschichte des Wanderns, exh. cat. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (2018). 5 Luke 5:1. 6 The twelve news factors according to Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge (1965) in Elisabeth NoelleNeumann, Winfried Schulz, and Jürgen Wilke, eds., Das Fischer Lexikon der Publizistik und Massenkommunikation (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), p. 331. 7 Henry David Thoreau, “Journal, 16 November 1850,” in Bradford Torrey, ed., The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Cambridge, MA, 1906), p. 100. 8 Chandos Michael Brown, “The First American Sublime,” in Timothy M. Costelloe, ed., The Sublime from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, UK, 2012), pp. 147–70, esp. pp. 159–60. 9 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1966,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 46. 10 Richter 1970 (see note 1), p. 56. 11 Gerhard Richter, “Text for Catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 121. 12 Oskar Bätschmann, “Landscapes at One Remove,” in Elger 2011 (see note 2), 57–69, esp. 59. 13 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1981,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), pp. 120. See also Bätschmann 2011 (see note 12), pp. 65–66.

14 J. Claretie, “Le Salon de 1874,” in L’art et les artistes français contemporains (Paris, 1876). 15 James T. Demetrion, “Foreword,” in Neal Benezra et al., eds., Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century, exh. cat. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (1999), p. 7. 16 On Monet’s close interactions with successful and innovative plant suppliers and landscape designers such as Georges Truffaut and Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac (for the water lilies), see Cathérine Hug and Monika Leonhardt, “Claude Monet the Gardener,” in Christoph Becker, ed., Monet’s Garden, exh. cat. w Kunsthaus Zürich (Ostfildern, 2004), pp. 113–57. 17 Gerhard Richter never explicitly connected his understanding of landscape and nature with remembered images of the rubble landscapes of bombed cities. In their craggy visual language, the almost fifty city portraits that emerged between 1968 and 1970 (pp. 96–99) are legitimately reminiscent of bombed out cities, which, however, was not at the forefront for Gerhard Richter during their production, but appeared to him only after the fact; see Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Maler (Cologne, 2018), p. 182. Such visual memories, however, are likely to have influenced, consciously or unconsciously, everyone who experienced that period, and so too presumably with Richter as well. For that reason, I take the liberty of alluding to the following detailed analysis: David Blackbourn, “The ‘Economic Miracle’ and the Rise of Ecology,” in Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (London, 2006), pp. 308–21.

18 Introductory literature: Christopher Hibbert, The Grand Tour (London, 1987); Clare Hornsby, ed., The Impact of Italy: The Grand Tour and Beyond (London, 2000); Tijana Rakić and Jo-Anne Lester, eds., Travel, Tourism and Art (London, 2013). 19 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Travels in Italy (1786), trans. A. J. W. Morrison, (London, 1881), https://www.guten berg.org/files/53205/53205h/53205 -h.htm (accessed March 31, 2020). 20 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On the Brenner, September 8, 1786, Evening,” in ibid. 21 Umberto Eco, “The Sublime in Nature,” On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea, trans. Alastair McEwen (London, 2004), pp. 281–84, esp. p. 281. 22 From the manuscript of a radio broadcast, “Die Vermessung der Schönheit” (Measuring Beauty) by Gábor Paál, broadcast: January 1, 2020, editor: Sonja Striegl; director: Günter Maurer; production: SWR, 2019, pp. 16–17. https://www.swr. de/swr2/programm/swr2-wissensendung-uebersicht-100.html (accessed March 31, 2020). 23 On the instrumentalization of Abstract Expressionism by politics, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1983). 24 Between 1939 and 1952, the musician and conceptual artist repeatedly worked on the theme of landscape; his most famous works on the subject art are the series Imaginary Landscape and the work In a Landscape. Richter with reference to the idea of doing in the process of artistic creation “the right thing, the only natural thing,” Richter referred to John Cage’s statement “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” Quoted in Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1985” (November 13, 1985), in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 143. .

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25 I am grateful to Hubertus Butin for the reference to Mark Rosenthal’s interview of Gerhard Richter on Mark Rothko, in which Richter says: “We need beauty in all its variations.” Frances P. Smyth and Jeffrey Weiss, eds., Mark Rothko, exh. cat. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris (Washington, DC, 1998), p. 365. 26 Among other works, Barnett Newman’s Tundra and Jackson Pollock’s Moon Vibrations were shown. 27 In the second Documenta in 1959, curated by Arnold Bode with Werner Haftmann and others as consultants, Jackson Pollock was, with sixteen works, by far the best represented American artist. Barnett Newman was represented by two landscapes, with the legendarily immersive formats of 244 × 543 and 183 × 228 centimeters, respectively. The best-represented Europeans, and representatives of Art Informel, were Nicolas de Staël with twenty-four and WOLS with forty-one works. Significantly, Gerhard Richter never mentions these as influences on his own work in his volume of interviews (2008).

28 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1993,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 298. 29 Barnett Newman, “The Sublime Is Now” (1948), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA, 2003), 580–82, esp. p. 582. 30 Jean-Hubert Martin, quoted in Cathérine Hug, “Picabia after Picabia,” in Hug and Anne Umland, eds., Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction, exh. cat. Kunsthaus Zürich and Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York, 2016), 294–309, esp. p. 303. 31 Exhibited as cat. no. 147 in the Picabia exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. 32 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Amine Hasse, 1977,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 96. 33 Pontus Hultén, foreword, in Gerhard Richter, exh. cat. Centre Pompidou (Paris, 1977), p. 3. 34 John Berger, “Painting a Landscape” (1966), in Berger, Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer (New York, 2003), p. 211. 35 Perhaps one would be well advised to speak of “physical distancing and social solidarity.” I am grateful to Monika Leonhardt and Rhea Plangg for this suggestion.

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Second-Hand Landscapes

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Ägyptische Landschaft (Egyptian Landscape), 1964–65 Oil on canvas, 150 × 165 cm Private collection, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Collection Services

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Ausbruch eines großen Geysir (Eruption of a Big Geyser), 1964 Graphite on paper, 26 × 38 cm Block Collection Berlin

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Familie im Schnee (Family in the Snow), 1966 Oil on canvas, 53 × 70 cm Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gerhard Richter Archive, loan from a private collection

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St. Moritz, 1992 Oil on canvas, 72 × 102 cm Private collection, Switzerland

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Meran (Merano), 1964 Graphite on paper, 40 × 29.5 cm Private collection

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Regenbogen (Rainbow), 1970 Oil on canvas, 50 × 55 cm Private collection

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Wiesental (Meadowland), 1985 Oil on canvas, 90.5 × 94.9 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller, Betsy Babcook and Mrs. Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson Funds, 1985

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Bäume (Trees), 1987 Oil on canvas, 52 × 72 cm Albertina, Vienna, permanent loan from an Austrian private collection

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Kleine Straße (Small Road), 1987 Oil on canvas, 62 × 83 cm Private collection

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Wasserfall (Waterfall), 1997 Oil on canvas, 126 × 90 cm Kunst Museum Winterthur, purchased with help from the Fund for Charitable Purposes of the Canton of Zurich, 1998

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Schneelandschaft (verwischt) (Snowscape [Blurred]), 1966 Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 cm Heidi Horten Collection

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Waldhaus (House in Forest), 2004 Oil on canvas, 126 × 92 cm Private collection

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Seestück (Seascape), 1998 Oil on canvas, 290 x 290 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

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Romanticizing Images as “Cuckoo’s Eggs”

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Vierwaldstätter See (Lake Lucerne), 1969 Oil on canvas, 120 × 150 cm Daros Collection, Switzerland

65

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Elbe, 1957/2012 Inkjet prints on paper after the monotypes of the same name, each 29.5 × 21 cm, 12 of 31 motifs Olbricht Collection

67

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Wolke (Cloud), 1976 Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm Private collection

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Ruhrtalbrücke (Ruhrtal Bridge), 1969 Oil on canvas, 120 × 150 cm Private collection, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Collection Services

71

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Davos, 1981 Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm Private collection

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Eis (Ice), 2011 Artist’s book, offset print, 23.5 × 15.5 cm Private collection

74

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Eis (Ice), 1981 Oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm Ruth McLoughlin Collection, Monaco

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Wolken (Clouds), 1970 Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm Museum Folkwang, Essen

77

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Abendstimmung (Evening Mood), 1969 Oil on canvas, 120 × 150 cm Kunsthalle zu Kiel

78

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Landschaft bei Hubbelrath (Landscape near Hubbelrath), 1969 Oil on canvas, 100 × 140 cm Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, loan from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Stiftung

79

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Venedig (Treppe) (Venice [Staircase]), 1985 Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm Art Institute of Chicago Gift of Edlis Neeson Collection

81

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Große Teyde-Landschaft (mit zwei Figuren) (Large Teyde Landscape [with Two Figures]), 1971 Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm Crex Collection

82

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Teyde-Landschaft (Teyde Landscape), 1971 Oil on canvas, 120 × 180 cm Private collection, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Collection Services

83

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Kleine Teyde-Landschaft (Small Teyde Landscape), 1971 Oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm Private collection, Berlin

84

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Teyde-Landschaft (Teyde Landscape), 1971 Oil on canvas, 120 × 180 cm Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, permanent loan from Kunstverein Museum Schloss Morsbroich e. V.

85

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Vesuv (Vesuvius), 1976 Oil on wood, 66 × 95 cm Crex Collection

87

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Landscapes in Abstraction

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Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2005 Oil on Alu-Dibond, 27.5 × 33.9 cm Albertina, Vienna, permanent loan from an Austrian private collection

91

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Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1984 Oil on canvas, 43 × 60 cm Private collection, Switzerland Abstraktes Bild L (Abstract Painting L), 1995 Oil on canvas, 36 × 41 cm Private collection, Switzerland

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Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1984 Oil on canvas, 43 × 60 cm Private collection, Switzerland

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Sternbild (Star Picture), 1969 Oil on canvas, 92 × 92 cm Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden

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Alpen (Alps), 1970 Oil on canvas, 47 × 53 cm Private collection, Switzerland

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Stadtbild PL (Townscape PL), 1970 Oil on canvas, 170 × 170 cm Private collection via Neues Museum Nuremberg

96

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Stadtbild D (Townscape D), 1968 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Daros Collection, Switzerland

97

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Stadtbild PX (Townscape PX), 1968 Oil on canvas, 101 × 91 cm Wittelsbacher Ausgleichfonds– Sammlung Prinz Franz von Bayern, in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, since 1984

98

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Stadtbild F (Townscape F), 1968 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, permanent loan from the Deutsche Bundesbank

99

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Waldstück (Chile) (Forest Piece [Chile]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 174 × 124 cm Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, gift of Jytte and Dennis Dresing

101

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Waldstück (Okinawa) (Forest Piece [Okinawa]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 174 × 124 cm Anne and Wolfgang Titze Collection

103

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Abstrakte Landschaft (Abstract Landscape), 1969 Oil on canvas, 30 × 40 cm Private collection, Munich

104

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Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1987 Oil on canvas, 62 × 72 cm Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung at the Sprengel Museum Hannover

105

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31.5.1999, 1999 Graphite on paper, 21 × 30.2 cm Kunst Museum Winterthur, purchased with help from the Fund for Charitable Purposes of the Canton of Zurich, 2000

106

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1.6.1999, 1999 Graphite on paper, 21 × 29.7 cm Private collection

107

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Gebirge (Pyrenäen Z.) (Mountains [Pyrenees Z.]), 1968 Graphite on canvas, 130 × 180 cm Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gerhard Richter Archive

109

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110

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40 Tage (40 Days), 2015, 20 of 40 sheets, pencil on paper, each 21 × 29.5 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York, promised gift of Catie and Donald Marron

111

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27.8.1985 (1), 1985 Graphite on paper, 21 × 29.7 cm Kunst Museum Winterthur, purchased with help from the Fund for Charitable Purposes of the Canton of Zurich, 1997

113

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Dschungelbild (Jungle Picture), 1971 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Private collection, courtesy of Ceylan Ecer

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115

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Parkstück (Park Piece), 1971 Oil on canvas, 3 parts, each 300 × 125 cm Nanette Gehrig

117

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Schweizer Alpen I (Swiss Alps I), 1969 5 screen prints on lightweight card, each 69.4 × 69.4 cm Olbricht Collection

118

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Himalaja (Himalaya), 1968 Oil on canvas, 200 × 160 cm Daros Collection, Switzerland

119

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120

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Sankt Gallen, 1989 Oil on canvas, two parts, each 250 × 340 cm University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

121

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24.11.18, 2018 Pencil on paper, 23 × 23 cm Private collection

123

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Landscapes as Fictional Constructs

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Seestück (Grau) (Seascape [Gray]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 70 × 70 cm Private collection

127

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128

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128 Fotos von einem Bild (Halifax 1978) II (128 Details from a Picture [Halifax 1979] II), 1998 8 offset prints on card, each 64.2 × 100.6 cm Olbricht Collection

129

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Seestücke (Fotocollagen) (Seascapes [Photo Collages]), 1973 2 color photographs mounted with adhesive tape, 36.7 × 51.7 cm Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich

130

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Meer (Sea), 1972 Offset print on lightweight card, 67 × 65 cm Olbricht Collection

131

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Umwandlung (Transformation), 1968 Offset print on lightweight card, 46.4 × 67.4 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1994 Kugel, 15.6.1991 (Ball, 15.6.1991), 1991 India ink on paper, 30 × 39.7 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1994

132

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Kugel III (Sphere III), 1992 Stainless steel, diameter: 16 cm Olbricht Collection

133

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Seestück (bewölkt) (Seascape [Cloudy]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Private collection via Neues Museum Nuremberg

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135

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Wolke (Cloud), 1971 Offset print on lightweight card, 64 × 60 cm Olbricht Collection

136

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Räume (Rooms), (from: Atlas), 1971 4 color photographs mounted in room sketches, each 66.7 × 51.7 cm Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich

137

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Seestück (Welle) (Seascape [Wave]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 201.9 × 201.3 cm Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, gift of the Burnett Family Foundation in honor of Marla Price

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139

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Wolken (Clouds), 1969 Offset print on paper, 55 × 50 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings

140

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Seestück I (Seascape I), 1969 Offset print on paper, 51 × 49.3 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings

141

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Seestück (See-See) (Seascape [Sea-Sea]), 1970 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Private collection

142

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Seestück (See-See) (Seascape [Sea-Sea]), 1970 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

143

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Overpainted Landscapes

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Piz Surlej, Piz Corvatsch, 1992 Oil on color photograph, 8.9 × 12.6 cm Peter and Elisabeth Bloch Collection

147

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148

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Firenze (Florene), 2000 oil on color photograph four examples of the edition, each 12 × 12 cm From left: Private collection, courtesy of Schacky Art & Advisory All others: Olbricht Collection

149

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Park, 1990 Oil on color photograph, 50.2 × 63.8 cm Private collection Park (2. Mai 1990), 1990 Oil on offset print, 63.5 × 81 cm Olbricht Collection

150

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Park (3. Mai 1990), 1990 Oil on offset print, 63.5 × 81 cm Private collection Park (7. Mai 1990), 1990 Oil on offset print, 63.5 × 81 cm Olbricht Collection

151

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5. Sept. 2009, 2009 Oil on color photograph, 10 × 15 cm Olbricht Collection

152

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Firenze (Florence), 1999 Oil on color photograph, 12 × 12 cm Olbricht Collection Firenze (Florence), 1999 Oil on color photograph, 12 × 12 cm Private collection

153

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10. Jan. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 ×16.7 cm Private collection 3.2.92, 1992 Oil on color photograph, 8.9 × 12.6 cm Private collection

154

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22. Jan. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection 4. Dez. 2014, 2014 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection

155

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25. Jan. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection 24. Jan. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection

156

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3. Juni 2009, 2009 Oil on color photograph, 10 × 15 cm Private collection 2. Febr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 17 cm Private collection

157

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13. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.6 cm Private collection 30. März 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 17.9 cm Private collection

158

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9. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 17 × 11.3 cm Private collection 10. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 17 × 11.3 cm Private collection

159

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15. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection 23. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 16.7 cm Private collection

160

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24.7.2015 (3), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.7 cm Private collection 24. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 16.7 cm Private collection

161

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27. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 16.7 × 12.6 cm Private collection 28. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 16.7 × 12.6 cm Private collection

162

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24.7.2015 (4), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.9 cm Private collection 28.7.2015 (1), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.5 cm Private collection

163

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28.7.2015 (2), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.9 cm Private collection 28.7.2015 (3), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.9 cm Private collection

164

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8. Juni 2016 (7), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 16.7 × 12.7 cm Private collection 8. Juni 2016 (8), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 16.7 × 12.6 cm Private collection

165

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14.6.2016 (2), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 18.8 cm Private collection 18.6.2016 (4), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 18.8 cm Private collection

166

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25.6.2016 (1), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 18.7 cm Private collection Abstract, 13.5.92, 1992 Photograph overpainted with oil paint on paper, 12.7 × 17.8 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1993

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Baumgruppe (Clump of Trees), 1987 Oil on canvas, 72 × 102 cm Private collection, Switzerland

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Haus 6.1.90 (House 6.1.90), 1990 Offset print on lightweight card, 49.8 × 70 cm Private collection

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Krems, 1986 Oil on canvas, 72 × 102 cm Private collection via Neues Museum Nuremberg

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Venedig (Venice), 1986 Oil on canvas, 86 × 121 cm Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden

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Silsersee (Lake Sils), 1995 Oil on canvas, 41 × 51 cm Private collection

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Abstraktes Bild, Materdell (Abstract Painting, Materdell), 1995 Oil on canvas, 36 × 41 cm Private collection

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Ohne Titel (Febr. 92) (Untitled, Feb. 92), 1992 Graphite and lacquer on card, 21 × 16 cm Private collection

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Landscape as Debt

Matias Faldbakken

Fig. 1 — Peder Balke Stormy Sea, ca. 1870 Oil on paper, mounted on wood, 8.5 × 11 cm National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, the Fine Art Collection, Oslo

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In Norway, there are two artists who are synonymous with landscape painting. The first is Peder Balke and the second is Lars Hertervig. They both immediately sprang to mind when I was asked to write a text about Gerhard Richter’s landscapes. Why? Because both had been the prisms through which I had seen my own landscape, which is to say Norwegian nature. Both had therefore, undoubtedly, formed my own perceptions of landscape painting. I cannot view landscapes without seeing the work of Balke and Hertervig. The best chance I have of reading Richter’s landscapes is to place him in between Balke and Hertervig and to simply see what I can see. At the art academy we learned that Richter’s paintings constituted a kind of posture that was deconstructive. Abstracts, portraits, historical as well as private images, family motifs, still lifes, landscapes—everything was the same. These were drained paintings that were merely imitating painting. The worst you could do was to read them one-to-one. Richter had flattened and, at the same time, doubled everything that (I thought) was rewarding, “magnificent” even, in the act of painting. Representation was worn out, we were told, the same could be said of abstraction, and photography was hovering like a trauma behind it all. Those (like me) who had been admitted to the art schools via “observation”—figurative drawing, painting, and delicate graphic prints—were given a slap in the face. This was (historically) impossible to do, and there was only one man who now had permission to indulge in soft, lovely Figurativism. Gerhard Richter painted the exhaustion of the tradition of painting, so to speak. His images were as hard as Ad Reinhardt’s and as two-faced as irony. Scholars gave him the green light to continue in this vein. He was granted a kind of monopoly. Richter made many young people abandon their paintbrushes—I saw it with my own eyes. No doubt a lot has been said about Richter and painting, Richter and photography, Richter and abstraction, Richter and the representation, Richter and irony, Richter and history, etc., but now, on this side of the millennium, the conflicts in Richter’s painting are no longer perceived as very dramatic. We have other things to contend with. If anyone wants to paint in different “styles” they are free to do so. Truth be told, formats merge anyway. It is not always easy to distinguish painting from photos, text, or objects, even if you try. Now we have “platforms,” we have interfaces; networks without genre boundaries. It all flows together on a new infinite plain: the screen. Anyway, there was always something a little suspect with Richter’s “unassailable” position. This was clear long before any Internet connection. Who starts painting or carries on painting if they are indifferent to it? To conclude that painting is “scraped out” is something you do in order to be able to continue to paint. Some people are interested in creating images with their hands, and anyone who has painted an intricate, figurative picture, even based on a photo, knows that

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it is practically impossible not to become consumed by what you are painting. That you work like a machine to only reproduce reproduction, demonstrate indifference, critically enact painting, or something along those lines is just a claim. Richter seemed too interested in painting. Hedging your bets is also a rather cowardly method. Successful artists play it safe, good artists never do. Richter could not possibly be so spineless that he painted but did not stand up for it? The “cold” approach nevertheless afforded him a strong position—somewhere in the gray zone between politicized art, Pop Art, idea art, and painting. He could even be viewed as a kind of Minimalist, if that was what you liked. But in interviews after the 1980s, Richter started to flatly refuse the more thoughtout (and theoretically advantageous) approaches he himself had chosen, or with which he was associated. In conversations with Benjamin Buchloh, Robert Storr, Nicholas Serota, et al., Richter shied away from and rejected almost everything alleged about the drainage of the motifs, painterly mockery, historical impossibility, etc. Indeed, some of the interviews seem almost choreographed, as if Richter and, e.g., Buchloh jointly tried to launch Richter as a master of paradoxes rather than an analytical ironist. “You can’t possibly mean that!” Read: you can’t possibly mean that you mean painting? Richter suddenly sat up and talked about “yearning,” “lost greatness,” and “painting like C. D.” It was what you suspected as much: C. D. is Caspar David Friedrich. Nobody gets as close to painting as Richter, without bursting at the seams. Peder Balke (1804–1887) came from a family of landless servants in Helgøya in Hedmark county in the heart of the Norwegian inland. Balke was enterprising and clearly incredibly charming. After an upbringing in utmost poverty, he found painting jobs in Toten, in Oppland county, and eventually went on to apprentice as a decorative painter. He then made his way to the capital, Christiania, where he befriended some of the masters. He talked his way further into their world, despite not having the greatest talent for painting, and went on to travel to Stockholm, then to Berlin, and on to Dresden to visit Johan Christian Dahl. “Dahl has told me there is no other way to become an independent Painter than to paint after Nature. . . , however, not in Germany, here is no Nature, but Norway,” Balke wrote in a letter to his old professor Jens Rathke in Christiania. The realization hit Balke quickly in Dresden; he had to get home and study nature. At the time, Dahl was living with Caspar David Friedrich and the message was clear: no artist is greater than nature itself. In the 1930s, Balke was the first Norwegian artist to travel to the “outermost frontier of Europe”—northern Norway—in order to experience nature’s crushing superiority. It was the memories of these experiences that became his central

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motif for the rest of his life. However, Balke never received full recognition from the professional circles in the capital, although he enjoyed some success, both at home and abroad. After 1850, he became more and more involved in labor politics and was largely forgotten as a painter. But he continued to make pictures on the side. In this later period, when there was no audience for his work, he developed his particular painting method, the fordriver technique. (Fordriver in Norwegian is both the word for a broad paint brush made to push around and smooth paint, as well as to “drive out” or “expel.” fig. 1.) And it is in terms of these technical solutions that Balke is most interesting in relation to Richter. Balke was not an especially gifted painter, which is easy to see in the early works. Both arrangement and details could be heavy-handed, lacking academic finesse. You can feel traces of the decorative painter. But it was exactly these tricks from marbling that allowed him to find his method for evoking memories from the north. Later in life Balke had time to slide thin, weak-colored glazes over a light background, often in small format. He whipped up wonderful effects with a sponge, cloth, the back of his hand, and fingers. Sea spray, wave formations, ocean surfaces, shrouded mountains, Northern Lights, and hefty cloud formations were washed into life. Horizontal planes stacked inward—a method taken from Friedrich—was key to most of Balke’s compositions, though the German master’s detail orientation was dissolved in the Norwegian’s relatively abstract processing of the image. Northern Lights over Coastal Landscape from around 1870 is one of many examples (fig. 2). The ten-and-a-half by twelve centimeter colorless painting shows one black outcrop in the foreground. Some simple reefs and rocks almost dripped over the steady sweep of paint from the left that makes up the sea level. One wash upward creates the illusion of the Northern Lights; and finally he placed a fingerprint on the far right. Several writers call Richter’s figurations “classic,” “effortless,” and “virtuoso,” but here Richter himself is clear: “I wasn’t sure that I’m good, not at all, but I was always sure that I’m allowed to do this.” What happens when you press your

Fig. 2 — Peder Balke Northern Lights over Coastal Landscape, ca. 1870 Oil on cardboard, 10.5 × 12 cm National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Desgin, the Fine Art Collection, Oslo

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sharpened pencil down on paper? Then you are deprived of the opportunity to lie, then you have no opportunity to deceive. A quick look at some of Richter’s drawings shows that you are not dealing with a classic virtuoso. Time and again Richter insists that he is not a virtuoso, and that this is his “flaw.” But he gives himself permission to paint. To give yourself permission is crucial for a painter. People who paint figuratively know that Richter’s painting method, using a flat brush or a fan brush to push the paint around, just like Balke’s fordriver trick, despite the striking results, is a useful technique to compensate for the lack of skill. The brush drives away technical blunders in addition to paint. The squeegee, the scraper, the rubbing out, or fuzzing provide good support for a stammering hand. (Balke’s fordriver paintings are actually midway between Richter’s blurred figurations and his dragged abstractions. You could say that in the abstraction Richter is wiping his way toward a motif he hasn’t seen before, while in figuration he is fluffing himself away from the photo of which he already knows the result.) Both Balke and Richter share a memory of Friedrich’s visions of landscape, and chase this with a technique designed to compensate for, precisely, this lack of technique. The yearning for the “great” landscape and the “deep” technique in paintings of earlier times was replaced by a more effect-seeking, screen-like, “harmless” painting technique—something for which Balke received criticism in his time, but for which Richter received full credit just over 100 years later. Where Balke washed away his own shortcomings, Richter used the fordriver effectively; if the motif is dispelled then you can never arrive at the picture either, and this is the whole point. The painting remains uncashed. Thus it continues to give. You never truly reach the landscape. With the brushing out technique, Richter points back to Friedrich’s wellknown fog banks; the mist that lies between the landscape and the viewer like a veil. Friedrich himself was clear about the effects: “When a landscape is covered in mist, it appears grander and more sublime. It strengthens the power of the imagination and arouses our expectation, just like a veiled woman.” The wiping method of painting for both Balke and Richter applies the wiper, the squeegee, the sponge concretely, instead of the mist, metaphorically, to keep distance from the subject. Or as Vilém Flusser said: “The image is a screen that hides what it means.” Lars Hertervig (1830–1902) was also from poor stock. However, unlike the inland boy Balke, he came from the coast, and also unlike Balke, he had an undeniable talent for painting. Hertervig was the Stavanger region’s great art hope. The boy from Tysvær’s gift as an apprentice (also decorative painting) was discovered by local patrons who made sure that he came to Christiania to study fine art, and on to Düsseldorf in 1852, where he went to learn from, among others,

Fig. 3 — Lars Hertervig Old Pine Trees, 1865 Oil on canvas, 64 × 74.5 cm Stavanger Art Museum

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the landscape painter Hans Gude, another Norwegian talent. From these years we have a group of Hertervig landscapes in the fashionable, brown/blue contrast, Düsseldorf style. This was his first “good” period. Then he suffered some form of mental crisis and went home. During his second “good” period, which lasted a couple of years in the mid1860s, Hertervig created the oil paintings for which he is most famous. These still have the contemporary Düsseldorf school’s snuff brown and mossy ground, but it is contrasted by an entirely peculiar, blue sky light topped by sculptural and almost supernatural cloud formations, which break the mold of the more heroic, Romantic painting style he had learned in Germany. The crowning examples from this period are The Tarn (1865), Old Pine Trees (1865) (fig. 3), Island Borgøya (1867) (fig. 4), and From Tysvær (1867). The paintings are dreamlike and intricate, trippy even. It has been common to read them as images of the mind, or mental landscapes. They have also been called Surrealistic—or symbolic, or mysterious, or proto-modern. Hertervig’s paintings from this period are unique and anyone who has not already seen these pictures should seek them out. After this, two things happen: first, Hertervig can no longer afford oil and canvas so almost all artwork from the final thirty years of his life (he lived to be seventy-one) he made in small format and on poor, residual materials. He painted on wrapping paper, tobacco paper, newsprint, clothes, rags, wallpaper, canvas strips, and cardboard—garbage, simply put. It is said that Hertervig’s financial situation was so miserable that the underlayers were often a kind of papiermâché made from the remains of “commercial” paper types, glued together with rye flour and water. In a collage of sheets, tabs, and rough flakes you can see wholesalers’ stamps and emblems shining through the watercolors—in themselves a picture of Hertervig’s dire situation. The underlayers flow together with the motifs. This part of production makes up Hertervig’s so-called “fragments” (fig. 5). At the same time, “light” becomes a main motif for Hertervig. A feverish light settles over the whole production, and stays there for the rest of his life. Nothing Hertervig does avoids the phenomenon of light.

Fig. 4 — Lars Hertervig Island Borgøya, 1867 Oil on canvas, 69.5 × 61.7 cm National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Desgin, the Fine Art Collection, Oslo

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“I have a problem with the term light,” Richter told Robert Storr in 2002. “I was never interested in light. Light is there and you turn it on and you turn it off. I don’t know what the ‘problematic of light’ is.” But there is the temptation to defy Richter here and see how the Hertervig-esque light shines over Richter’s landscapes. Hertervig said of his own mental illness that, “it had emerged by gazing at the landscapes in sunshine.” As a visual artist, he was linked to the world through vision, and “vision” was also the thing that broke him. In a way, he had stared himself sick down in Düsseldorf. And it is as if a sickly light has burned into the painter, like sunstroke or some kind of snow blindness. What is really happening in the fragments? Ever since Hertervig was rediscovered in 1914, these fragments have, in a “romantic” way, been interpreted as pictures of (or by) his mental disorders. They seem confused. Hertervig ante-dated many of the small works, giving them years like 1673, 1700, 1709, 1770, and 1813, or wrote “from the 14th century” at the bottom. He signed them with L. Hertervig, L. Hatarvaag, Larsen Hertervig, Larsen Herterervig. The motifs vary. Some are quite bashful views of the cultural landscape in the Stavanger region, probably painted outdoors. Other fragments are more like the paintings of his second period. These are more “fantastic” views where the dense forests, swampy terrain, lakes, clouds, and sky blend into a dreamlike entirety. Different variations of Primeval Forest belong to this camp. Then comes a series of miniatures with human figures, some deer, horses on the run, and many equestrian pictures, rows of riders on horses. These works are more fantastical, and are clearly some kind of inner images. They point again to a final category that quite obviously is religious visions, e.g., The Tabernacle and The Whore of Babylon. What all the fragments have in common is that they seem like mirages, overexposed, almost dazzling. They are bathed in “light.” The landscape motifs emerge or disappear in a flickering overexposure, they dematerialize; they then dissolve in their own materials. The dry watercolor and barren gouache, in some places almost pointillistically applied, are about to be canceled out by the

Fig. 5 — Lars Hertervig Primeval Forest, 1880s Watercolor and gouache on paper 30.5 × 37.2 cm Stavanger Art Museum

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scruffy base layer. It’s like the motifs are recalled to the garbage from which they were developed. But it is also here where the magic of Hertervig’s fragments lies: the painter gets the rejected, worthless, invisible, patches to shine thanks to his landscapes and his visions. How is it possible? Can “light” be coaxed out of a dirty gouache? Was this what Hertervig was trying to do, to push light into these impoverished, small formats? It probably was the case. Lars Hertervig came from a Quaker family, and the fragment work especially can be read as an expression of Quaker attitudes: the Quakers placed “the inner light” higher than the Bible itself. Their writings have plenty of light metaphors. The word of God and the spiritual dimension—the highest—should be revealed in the individual through a search for active emptiness. The services were so-called silent meetings—the Quakers wanted to “get the silence to speak.” The Quaker movement was individualistic, and strongly anti-authoritarian. To show hubris or have material goals could be punished, by mental illness for example. It is not inconceivable that Hertervig saw his own breakdown as a result of the ambitions he had shown by leaving his family and Quaker friends in Norway to seek fulfillment and fame in Düsseldorf, the Whore of Babylon. (The family opposed his leaving.) If you look at it from this point of view, all of his fragment works contain a kind of “homecoming” to the Quakers’ values and ideals. This is plausible; for the rest of his life Hertervig lived with his father who was a devout Quaker. Hertervig even went by the nickname “Quaker Lars.” The fragments show an almost heartbreaking amalgam of the useless and the most elevated. He found the greatest in the smallest, like a low caste J. M. W. Turner who rejected what little he was offered. A sclerotic Turner who never saw Turner but painted out his silent meetings in full revolt. “So these dead cities and Alps attracted me, rubble heaps in both cases, mute stuff,” Richter tells Buchloh about how he chose city- and landscape motifs when he began to grow tired of the figure photographs he used to paint after; these became too narrative. With black-and-white family photos, possibly historical photos of people, it became difficult to avoid an obvious statement. Then rather mute stuff, that is, dumb things, silent objects, and “rubble heaps,” piles of gravel and rock, e.g., cities and mountains. A cold silence. Hertervig’s fragments are the opposite of cold; they are anti-indifferent, completely surrendered to what happens in the eye, or in the eye of the mind. Can one allow oneself to fantasize a little? Yes, if you twist around the vision axis and glare back at Hertervig, where he gawks into his “staring observation.” What do you see? Something similar to August Natterer’s fantastic My Eyes at the Moment of Revelation. Here we have eyes that are blinded by sight, by sights.

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A bloodshot look disturbed by vision. In English, the work is alternatively called: My Eyes at the Moment of Apparitions. One can allow oneself to imagine that this picture coincides with Hertervig’s outlook. And Richter? No, he is not keen on apparitions, he is interested in appearance. “Appearance, that to me is a phenomenon.” Robert Storr tries to say that the photographs are a direct registration of light, while his paintings are representations of light. Richter will have it. “I know that people have mentioned on certain occasions that ‘Richter is all about light,’ and that, ‘The paintings have a special light’; and I never knew what they were talking about. I was never interested in light . . . . I never wanted to capture and hold reality in painting. But I wanted to capture the appearance of reality. That is my theme or job.” The appearance of reality, or in other words, similar to what Hertervig practiced. How the reality “emerges” for Richter is up to him to assert, just as you cannot deny how appearance and apparition blend together in Hertervig’s wide-open eyes and on his glued-together fiber strips. Hertervig grasped for mirages. Disappointment is always on top with Richter. Richter paints disappointed landscapes. It may seem like he is dealing with some kind of double grief counseling. There is grief over a type of painting that it is no longer feasible to engage with, and double up, through a motif that has, in many ways, been lost. In his own words: “It is a reality that is unreachable. It is a dream. All over. But I’m old-fashioned enough or stupid enough to hang on . . . . It’s the wrong time and I can’t do it. I am too dumb. Well, I am not able to.” Richter’s Evening Mood from 1969 (fig. 6), an early example, shows an atmospheric evening with a hazy sunset and a glimpse of the sea. It is over two-thirds sky and less than one-third earth on the surface of the image, the water shimmers right out by the horizon. The light source is almost in the middle of the picture and fires up the fog. The light fades from an almost white, though polluted Naples yellow, over beige shades, and through a blue gradation to dark Prussian blue, rounded at the top corners. The division of the picture is clearly related to Friedrich’s famous The Monk by the Sea (fig. 7), which was radical

Fig. 6 — Gerhard Richter Abendstimmung (Evening Mood), 1969 Oil on canvas, 120 × 150 cm Kunsthalle zu Kiel (p. 78)

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Fig. 7 — Caspar David Friedrich Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea) 1808–10, Oil on canvas, 110 × 171.5 cm Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie

in Friedrich’s time, yet not in Richter’s. Richter’s painting has a dark foreground where Friedrich’s is light. Richter gives us an illuminated horizon line instead of Friedrich’s veiled, hazy, melancholy line. If the horizon, the meeting line between heaven and earth, is handled with a strip of tape, then the mystique goes. It may look like Richter used masking tape on the horizon line. Masking tape is a hard break with Friedrich’s more fairy tale-like, fuzzy spirituality, to put it mildly. You can imagine a modern and professional studio situation at Richter’s where industrial, high-quality color tubes sit in rows according to a color analysis of the motif. Whoever reproduces a landscape weighs it down with their burdens. With Balke it was the memory of the trip to northern Norway, rehearsed and staggered. He attempted to relive it with the help of an effect-seeking manipulation of the paint that should manage his lack of touch. With Hertervig it was the disease, or his faith, his feverish outlook, a Quaker silence, the shakiness, and the light that burns out the view: a fusion of natural and mysterious experiences plus a kind of paranoia. What do the Richter landscapes carry? As little as possible, it seems. He treats his “yearning” unsentimentally, in a structured and non-virtuoso way: metered. But still, something seems tired, driven. What do we see in Richter’s Evening Mood from 1969? We see a beautiful evening scene, but this scene is strangely “small” when compared with Friedrich’s “deep” monk on the beach. It seems “shorter” than Hertervig’s revelations that shift the relationship between the visible and the inner world. Richter’s painting has a different shine and that shine has a scent. There is no getting away from the synthetic smell. The oil paint smells of chemicals from the photo lab. That is why the images become immediately blunt, dull, flat, just “short,” like photographic painting often is. A little dead, maybe. What does it mean for a landscape to be photographed before it is painted? If an image looks like a photograph, then it’s modern times. Times that are moving away from the Beaux Arts. It represents times when they got control of representation. When they also got control of production. And control over distances. Control at sea. Control in airspace. This not only meant snapshots and trauma for pictorial representation. It also meant steam, trains, engines, mass transport, air traffic, tourism, overproduction, screen displays, overrepresentation. An ambush. A takeover. A total victory. Heating. This is the screen’s time. The logic is escapist, safe. The landscape is food for braggadocios. Twin-tip skis. Drone video. Turbines. Posting. Drilling. Anything. The landscape is the place where you “increase activity.”

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Matias Faldbakken

“That which overwhelms us and creates fear,” was how the sublime was described a couple of hundred years ago. There is something reassuring about the notion of the classic, dangerous nature: an omnipotent, pure, relentless, and godly nature that demanded awe from humans. The frozen wastes in the north. The schooner that is crushed to driftwood in the surf. Edmund Burke’s “fear and pain,” etc. But a landscape that is photographed is a landscape under pressure from the people, not the other way around. “We have lost the feeling of God’s omnipresence,” says Richter himself. His “classic” or “nostalgic” painting style has never been classic because you see the dark of the dark room, not a divine glow. Richter’s yearning occurs in images of something already depicted. Something exhausted, that is. Something emptied of representation, depleted, exploited, crossed, twisted, abandoned. Something that is washed in chemicals. Richter sees both landscape and landscape painting in the rearview mirror of the car or from the aircraft fuselage. Richter’s landscape paintings are, intentionally or not, and perhaps mostly, down to their being painted recently, a good 100 years after Balke and Hertervig—portraits of the landscape as a rigid invoice that must soon be met. A debt on which interest accrues. A demand that gets bigger as the weeks go by—the fees are calculated. How are we to understand the cold-blooded strangulation of the natural environment with which contemporary human beings are busy? An old trick from psychology is to look at the result of people’s actions instead of inquiring after the motivations. Seen like that, our project is possibly to reinstate some risk in nature. Can fear of nature be reactivated by irritating it? Can we re-sublimate nature by poking, teasing, gassing, and guiding it in unpredictable directions? The risk that landscape once posed is no longer the healthy, muscular power of furious nature. It isn’t a gorge, depths, distances, sea spray, a violent storm. It’s more like a wheezing exhalation, caused by emphysema. A polluted sublimity. A plagued greatness. The icy wilderness is gone, now comes “the heat.” There is penicillin in the fjords and becquerel (radioactivity) in the moss. Nature becomes a new type of antagonist. Now we feel insecure again. There is a virus. Something is about to thaw. There comes a response. The patient is coughing. We get an asthmatic outlook. This is what Richter paints, via the darkroom. C. D. Friedrich said, “The painter should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees in himself. . . . Otherwise paintings would resemble screens behind which one expects to find the sick, even the dead.” What does the painter see in himself today? Richter peers into the camera finder and reveals that such “screens” are all we have. His landscape paintings, therefore, have a screen glow, a pale hue, negatively related to Hertervig’s visionary fragments. Richter’s landscape paintings evoke everything Quaker Lars painted away; desire,

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Landscape as Debt

use, drive. They show ailing landscapes exposed to human hubris. What was once a picture of an “epic” human-nature relationship now shows human appetite and the nausea thereafter. Richter paints landscapes across which the Whore of Babylon has already ridden. It will be epic anyway. Landscape is still the grandest motif. It is probably our final motif.

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The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes

T. J. Demos

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Anthropocene landscapes are mutating geographies, merging nature and culture. As naturalcultural, they provide a post-binary composite of mutual determination: land has been inextricably shaped biogeophysically by capital, just as the latter has internalized nature for its reproduction.1 “Anthropocene” and “landscape” are thus conflicted terms, containing unstable, shifting meanings and references. While scape unevenly conjugates vision and labor, the seen and the shaped— the implications of which I discuss below—land, coming from Old English, splits ground and property, signifying a definite portion of the Earth’s surface; home region of a person or a people; territory marked by political boundaries. Circumscribed as such, landscapes identify geopolitical determinations subjected to dispute, while its soil increasingly includes human byproducts: chemical and toxic agents unleashed by industrial capital. Microplastics—found in water, soil, and air—proliferate, as plastic derives from petrochemicals sourced in coal and oil, the products of ancient plants undergone anaerobic decomposition over millions of years. With the nonorganic transformation of land, all manner of spaces—geographical, technological, industrial, virtual—expand the meaning of Anthropocene landscapes: these are as much a mountain pass mined for bauxite, a toxic river filled with micropolymers, as a field of lettered plastic squares on a cybernetic device energized by fossil fuels used to type out those two words. As a geopolitical term, the Capitalocene is perhaps more accurate—geographies of capital, natural systems dominated by corporations and their financial elites over the course of modernity. Capitalocene landscapes, in their current guise, represent not only expanding frontiers of extractive industry (mining sites, drilling rigs, pipeline networks, electricity grids, urban infrastructure, architecture, production factories), but also the becoming-technological of geography (server farms, stacks, virtual territories, screen visions, neural nets). This includes legal, political, economic, and trade networks, merged with natural resources—the managed forests, industrial agricultures, greenhouse gas filled atmospheres, pharmaceutical and genetically modified seeds and animals—as well as the remainder— growing swathes of Earth abandoned to dead zones of pollution, mass extinction, and uncontainable toxicity and radiation. More than naturalcultural, these landscapes are biopolitical, critically highlighting the governance of life (and death) under late liberalism, which continues in the current green convergence of science, cybernetic technology, and capital. Early modern landscapes of the Anthropocene (the geological age structured by human activities) and of the Capitalocene (that age defined, more specifically, by modern capitalism), were largely shaped by expansionist colonial regimes producing notions of territory and race by commodifying land and trading people as currency. These were driven by military control, assisted by cartographic, anthropological, and botanical knowledge to assert sovereignty. The Plantationocene—

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T. J. Demos

a further category of Anthropocene landscapes—defines a socio-agricultural matrix, a machine for disciplining labor and crops alike.2 More recent versions extend from the social and geographical into the cellular and cybernetic domains, bringing the gene and molecule, the pixel and byte, into alignment with intellectual property rights, bioengineering, machine learning algorithms, cloud computing, and new markets of wealth accumulation and biopolitical control.3 Think Bayer and Monsanto, Google, Facebook, and Baidu. Landscapes—whether regional ecosystems, power grids of renewable energy, virtual fields of financial information, or surveilled zones of patented knowledge—are now distributed networks of corporate agency that define expanding territories of capital. All of which renders the category “landscape”—if conjuring traditional representations of idyllic geographies—entirely outmoded, if not without purpose. Present Anthropocene landscapes exhibit a dynamic between techno-utopian aspiration and uncontrollable dystopian eventuality (the variable scenarios of which have been explored in much great sci-fi, near-futurist, and fantasy writing, in ways visionary, emancipatory, and catastrophist). But one universal realization is that “we” are not as we thought. Rather than individual, self-sufficient, autonomous, determinative, and sovereign, we humans (even at the individual level) are multiple, relational, interdependent, heteronymous, and multispecies assemblages (our bodies include trillions of microorganisms, their bacterial genomic contribution necessary to digest food and absorb nutrients). We are also riven by sociopolitical and economic inequalities, making human a reductive flattener of difference. Which is why Anthropo-cene, returning etymologically to “the human” as discrete species-being, premised on the outmoded philosophical conceptions of the Cartesian subject and the circumscribed biology of Homo sapiens, is really the wrong term, even if it is here to stay.4 “What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social?” asks Donna Haraway.5 One result is the need for further terminological options, and Haraway in turn proposes the Chthulucene to designate the era of multispecies being and becoming, formed through symbiogenesis and sympoietics, as the basis for newly conceived, postanthropocentric naturecultures of research and practice, as much as existence and imagination. Emergent Chthulucene landscapes couldn’t be clearer during global pandemics, where humans encounter their thorough immersion in a biomolecular atmosphere of commonality. Viral communication, including zoonotic diseases, reveals our intimate naturalcultural relationalities. These are evidenced by the practice of social distancing: “The ethics of withdrawal before Covid-19 is [precisely] a show of a planetary collectivity, where we finally understand that our bodies are all connected.”6 Indeed, the Virocene—yet another alternative to, or

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subcategory of, the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene—is brought about by new proximities and biomolecular pathways—Virocene landscapes—between the human and the more-than-human in the era of fragmented habitats, factory farming, and global markets, which highlights the nexus among various bodies, whether this nexus is desired or not. For centuries the negatives of such continuum (between diverse species, between industry and nature, between markets and viruses) have been overlooked, denied, or externalized, although their material impacts—waste, toxicity, illness, death, destruction—have in many cases only continued to grow. In the present era, they are forced into collective consciousness by climate science, epidemiology, and environmental justice activism alike, as the various threats of socio-ecological breakdown become ever clearer where climate disruption, global pandemics, and neocolonial extractivism threaten the sustainability of civilization itself. Not surprisingly, as Anthropocene agency mutates, coming into self-awareness as politicogeological consciousness, its central drivers (transnational corporations, extractive industries, the governmental-military complex, research universities and their representatives) increasingly adopt the rhetoric of ethical design and corporate responsibility—for instance, via geoengineering, transitional energy systems, biogenetic science, and green infrastructure, all in support of a sustainable future. For many critics, however, this represents only a further step toward the destructive transformation partially initiated with the first acts of colonial expansion.7 If Anthropocene landscapes represent the complete interconnection and mutual interdependence of everything, including all sociopolitical, economic, technological, material, and biological systems, then perhaps their ideal exemplar appears in the designs for near-future off-world space colonies: megastructures orbiting Earth or terraformed planets like Mars, representing outlaw geographies comprising the epitome of technonatural synthesis.8 Even if only imagined, these reveal the ultimate Anthropocene landscape as a site of total systems design shaped by the convergence of neoliberal capital, technocratic reason, aesthetic spectacle, and post-democratic governance, a convergence that summarizes the Anthropocene’s general economy. Taking shape in the libertarian imaginations of such tech entrepreneurs as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and Paul Allen, space colony designs now command extravagant research budgets and the dedication of teams of scientists and engineers. In Bezos’s version—toward which he has invested a billion a year over the last decade—space cities will contain entire ecosystems operating as self-sufficient environments holding hundreds of thousands, even millions of people. Influenced by Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill’s own space colony designs of the 1970s—also operating at the nexus of privatized space, neoliberal extractivism, and libertarian politics9—these orbiting megastructures will be artificially maintained, intimately connected to cybernetic command

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in a maximized expression of total systems engineering. Earth, according to these futurist scenarios, will be wholly or largely evacuated of human presence, relieved of unsustainable population growth, destructive fossil-fuel development, and negative environmental impacts, and newly set on a path of rewilding, helped along by global-scale geoengineering technology including solar radiation management and de-extinction genetics. For techno-utopians, such designs are necessary to ensure human survival, escaping the threat of Earthly extinction by climate breakdown, nuclear war, or similar civilization-ending event (even while they disavow their own responsibility—as corporate leaders in the fossil fuel, retail, and tech industries—in the production of such risks in the first place). Though the end result may resemble something like an Amazon “fulfilment center” in outer space: a techno-organic mega-machine of total control, with life systems modeled on the utmost efficiency and labor disciplined to the micro-second by Bezos as ultimate Anthropocene CEO. One ideological roadmap for such visions of world-making and escape—from human nature, as much as from Earth’s homeland—is Yuval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, adored (not surprisingly) by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, which includes a chapter on “The Anthropocene.”10 It describes how Anthropos, driven by an endless quest for bliss, immortality, and divinity, figures as ultimate self-creator, for whom no challenge—climate change, artificial intelligence, planetary hunger, even death and extinction—will be beyond technological overcoming, especially when matched to Silicon Valley capital. By taking responsibility for climatological transformation, scientists and engineers, according to this scenario, hope to create what the Breakthrough Institute calls the “Good Anthropocene,” fully realizing the terraforming possibilities of technology in ideally modulating natural systems11—this, despite the cost, as detailed in Harari’s analysis, of growing inequality, an expanding useless class, a new religion of algorithmic dataism, and the reduction of humanity to biochemical subsystems monitored by global networks. Enabling this Anthropocene fantasy of techno-organic mastery is the landscape’s visual paradigm, premised upon the detachment of the subject from the object of its gaze. Removed from the web of life, the viewer transforms nature into a distanced field of observation, which is then open to aesthetic appreciation as much as technoscientific manipulation. This paradigm now expands to all sorts of already-existing remote sensing applications, from the thousands of communication, navigation, and astronomical satellites orbiting the planet, to the bio-surveillance, drone vision, and smart-tech devices operating on its surface (in microchipped livestock; cloud servers assembling wildlife observation archives by mining dispersed online data; wireless sensors seeded into soil to observe crops; and automated sail-drones monitoring oceans and marine life).12 Earth-as-

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The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes

cybernetic-machine—approximating what Buckminster Fuller earlier termed Spaceship Earth—renders the Anthropocene landscape as medianature, emphasizing the material bases of media (extracted rare earths, petrochemical products, and hazardous e-waste), as much as the signifying, sensing, and affective elements of nature (correlating with AI networks and biosemiotic nonhuman communication systems).13 While the cybernetic informatization of the planet might support human rights and environmentalist regulatory oversight (monitoring construction labor in India, cotton fields in Turkmenistan, and forest-destroying palm oil plantations in Indonesia), they also transform the planet into a post-natural manipulable object of engineering, a complex world-machine that can be endlessly monitored, adjusted, and reprogrammed according to corporate-science-governmental design—perhaps ultimately culminating in something like Bezos’s outer space Anthropocene landscapes. With Anthropocene landscapes, visuality and engineering combine as a twenty-first-century nexus of knowledge and power. But this convergence has been long in preparation. Indeed, its dynamics unfold from the very term landscape (in Old High German: lantscaf), sourced in scopic regimes and shaped geographies. As Svetlana Alpers observes, the modern concept of landscape arose in the Dutch seventeenth century—etymologically rooted in landschap, referring to the shaping of land and people—associated with cartographic practice, maritime exploration, burgeoning global trade, and colonial domination. Rendered in long traditions of Dutch painting, landscapes dialectically join the visualization and objectification of lands with the shaping of their cultures and peoples.14 Going back still further, Tim Ingold identifies landscape’s medieval provenance, referring “originally to an area of land bound into the everyday practices and customary usages of an agrarian community” before “its subsequent incorporation into the language of painterly depiction.”15 In fact, scape and scope have only a superficial resemblance, without direct etymological connection: “‘Scope’ comes from the classical Greek skopos— literally ‘the target of the bowman, the mark towards which he gazes as he aims’— from which is derived the verb skopein, ‘to look’. ‘Scape’, quite to the contrary, comes from Old English sceppan or skyppan, meaning ‘to shape.’”16 Modernist visuality, in other words, has gradually divested image from labor, emphasizing autonomous visuality above all else. According to Ingold, generations of scholars have mistaken the meaning of the suffix -scape for a specific scopic regime of detailed, distanced observation, when in fact that suffix referred originally to an intimate relationship with land use.17 The result (at least in its model version) is a subject formation severed from its outside, transforming the beyond into submissive materiality, capable of being extracted, monetized, exploited at will. Indeed, part of the sovereignty of modern Western Anthropos is the assumed right to destroy what is not it, a model constituted by an underlying psychology

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T. J. Demos

of perception by now long interrogated in psychoanalysis, anthropology, political analysis, feminism, social art history, visual culture, and decolonial studies.18 Its implications were realized through the colonization, globalization, and financialization of land under late liberal capital; and these are now extended into the fabric of life with biogenetic algorithms, where molecular evolution itself is subjected to (and manipulated by) calculation, prediction, and computerization, challenging bioethical and legal paradigms.19 The separation of visuality from labor, the scopic from the scaped, pervades Bezos’s futurist space cities too, the images of which (anonymously credited to Bezos’s Blue Origin corporation) bizarrely mix futurist and outmoded historical references. Twenty-first-century business districts, consisting of greened skyscrapers connected by high-speed trains, counterpoint rural regions of foggy mountains and snaking rivers, dotted with scenic villages, one resembling Renaissance Florence, all situated in a tubular megastructure orbiting Earth. While visual fantasy rules, these Anthropocene landscapes become ideological as aspirational diagrams meant to inspire tech innovation and designer desire in the present, even as they animate romantic nostalgia for nature.20 These image-fantasies notably avoid showing any of the Anthropocene’s cyber-machinic landscapes—the data centers, telecommunications networks, energy grids, automated agriculture, server stacks, hard drives, logistics bots, and cargo transport—that would no doubt be necessary in future orbital life, even as these proliferate now on our current planet, where we witness the deployment of cybernetic systems increasingly intersecting with all areas of life’s reproduction.21 Their conspicuous absence in Bezos’s designs may mean that total systems engineering, extensive bio-surveillance, and AI command ecology are too anxiety-ridden for the frontier freedoms of neoliberal capital at present. In this regard, the images perform a compensatory function: displaying the structural disassociation of the scopic and the scaped—reassuring viewers of the continuity of traditional forms of life even when projected into an off-world future—typical of ecomodernist desire. Indeed, one added element of “decoupling” for ecomodernism—the pro-market, techno-accelerationist agenda of post-environmentalist Anthropocenologists— proposes the delinking of economic growth from environmental impacts.22 Their proposal depends on both the intensification of economic efficiency (in farming, energy extraction, transportation, and urbanization), matched by the growth of clean tech, including solar and nuclear energy. Yet, as critics observe, not only is this practically unrealizable—regional-scale development will always bring environmental impacts—its agenda prioritizes economic growth above all else, protecting financial arrangements by attacking any climate solutions beyond market-based frameworks.23 The aesthetic and the productive, the scopic and the scaped, in other words, are not simply two disconnected logics, delinked over centuries of

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The Scopic and the Scaped: Anthropocene Landscapes

modern development; rather, they are also strategically reconnected in the interests of the Anthropocene’s neoliberalization (where the market rules above all else). The visual modality and its associated desires in fact drive geoengineering designs (i.e., technoscientific attempts to modulate natural systems, including solar radiation management, instead of regulating industrial outputs), justified, somewhat perversely, by environmentalist concern amplified by an aesthetic, spiritual, and emotional attachment to nature.24 The most conventional Anthropocene landscapes, in other words, provide nostalgic images of nature that its extractivist economic model simultaneously works to destroy. The Anthropocene shaping of land implicates aesthetics as fundamental to its worlding operations, whether extractive zones, IT technonatures, geoengineered atmospheres, orbital cities, or terraformed planets. Its basis in modernist visuality does ideological work in expressing the affective aspirations of conserving landscapes by shaping them according to corporate design in the interests of expanding wealth accumulation. Yet these visions—dramatized in Bezos’s designs—only obscure the anti-democratic, unregulated, techno-dystopian, and anthropocentric aspects of Anthropocene landscapes. With them, we are left wondering, if Anthropocene landscapes are sites of relationality, how can these be made to serve the commons, generate radical equality, and propagate justice, instead of violence, oppression, and inequity? How can we move from the Capitalocene—prioritizing the logic of wealth accumulation by the few—to the Chthulucene or Symbiocene— privileging ecologies of mutuality and interdependence that extend beyond Anthropos?25 How might open-access digital platforms, algorithmic systems, and machine-learning be placed in the service of the many, creating a global public commons in the post-Anthropocene? How to practice commonality in relation to multispecies justice, but without the Virocene’s deadly vectors of cross-species pathologies of infection? How, finally, can science be protected from privatization— especially in the Anglo-American contexts—and democratized so that it serves the interests of human welfare and multispecies biodiversity, instead of the wild fantasies of billionaires? The corrective is not to oppose any and all shaping of the land. Instead, we must reassess that desire from an eco-socialist understanding, asking first who benefits, and acknowledging that there is no distanced place of safe observation, design, and engineering. It becomes urgent to resituate ourselves in the larger web of life, so that any transformation of the environment— aesthetically, technologically, sociopolitically—is inevitably a shaping of ourselves in regenerative ways—including toward a new common sense, and toward a sense of the common, that works to the benefit and welfare of all on a global scale.

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1 Jason Moore calls it a “double internality”—of capitalism through nature, of nature through capitalism—in Capitalism in the Web of Life (London, 2015). “Naturalcultural” is a neologism of Donna Haraway’s that conceptualizes this new condition in terminological hybridity. 2 See “The Plantationocene Series: Plantation Worlds, Past and Present,” Edge Effects, https:// edgeeffects.net/plantationoceneseries-plantation-worlds/ (accessed March 28, 2020). 3 Margarida Mendes, “Molecular Colonialism,” Anthropocene Campus, April 23, 2016, https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/ molecular-colonialism. 4 For extended criticism of the Anthropocene’s terminology and conceptualization, see T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Berlin, 2017). 5 Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC, 2016), p. 30. 6 Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “Covid: The Ethical Disease,” Critical Legal Thinking, March 13, 2020, http://criticallegalthinking.com/ 2020/03/13/covid-the-ethical-disease/; also see Elizabeth Povinelli’s discussion of “the virus,” a figure that for her both reveals and disrupts the boundaries between life and nonlife, boundaries constructed by settler colonialism and exploited by capital, in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC, 2016). 7 Eyal Weizman, for instance, suggests that climate change is the telos of colonial modernity, rather than simply its accidental outcome, in Fazal Sheikh and Eyal Weizman, The Conflict Shoreline: Colonialism as Climate Change in the Negev Desert (Göttingen, 2015).

8 See Felicity Scott, Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York, 2016), for whom one version of such a beyond-the-law territory designates delimited and exceptional enclaves of technolibertarian escape, extrastate governmentality, and environmental control, whether on Earth or in outer space. 9 As Felicity Scott summarizes, “Mobilizing the catalytic effect of the period’s environmental, social, political, and geopolitical anxieties, and armed with NASA’s renderings of seductive futuristic visions, O’Neill translated the promise of space colonization into a platform for a neo-liberal imaginary of freedom and a secure future for the American way of life, going back and forth between nationalistic claims to U.S. supremacy and, not unrelated, to potentially vast economic gains for corporate partners.” “Earthlike,” Grey Room 65 (Fall 2016): p. 28. 10 Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London, 2016). Gates featured the book on his blog in 2017, https://www. gatesnotes.com/Books/Homo-Deus; and reviewed it in Bill Gates, “What Are the Biggest Problems Facing Us in the 21st Century?,” New York Times, September 4, 2018, https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/ books/review/21-lessons-for-the21st-century-yuva l-noah-harari.html. 11 See Ian Angus, “Hijacking the Anthropocene,” Resilience, May 20, 2015, https://www.resilience.org/ stories/2015-05-20/hijacking-theanthropocene/. 12 See Wayt Gibbs, “A View from Everywhere All the Time,” Anthropocene Magazine, June 2019, https:// anthropocenemagazine.org/2019/ 06/a-view-from-everywhere%E2% 80%89-all-the-time/.

13 Jussi Parikka, ed., Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste (London, 2011). On Fuller’s larger discussion of Spaceship Earth, see Felicity Scott, Architecture or Technoutopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 14 Svetlana Alpers, “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,” in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1983), pp. 119–68. 15 Tim Ingold, “Landscape or WeatherWorld?,” Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York, 2011), pp. 126–27. See also Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swenson, Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics (Los Angeles, 2015). 16 Ibid., 126–27. 17 Land as fundamentally relational, and based on use, has nonetheless been maintained in certain cultures, particularly in many indigenous traditions. As Glen Coulthard, member of the Yellowknives Dene nation in Canada, explains in his conversation with Harsha Walia, “Land is a relationship based on the obligations we have to other people and the other-than-human relations that constitute the land itself,” “Land Is a Relationship: In Conversation with Glen Coulthard on Indigenous Nationhood,” Rabble.ca, January 21, 2015, https://rabble.ca/columnists/ 2015/01/land-relationship-conversation-glen-coulthard-on-indigenousnationhood. 18 See Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds., Empires of Vision: A Reader (Durham, NC, 2014). 19 Given “the increasing integration of algorithmic models of computation for the management of life,” Margarida Mendes asks in “Molecular Colonialism” if “our constitutions [are] strong enough to act preemptively [in rejecting this neocolonial force], or are we allowing code developers, patentors, and laboratories to operate in the forefront of natural selection?”

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20 Just as NASA comprehended the strategic use of pictorial representations of the dramatic episodes of its space program in mobilizing public and political support, so too did O’Neill understand images of space colonies as instrumental to inspire the imagination of corporate funders and venture capitalists. See Scott, “Earthlike” (see note 9), p. 14: “[T]he resurgence of traditional, conventional, or familiar images and aesthetic paradigms or even media logics functions sometimes less as a panacea to the advancement of technocratic or neoliberal regimes than as a glaring if not-quite-transparent symptom of them.” 21 Liam Young, ed., Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene (London, 2019) 22 See John Asafu-Adjaye et al. (of the Breakthrough Institute), “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” April 2015, http:// www.ecomodernism.org/s/AnEcomodernist-Manifesto.pdf, p. 11. 23 As George Monbiot argues: “Green consumerism, material decoupling, sustainable growth are illusions, designed to justify an economic model that is driving us to catastrophe,” in “Too Right It’s Black Friday: Our Relentless Consumption Is Trashing the Planet,” The Guardian, November 22, 2017, https://www. theguardian.com. See also the extensive critique of the decoupling thesis by the European Environmental Bureau (2019), https://eeb.org/ library/decoupling-debunked/. 24 See “Ecomodernist Manifesto”: “The case for a more active, conscious, and accelerated decoupling to spare nature draws more on spiritual or aesthetic than on material or utilitarian arguments,” p. 25; and further: “Along with decoupling humankind’s material needs from nature, establishing an enduring commitment to preserve wilderness, biodiversity, and a mosaic of beautiful landcapes will require a deeper emotional connection to them,” p. 26.

25 The “Symbiocene,” coined by Glenn Albrecht, joins positive multispecies relationality to postBoomer multigenerational and intersectionalist environmentalism. See: https://theecologist.org/2019/ mar/08/generation-symbiocene.

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Biography Compiled by Agnes Wyskitensky

Benjamin Katz, Gerhard Richter Photograph, Cologne 2017

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1932 Gerhard Richter is born in Dresden on February 9. His father, Horst, is a mathematics teacher and his mother, Hildegard, a trained bookseller.

1957 Marries Marianne (Ema) Eufinger. Richter produces Elbe, a series of 31 monotypes with motifs between abstraction and landscape association.

1936 The family moves to rural Reichenau. In November, Richter’s sister Gisela is born.

1959 Attends Documenta II in Kassel, the most important international art show of the postwar period, where he sees representatives of Abstract Expressionism, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and of Art Informel, inspiring him to experiment with abstraction.

1939 Horst Richter is conscripted into the army and does not return from captivity as a prisoner of war until 1946. During the war years, the family lives first in Reichenau, then in Waltersdorf in Saxony. 1945 In February, Dresden is destroyed in Allied aerial bombing attacks. 1947 Gerhard Richter attends vocational secondary school in Zittau and attends evening classes in painting.

So in the watercolour all this anger is included, at 16. It was the same with the poems I was writing—but romantic, but bitter and nihilistic, like Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse.1

1951–56 Studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, which is oriented around Socialist Realism. Richter attends the mural class of Heinz Lohmar. 1956 The artist receives his diploma for the wall painting Lebensfreude (Joie de Vivre) in the Deutsches HygieneMuseum, Dresden.

1961 Flees the GDR. Richter moves with his wife, Ema, to Düsseldorf and studies at the Staatliche Kunstakademie there. 1962 Richter meets the artists Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg (Fischer), and Manfred Kuttner, who will become his artistic fellow travelers during the 1960s. Produces the painting Tisch (Table) based on a photograph from the magazine Domus. It is listed as catalogue number one in his catalogue raisonné and formulates at once a new beginning and the exclusion of all his previous works.

The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.2

First exhibition, at the Galerie Junge Kunst in Fulda, together with Manfred Kuttner.

1963 Exhibition of Richter, Lueg, Polke, and Kuttner in an empty store in Düsseldorf’s old town. From 1963 to 1966, these four artists present performances under the label Capitalist Realism (in provocative reference to Socialist Realism). In his exhibition in the Berges furniture store in Düsseldorf he shows his first oil paintings with landscape motifs that are based on photographs: Hirsch (Deer [CR 7]) and Schloss Neuschwanstein (Neuschwanstein Castle [CR 8]). Elements of popular culture are increasingly reflected in Richter’s works. Produces first paintings using blurring techniques. 1964 First solo exhibition, at the Galerie Alfred Schmela, Düsseldorf. Exhibition with Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg at the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal. Richter begins working with an episcope to transfer photographs to canvas.

I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsman-like but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.3

1965 Richter paints large-format paintings of curtains. Paints Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi) (CR 85) and Tante Marianne (Aunt Marianne) (CR 87). Richter’s uncle had served as an army officer until 1944. His aunt is murdered in 1945 as part of the euthanasia program of the National Socialists.

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1966 Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) (Ema [Nude on a Staircase]) (CR 134) is painted based on a color photograph by Richter. Begins the Farbtafelbilder (Color Charts) group of works, based on paint sample cards (from CR 135-1 onward). Richter’s daughter Babette (Betty) is born. 1967 Corrugated sheet metal, doors, and pipes find their way into Richter’s paintings along with pornographic scenes. Creates his first glass construction (CR 160). 1968–69 Bird’s-eye views of cities and mountains with pastose brushwork move closer to abstraction.

1971 Richter again works with geometric abstraction. New color charts result. Appointed professor at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. 1972 The artist shows 48 Porträts (48 Portraits) (CR 324) and landscapes at the thirty-sixth Venice Biennale. First participation in Documenta in Kassel. Richter publishes Atlas, a collection of photographs, newspaper clippings, and sketches he uses as the basis for paintings. Gray paintings, first Vermalungen (Inpaintings), and red-blue-yellow paintings. 1973 First solo exhibition in New York, at the Reinhard Onnasch Gallery. 1975 Produces a cycle of seascapes based on photographs from a trip to Greenland (CR 375–78).

When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war.4

Richter turns increasingly to the landscape. Following a vacation on Corsica, first landscapes, inspired by German Romanticism (CR 199–201, 211–12). 1969 First solo exhibition at an art institution, at Gegenverkehr e. V., Zentrum für aktuelle Kunst in Aachen.

1976 First abstract paintings. This extensive group of works is still ongoing today. 1977 Richter develops a new medium for his work: sculptural works from panes of glass painted on one side. The recently opened Musée d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, presents a retrospective of the artist’s work.

1979 Separation from his first wife Marianne Eufinger. Continues work on abstraction. The large-format paintings Strich (auf Blau) (Stroke [on Blue]) (CR 451) and Strich (auf Rot) (Stroke [on Red]) (CR 452).

If the “Abstract Pictures” show my reality, then the landscapes and the still-lifes show my yearning.5

1981 Paints landscapes of Davos, and the artist’s book Eis (Ice) is published, based on photographs from a trip to Greenland. First Spiegel (Mirrors). Works by Richter shown in the exhibition A New Spirit in Painting at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Divorce from Ema. 1982 The motif of the candle enters Richter’s oeuvre. Marries the sculptor Isa Genzken. 1983 Richter moves from Düsseldorf to Cologne. Landscapes of rural motifs, such as Scheune (Barn) (CR 549-1), Wiese (Meadow) (CR 549-2), and, two years later, Wiesental (Meadow Valley) (CR 572-4). At the same time, Richter paints Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) that are heavily reminiscent of landscapes (CR 551/1–9).

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1986 The artist reworks a series of landscapes using a squeegee. The extensive retrospective Gerhard Richter: Bilder, 1962–1985 (Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 1962–1985) travels from Düsseldorf to Berlin, Bern, and Vienna. 1987 Richter’s notes published on the occasion of the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Werken op papier, 1983–1986 (Gerhard Richter: Works on Paper, 1983–1986) at the Museum Overholland, Amsterdam. 1988 Produces a cycle of fifteen paintings titled 18. Oktober 197 7 (CR 667-1 to 674-2) on the theme of the death of several members of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF, Red Army Faction).

I was always afraid of this kind of subject. It’s too spectacular; there is too much spectacle invested.6

Richter paints his daughter Betty as a young girl (CR 663-5). First retrospective in Canada and the US, which is seen at the Art Gallery Ontario, Toronto; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 1989 The artist begins to overpaint photographs. 1991 The mirror becomes a theme for Richter again. Now they are bloodred and gray and appear as corner mirrors in space.

Tate Gallery London presents Richter’s first retrospective in the United Kingdom. The 1990s are primarily under the sign of abstraction. 1992 In the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Sils at the Nietzsche Haus, the overpainted photographs are shown as autonomous works for the first time. 1993 Richter meets Sabine Moritz, a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. The book Text, with the artist’s interviews and notes, is published. Largest retrospective thus far, at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Travels to Bonn, Stockholm, and Madrid. I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself, and my paintings. (Because style is violence, and I am not violent.) 7

1994 Richter portrays Sabine Moritz in Lesende (CR 804) and Kleine Badende (CR 815-1). 1995 Marries Sabine Moritz. The couple will have three children: Moritz, Ella Maria, and Theodor. 1997 Atlas is shown at Documenta × in Kassel, which is curated by Catherine David. Richter is awarded the Praemium Imperiale Prize in Tokyo. 1998 First show of landscape paintings at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover.

1999 Richter’s work Schwarz, Rot, Gold (Black, Red, Gold) (CR 856) of six large-format panes of glass is installed in the foyer of the Reichstag in Berlin. 2001 Richter shows his Rhomben (Rhombuses) (CR 851/1–6) at the forty-ninth Venice Biennale. The following years will also be dedicated to abstract paintings. 2002 The exhibition Forty Years of Painting, on the occasion of Richter’s seventieth birthday, is presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute, Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC. 2003 The artist creates the series Silikat (Silicate) (CR 885/1–4) based on nanotechnological images that had illustrated an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 2006 The Gerhard Richter Archive is established at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Produces the cycle of abstract paintings Cage (CR 897/1–6), named after the composer John Cage. It is shown the following year at the fiftysecond Venice Biennale. 2007 The artist designs a window for Cologne Cathedral (CR 900), consisting of 11,500 squares of glass, inspired by his early color charts. The series 25 Farben (25 Colors) (CR 901/1–3) is produced at the same time.

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2008 The cycle Sindbad (Sinbad) (CR 905/1–100) consists of 100 smallformat glass paintings. 2011 Richter produces his first Strip paintings; the process for making them is described in his artist’s book Patterns. The film Gerhard Richter Painting by Corinna Belz is released. 2014 Richter works on four abstract paintings based on photographs of the Birkenau concentration camp that will later be titled Birkenau.

1 Gerhard Richter “Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” quoted in Richter, Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961–2007, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London, 2009), p. 383. 2 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1964–1965,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 30. 3 Ibid., p. 33. 4 Gerhard Richter, “Comments on Some Works, 1991,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 262. 5 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1981,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 120. 6 Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Gregorio Magnani, 1989,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 227. 7 Gerhard Richter, “Notes, 1964–1965,” in Richter 2009 (see note 1), p. 32.

2017 Several solo exhibitions on the occasion of the artist’s eighty-fifth birthday are held in various places. Richter’s work is shown in Australia for the first time, at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. A photographic Version of Birkenau is installed in the Reichstag in Berlin, opposite the work Schwarz, Rot, Gold. 2019 Richter designs the chancel window for the Benedictine abbey of St. Mauritius in Tholey in the Saarland. 2020 The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York shows the exhibition Gerhard Richter: Painting after All. At the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien and the Kunsthaus Zürich, the largest retrospective of Gerhard Richter’s landscapes to date will be seen.

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Selected Bibliography

Antoine, Jean-Philippe. “Photography, Painting and the Real: The Question of Landscape in the Painting of Gerhard Richter” In Gerhard Richter, edited by Antoine, Gertrud Koch and Luc Lan, Paris, 1995, pp. 53–89. Bell, Kristine and Greg Lulay, eds. Gerhard Richter: Landscapes. Exh. cat. Zwirner & Wirth, New York. New York, 2004. Butin, Hubertus. “Gerhard Richter – ein deutscher Romantiker?” In Gerhard Richter und die Romantik. Exh. cat. Kunstverein Ruhr. Essen, 1994, pp. 7–28. Butin, Hubertus. “Die unromantische Romantik Gerhard Richters.” In Christoph Vitali, ed. Ernste Spiele: Der Geist der Romantik in der deutschen Kunst. 1790–1990. Exh. cat. Haus der Kunst, Munich, 1995, pp. 454–56.

Elger, Dietmar, ed. Gerhard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961–2007. London, 2009. Elger, Dietmar. Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, 6 Vol. Ostfildern, 2011–ongoing. Friedel, Helmut, ed. Gerhard Richter: Atlas, 5 Vol. Cologne, 2015. Friese, Peter. “Von der Kunst des Zuspätkommens (mit einem Exkurs von Hans Joachim Lenger).” In Gerhard Richter und die Romantik, exh. cat. Kunstverein Ruhr, Essen, 1994, pp. 31–44. Gelshorn, Julia. Aneignung und Wiederholung: Bilddiskurse im Werk von Gerhard Richter und Sigmar Polke, Munich, 2012. Honisch, Dieter. Gerhard Richter, exh. cat. 36th Venice Biennale. Venice, 1972.

Butin, Hubertus, Stefan Gronert, and Thomas Olbricht, eds., Gerhard Richter: Editions 1965–2013. Ostfildern, 2014.

Lotz, Christian. The Art of Gerhard Richter: Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning. London, 2015.

Butin, Hubertus, Unikate in Serie: Unique Pieces in Series. Cologne, 2017.

Godfrey, Mark and Nicholas Serota, eds. Gerhard Richter: Panorama, exh. cat. Tate Modern, London, 2011.

Criqui, Jean-Pierre. “Drei Impromptus über die Kunst Gerhard Richters.” Parkett, no. 35 (1993), pp. 32–41.

Harten, Jürgen, ed. Gerhard Richter: Paintings 1962–1985, exh. cat. Städtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Nationalgalerie Berlin, Kunsthalle Bern, Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts Vienna, Cologne, 1986.

Elger, Dietmar, ed. Gerhard Richter: Firenze. Ostfildern-Ruit, 2001. Elger, Dietmar. Gerhard Richter: Maler. Cologne, 2002. Elger, Dietmar, ed. Gerhard Richter: Landscapes. Exh. cat. Sprengel Museum Hannover. Ostfildern, 1998, reissued 2011.

Heinzelmann, Markus, ed. Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs, exh. cat. Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Ostfildern, 2008.

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Hickey, David. “Richter in Tahiti.” In Parkett, no. 35 (1993), pp. 82–95. Husslein-Arco, Agnes, ed. Love Story: Sammlung Anne & Wolfgang Titze Collection, exh. cat. Belvedere Vienna, Nuremberg, 2014. Obrist, Hans Ulrich, ed. Gerhard Richter: Sils, Munich, 1992, reissued: Cologne, 2002. Richter, Gerhard. Eis. Cologne, 2011.

Westheider, Ortrud, ed. Gerhard Richter: Abstraction, exh. cat. Museum Barberini Potsdam, Munich /London / New York, 2018. Zweite, Armin, ed. Gerhard Richter. Exh. cat. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2005. Zweite, Armin. Gerhard Richter, Leben und Werk: Das Denken ist beim Malen das Malen. Munich, 2019.

Schreier, Christoph, ed. Gerhard Richter: About Painting, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bonn, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Munich, 2017. Schwarz, Dieter, ed. Gerhard Richter: Elbe 1957 – 31 Monotypien. Cologne, 2009. Schwarz, Dieter. Gerhard Richter: Drawings 1964–1999 – Catalogue Raisonné. Düsseldorf, 2000. Storr, Robert. Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden – Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. Washington DC, 2002; German edition: Gerhard Richter: Malerei. Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002. Wagstaff, Sheena, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, eds. Gerhard Richter: Painting after All, exh. cat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, 2020. Wedewer, Rolf. “Zum Landschaftstypus Gerhard Richters.” In Pantheon, 1975, pp. 41–49.

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Authors

Hubertus Butin worked as an art historian in Gerhard Richter’s studio in Cologne in the 1990s. Since 1991, he has published numerous essays and books on contemporary art and art theory. Among other works, he edited the catalogue raisonné of Richter’s editions and the Begriffslexikon zur zeitgenössischen Kunst. In 2020, his art-sociological book on forgeries was published. In addition to his activity as a writer and curator, he is active internationally as an appraiser. He lives and works in Berlin.

T. J. Demos is a professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz, and founder and director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes widely on the intersection of contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of several books, including Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology  (2016) and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017).

Cathérine Hug studied art history, computer science, and journalism at the University of Zurich. From 2008 to 2013, she was a curator at the Kunsthalle Wien, where she cocurated the exhibitions Thomas Ruff (2009), 1989: Ende der Geschichte oder Beginn der Zukunft (2009), and Salon der Angst (2013), among others. Since 2013, she has been at the Kunsthaus Zürich, where she has curated not only thematic exhibitions, but also retrospectives such as Francis Picabia (2016, in cooperation with

the MoMA, New York), Oskar Kokoschka (2018, in cooperation with the Museum Leopold, Vienna), and in 2020–21 Smoke and Mirrors: The Roaring 20s (with Guggenheim Museum Bilbao).

Matias Faldbakken works as an artist and a writer in Oslo. He has exhibited at Documenta 13 (2012) and represented Norway in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennial (2005). He has had solo exhibitions at WIELS, Brussels; Le Consortium, Dijon; Fridericianum, Kassel; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the National Museum of Art, Design and Architecture, Oslo; and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. Since 2001, Faldbakken has published five novels. His fiction writing is translated into more than fifteen languages.

Lisa Ortner-Kreil studied comparative literature, art history, and Romance languages in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Rome. Following positions at the Albertina in Vienna and the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, she has, since 2013, been curator at the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, where in recent years she has organized well-regarded exhibitions, including Eyes Wide Open: Stanley Kubrick als Fotograf (2014), XYZ: Martin Kippenberger (2016), and Man Ray (2018). In addition to teaching at the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna, she publishes regularly on modern and contemporary art.

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List of Works

Second-Hand Landscapes

The CR numbers refer to the catalogue raisonné of paintings published by Dietmar Elger, the catalogue raisonné of drawings published by Dieter Schwarz, and the catalogue raisonné of Gerhard Richter’s editions published by Hubertus Butin. Unless otherwise noted, the cited works appear in both the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien and at Kunsthaus Zürich.

Ägyptische Landschaft (Egyptian Landscape), 1964–65 Oil on canvas, 150 × 165 cm Private collection, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Collection Services CR 53, p. 45 Ausbruch eines großen Geysir (Eruption of a Big Geyser), 1964 Graphite on paper, 26 × 38 cm Block Collection Berlin Drawings CR 64/1, p. 46 Familie im Schnee (Family in the Snow), 1966 Oil on canvas, 53 × 70 cm Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gerhard Richter Archive, loan from a private collection Inv.-No. L376 CR 80-8, p. 47

Kleine Straße (Small Road), 1987 Oil on canvas, 62 × 83 cm Private collection CR 629-3, p. 55 Wasserfall (Waterfall), 1997 Oil on canvas, 126 × 90 cm Kunst Museum Winterthur, purchased with help from the Fund for Charitable Purposes of the Canton of Zurich, 1998, Inv.-No. G. 1998.002 CR 847-1, Zurich only, p. 57 Schneelandschaft (verwischt) (Snowscape [Blurred]), 1966 Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 cm Heidi Horten Collection CR 80-4, p. 58 Waldhaus (House in Forest), 2004 Oil on canvas, 126 × 92 cm Private collection CR 891-1, p. 59

St. Moritz, 1992 Oil on canvas, 72 × 102 cm Private collection, Switzerland CR 792-2, p. 48

Seestück (Seascape), 1998 Oil on canvas, 290 x 290 cm Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa CR 852-2, Zurich only, p. 61

Meran (Merano), 1964 Graphite on paper, 40 × 29.5 cm Private collection Drawings CR 64/3, p. 49

Romanticizing Images as “Cuckoo’s Eggs”

Regenbogen (Rainbow), 1970 Oil on canvas, 50 × 55 cm Private collection CR 261-3, p. 51 Wiesental (Meadowland), 1985 Oil on canvas, 90.5 × 94.9 cm The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller, Betsy Babcook and Mrs. Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson Funds, 1985, Inv.-No. 350.1985 CR 572-4, Zurich only, p. 53 Bäume (Trees), 1987 Oil on canvas, 52 × 72 cm Albertina, Vienna, permanent loan from an Austrian private collection, Inv.-No. GE366DL CR 628-2, p. 54

Vierwaldstätter See (Lake Lucerne), 1969 Oil on canvas, 120 × 150 cm Daros Collection, Switzerland CR 226-2, Zurich only, p. 65 Elbe, 1957/2012 Inkjet prints on paper after the monotypes of the same name each 29.5 × 21 cm, 12 of 31 motifs Olbricht Collection Editions CR 155, pp. 66–67 Wolke (Cloud), 1976 Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm Private collection CR 413, p. 69 Ruhrtalbrücke (Ruhrtal Bridge), 1969 Oil on canvas, 120 × 150 cm Private collection, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Collection Services CR 228, p. 71

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Teyde-Landschaft (Teyde Landscape), 1971 Oil on canvas, 120 × 180 cm Private collection, courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Collection Services CR 283-1, p. 83

Davos, 1981 Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm Private collection CR 468-1, Zurich only, p. 73 Eis (Ice), 2011 Artist’s book, offset print, 23.5 × 15.5 cm Private collection Edition CR 147, p. 74 Eis (Ice), 1981 Oil on canvas, 70 × 100 cm Ruth McLoughlin Collection, Monaco CR 476, Vienna only, p. 75 Wolken (Clouds), 1970 Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm Museum Folkwang, Essen, Inv.-No. G 376 CR 265, p. 77 Abendstimmung (Evening Mood), 1969 Oil on canvas, 120 × 150 cm Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Inv.-No. 730 CR 243, p. 78 Landschaft bei Hubbelrath (Landscape near Hubbelrath), 1969 Oil on canvas, 100 × 140 cm Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst Aachen, loan from the Peter and Irene Ludwig Stiftung CR 221, p. 79 Venedig (Treppe) (Venice [Staircase]), 1985 Oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm Art Institute of Chicago Gift of Edlis Neeson Collection, Inv.-No. 2015.136 CR 586-3, p. 81 Große Teyde-Landschaft (mit zwei Figuren) (Large Teyde Landscape [with Two Figures]), 1971 Oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm Crex Collection CR 284, p. 82

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Kleine Teyde-Landschaft (Small Teyde Landscape), 1971 Oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm Private collection, Berlin CR 287, p. 84 Teyde-Landschaft (Teyde Landscape), 1971 Oil on canvas, 120 × 180 cm Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, permanent loan from Kunstverein Museum Schloss Morsbroich e. V. CR 283, p. 85

Alpen (Alps), 1970 Oil on canvas, 47 × 53 cm Private collection Switzerland CR 256-1, p. 95 Stadtbild PL (Townscape PL), 1970 Oil on canvas, 170 × 170 cm Private collection via Neues Museum Nuremberg CR 250, p. 96 Stadtbild D (Townscape D), 1968 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Daros Collection, Switzerland CR 176, Zurich only, p. 97

Landscapes in Abstraction

Stadtbild PX (Townscape PX), 1968 Oil on canvas, 101 × 91 cm Wittelsbacher Ausgleichfonds – Sammlung Prinz Franz von Bayern, in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich, since 1984 CR 174-3, p. 98

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 2005 Oil on Alu-Dibond, 27.5 × 33.9 cm Albertina, Vienna, permanent loan from an Austrian private collection, Inv.-No. GE413DL CR 893-3, p. 91

Stadtbild F (Townscape F), 1968 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, permanent loan from the Deutsche Bundesbank CR 177-3, Zurich only, p. 99

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1984 Oil on canvas, 43 × 60 cm Private collection, Switzerland CR 551-2, p. 92

Waldstück (Chile) (Forest Piece [Chile]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 174 × 124 cm Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, gift of Jytte and Dennis Dresing, Inv.-No. 10-15-2756 CR 216-2, p. 101

Vesuv (Vesuvius), 1976 Oil on wood, 66 × 95 cm Crex Collection CR 406, p. 87

Abstraktes Bild L. (Abstract Painting L), 1995 Oil on canvas, 36 × 41 cm Private collection, Switzerland CR 833-6, p. 92 Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1984 Oil on canvas, 43 × 60 cm Private collection, Switzerland CR 551-1, p. 93

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Sternbild (Star Picture), 1969 Oil on canvas, 92 × 92 cm Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden CR 255-4, p. 94

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Waldstück (Okinawa) (Forest Piece [Okinawa]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 174 × 124 cm Anne and Wolfgang Titze Collection CR 215, p. 103

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Abstrakte Landschaft (Abstract Landscape), 1969 Oil on canvas, 30 × 40 cm Private collection, Munich CR 225-8, p. 104

Pencil on paper, 21 x 29.5 cm each The Museum of Modern Art, New York, promised gift of Catie and Donald Marron, Inv.-No. PG606.2016.1–20 Zurich only, pp. 110–11

Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting), 1987 Oil on canvas, 62 × 72 cm Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, Inv.-No. NSKS 0527/93 CR 641-4, p. 105

27.8.1985 (1), 1985 Graphite on paper, 21 × 29.7 cm Kunst Museum Winterthur, purchased with help from the Fund for Charitable Purposes of the Canton of Zurich, 1997 Drawings CR 85/6, Zurich only, p. 113

31.5.1999, 1999 Graphite on paper, 21 × 30.2 cm Kunst Museum Winterthur, purchased with help from the Fund for Charitable Purposes of the Canton of Zurich, 2000 Drawings CR 99/40, Vienna only, p. 106

Dschungelbild (Jungle Picture), 1971 Oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm Private collection, courtesy of Ceylan Ecer CR 312, p. 115 Parkstück (Park Piece), 1971 Oil on canvas, 3 parts, each 300 x 125 cm Nanette Gehrig CR 310, Zurich only, p. 117

1.6.1999, 1999 Graphite on paper, 21 × 29.7 cm Private collection Drawings CR 99/41, p. 107 Gebirge (Pyrenäen Z.) (Mountains [Pyrenees Z.]), 1968 Graphite on canvas, 130 × 180 cm Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gerhard Richter Archive CR 186-1, p. 109 40 Tage (40 Days), 2015 (20 of 40 sheets) 8. Juni 2015, 2015 9. Juni 2015, 2015 10. Juni 2015, 2015 11. Juni 2015, 2015 12.6.2015, 2015 13. Juni 2015, 2015 14.6.2015, 2015 15.6.2015, 2015 16.6.2015, 2015 5. Aug. 2015, 2015 6. Aug. 2015, 2015 7.8.2015, 2015 5. Sept. 2015, 2015 6. Sept. 2015, 2015 8. Sept. 2015, 2015 9.9.2015, 2015 10.9.2015, 2015 11.9.2015, 2015 12. Sept 2015, 2015 13.9.2015, 2015

Schweizer Alpen I (Swiss Alps I), 1969 5 screen prints on lightweight card, each 69.4 × 69.4 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 20, p. 118

128 Fotos von einem Bild (Halifax 1979) II (128 Details from a Picture [Halifax 1979] II), 1998 8 offset prints on card, each 64.2 x 100.6 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 99, pp. 128–29 Seestücke (Fotocollage) (Seascapes [Photo Collages]), 1973 2 color photographs mounted with adhesive tape, 36.7 × 51.7 cm Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich Atlas Sheet 198, p. 130 Meer (Sea), 1972 Offset print on lightweight card, 67 × 25 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 48, p. 131 Umwandlung (Transformation), 1968 Offset print on lightweight card, 46.4 × 67.4 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1994, Inv.-No. Gr.1994/0014 Editions CR 14, p. 132

Himalaja (Himalaya), 1968 Oil on canvas, 200 × 160 cm Daros Collection, Switzerland CR 181, Zurich only, p. 119

Kugel, 15.6.1991 (Ball, 15.6.1991), 1991 India ink on paper, 30 × 39.7 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1994, Inv.-No. Z.1992/0031 Drawings CR 91/12, p. 132

Sankt Gallen, 1989 Oil on canvas, two parts, each 250 × 340 cm University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland CR 695, pp. 120–21

Kugel III (Sphere III), 1992 Stainless steel, diameter: 16 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 77, p. 133

24.11.18, 2018 Pencil on paper, 23 × 23 cm Private collection p. 123

Seestück (bewölkt) (Seascape [Cloudy]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Private collection via Neues Museum Nuremberg CR 239-1, p. 135

Landscapes as Fictional Constructs Seestück (Grau) (Seascape [Gray]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 70 × 70 cm Private collection CR 224-16, p. 127

Wolke (Cloud), 1971 Offset print on lightweight card, 64 × 60 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 37, p. 136

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Firenze (Florence), 2000 Oil on color photograph, 12 × 12 cm Private collection, courtesy of Schacky Art & Advisory Editions CR 110, p. 148

Räume (Rooms) (from Atlas), 1971 2 color photographs mounted in room sketches, 66.7 × 51.7 cm Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich Atlas Sheets 249, p. 137

Firenze (Florence), 2000 Oil on color photograph, 12 × 12 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 110, p. 148

Räume (Rooms) (from Atlas), 1971 2 color photographs mounted in room sketches, 66.7 × 51.7 cm Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich Atlas Sheets 243, p. 137 Seestück (Welle) (Seascape [Wave]), 1969 Oil on canvas, 201.9 × 201.3 cm Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, gift of the Burnett Family Foundation in honor of Marla Price CR 234, p. 139 Wolken (Clouds), 1969 Offset print on paper, 55 × 50 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, Inv.-No. Gr.1979/0029 Editions CR 24, p. 140 Seestück I (Seascape I), 1969 Offset print on paper, 51 × 49.3 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, Inv.-No. Gr.1979/0032 Editions CR 23, p. 141 Seestück (See-See) (Seascape [Sea-Sea]), 1970 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Private collection CR 245, Vienna only, p. 142

Firenze (Florence), 2000 (2 works) Oil on color photograph, each 12 × 12 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 110, p. 149 Park, 1990 Oil on color photograph, 50.2 × 63.8 cm Private collection p. 150 Park (2. Mai 1990), 1990 Oil on offset print, 63.5 × 81 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 72, p. 150 Park (3. Mai 1990), 1990 Oil on offset print, 63.5 × 81 cm Private collection Editions CR 72, p. 151 Park (7. Mai 1990), 1990 Oil on offset print, 63.5 × 81 cm Olbricht Collection Editions CR 72, p. 151 5. Sept. 2009, 2009 Oil on color photograph, 10 × 15 cm Olbricht Collection p. 152

Seestück (See-See) (Seascape [Sea-Sea]), 1970 Oil on canvas, 200 × 200 cm Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie CR 244, Zurich only, p. 143

Firenze, 6.12.1999 (Florence), 1999 Oil on color photograph, 12 × 12 cm Olbricht Collection p. 153 Firenze, 9.12.1999 (Florence), 1999 Oil on color photograph, 12 × 12 cm Private collection p. 153

Overpainted Landscapes Piz Surlej, Piz Corvatsch, 1992 Oil on color photograph, 8.9 × 12.6 cm Peter and Elisabeth Bloch Collection p. 147

10. Jan. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 ×16.7 cm Private collection p. 154

3.2.92, 1992 Oil on color photograph, 8.9 × 12.6 cm Private collection p. 154 22. Jan. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection p. 155 4. Dez. 2014, 2014 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection p. 155 25. Jan. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection p. 156 24. Jan. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection p. 156 3. Juni 2009, 2009 Oil on color photograph, 10 × 15 cm Private collection p. 157 2. Febr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 17 cm Private collection p. 157 13. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.6 cm Private collection p. 158 30. März 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 17.9 cm Private collection p. 158 9. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 17 × 11.3 cm Private collection p. 159 10. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 17 × 11.3 cm Private collection p. 159

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15. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.8 cm Private collection p. 160

8. Juni 2016 (8), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 16.7 × 12.6 cm Private collection p. 165

23. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 16.7 cm Private collection p. 160

14.6.2016 (2), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 18.8 cm Private collection p. 166

24.7.2015 (3), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.7 cm Private collection p. 161

18.6.2016 (4), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 18.8 cm Private collection p. 166

24. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 16.7 cm Private collection p. 161

25.6.2016 (1), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 12.6 × 18.7 cm Private collection p. 167

27. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 16.7 × 12.6 cm Private collection p. 162

Abstract, 13.5.92, 1992 Photograph overpainted with oil paint on paper, 12.7 × 17.8 cm Kunsthaus Zürich, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1993, Inv.-No. Z.1993/0004 p. 167

28. Apr. 2015, 2015 Oil on color photograph, 16.7 × 12.6 cm Private collection p. 162 24.7.2015 (4), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.9 cm Private collection p. 163 28.7.2015 (1), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.5 cm Private collection p. 163 28.7.2015 (2), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.9 cm Private collection p. 164 28.7.2015 (3), 2015 Oil on color photograph, 11.3 × 16.9 cm Private collection p. 164 8. Juni 2016 (7), 2016 Oil on color photograph, 16.7 × 12.7 cm Private collection p. 165

Abstraktes Bild, Materdell (Abstract Painting, Materdell), 1995 Oil on canvas, 36 × 41 cm Private collection CR 833-8, p. 173 Ohne Titel (Febr. 92) (Untitled, Feb. 92), 1992 Graphite and lacquer on card, 21 × 16 cm Private collection p. 175

Eis (Ice), 1981 Artist’s book, offset print, 20 × 12 cm Private collection Editions CR 58, not reproduced

Baumgruppe (Clump of Trees), 1987 Oil on canvas, 72 × 102 cm Private collection, Switzerland CR 628-1, Zurich only, p. 168 Haus 6.1.90 (House 6.1.90), 1990 Offset print on lightweight card, 49.8 × 70 cm Private collection p. 169 Krems, 1986 Oil on canvas, 72 × 102 cm Private collection via Neues Museum Nuremberg CR 606-4, p. 170 Venedig (Venice), 1986 Oil on canvas, 86 × 121 cm Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden CR 606-3, p. 171 Silsersee (Lake Sils), 1995 Oil on canvas, 41 × 51 cm Private collection CR 835-6, p. 172

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Acknowledgments

We would like to extend our greatest thanks to all of the lenders of the exhibition

Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden Block Collection Berlin Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa Peter and Elisabeth Bloch Collection The Art Institute of Chicago Crex Collection Daros Collection, Switzerland Gerhard Richter Archive, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden Private Collection, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf Museum Folkwang, Essen The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas Collection of the Deutsche Bundesbank, permanent loan at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Nanette Gehrig Sprengel Museum Hannover Heidi Horten Collection Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark Kunsthalle zu Kiel Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen Collection Ruth McLoughlin, Monaco Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau Munich The Museum of Modern Art, New York Neues Museum Nuremberg Olbricht Collection Atelier Gerhard Richter University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland Schacky Art & Advisory Anne & Wolfgang Titze Collection Albertina, Vienna Kunst Museum Winterthur Kunsthaus Zürich Private Collection, Hauser & Wirth, Zurich as well as all those who wish to remain anonymous.

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Florian Fauré Eliza Frecon Priska Fröhli Caitlin Haskell Nadine Henn Bruno Hensler Thomas Heyden Lekha Hileman Waitoller Antonia Hoerschelmann Anette Hüsch Agnes Husslein-Arco Joachim Jäger Fred Jahn Jessica Jernigan Judith Irrgang Patricia Kamp Doris Keil Sam Keller Emily-Jane Kirwan Udo Kittelmann Felicitas Klein Marissa Klein Martin Klosterfelde Renata Knes Simone Kober Walther König Pamela Kort Eva Kraus Stefanie Kreuzer Doris Krystof Kerstin Küster Silke Lemmes Christian Löhrl Glenn D. Lowry Bernhard Maaz Hiltrud Mario Karin Marti Sabine Moritz-Richter Matthias Mühling Pia Müller-Tamm Tanja Narr Elisabeth Nunn Hans Ulrich Obrist Heiner Oettli Daniel Oggenfuss Thomas Olbricht Guido Orsi Simon Ortner Mareike Otten Suzanne Pagé Carina Plath Marla Price Thomas Prigge

For their generous help and support we would also like to thank: Nadia Abbas Marion Ackermann Lucia Agirre Matthew Armstrong Juliane Au Emma Baker Laura Bechter Stefanie Behrendt Andreas Beitin Jörg-Michael Bertz Konrad Bitterli Elisabeth Bloch Peter André Bloch René Block Susanne Brüning Hans von Bülow Philippe Büttner Frieder Burda (†) Christophe Cherix Gerarda Coppola Iris Cramer Emily Cushman Jay Dandy Kirsten Degel Nick Deimel Natasha Derrickson Catrin Dietrich Georg Dietz Barbara Dossi Severin Dünser Ceylan Ecer Svenja Eckell Lucy Economakis Danielle Edwards Bernhard Ehrenzeller Sonja Eiböck Dietmar Elger Konstanze Ell Fritz Emslander Simone Gehr Holger Gehrmann Julia Gelshorn Regina Göckede Heidi Goëss-Horten Lily Goldberg Peter Gorschlüter Stefan Gronert Franziska Gulde-Druet Monique Fankhauser

Karola Rattner Eliza Ravelle-Chapuis Thomas Reinshagen Alexander Ritter James Rondeau Lisa Rosche Thomas Ruff Ludmilla Sala Yvette Sanchéz Kenny Schachter Daniel von Schacky Nina Schallenberg Elke Schmidt Nina Schmitz Gesa Schneider Dieter Scholz Wolfgang Schoppmann Herrad Schorn Klaus Albrecht Schröder Barry Schwabsky Dieter Schwarz Katrin Seemann Christine Senft Alexander Sies Sarah Sonderkamp Walter Soppelsa Reinhard Spieler Antonia Spuhler Robert Strebel Corinna Thierolf Poul Erik Tøjner Verena Traeger Anne Umland Mirjam Varadinis Juan Ignacio Vidarte Rita Vitorelli Ulrike Voß Moritz Wesseler Oliver Wick Lilias Wigan Gerald Winckler Mark Zittman Nadine Zuni

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Catalogue Editors Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Hubertus Butin, Cathérine Hug Managing editors Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Cathérine Hug, Agnes Wyskitensky Copyediting Aaron Bogart Translations Steven Lindberg, Emma Pressley Graphic design Martha Stutteregger Project management Richard Viktor Hagemann, Hatje Cantz Production Thomas Lemaître, Hatje Cantz Reproductions Repromayer Medienproduktion GmbH, Reutlingen Printing and binding Printer Trento S.r.l.

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© 2020 Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft / Kunsthaus Zürich © 2020 Texts: the authors © 2020 for the reproduced works by Gerhard Richter: Gerhard Richter © 2020 for the reproduced work by Benjamin Katz: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Bildrecht, Wien © 2020 for the reproduced work by Barnett Newman: The Barnett Newman Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Bildrecht, Wien © 2020 for the reproduced work by Francis Picabia: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Bildrecht, Wien © 2020 for the reproduced work by Jackson Pollock: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / Bildrecht, Wien © 2020 for the reproduced work by Hiroshi Sugimoto: Hiroshi Sugimoto / Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery New York © 2020 for the reproduced work by Andy Warhol: Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Bildrecht, Wien

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Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH Mommsenstraße 27 10629 Berlin www.hatjecantz.com A Ganske Publishing Group Company Trade edition ISBN 978-3-7757-4712-7 (German edition) ISBN 978-3-7757-4713-4 (English edition) Printed in Italy

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Photo Credits

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Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich: p. 71 Artothek / photo: Blauel/Gnamm: p. 98 Artothek / Museum Folkwang: pp. 16, 17, 77 Robert Bayer: pp. 65, 69, 119 FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa, photo: Erika Barahona Ede: p. 61 bpk / The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY: p. 81 bpk / Nationalgalerie, SMB / Jörg P. Anders: pp. 25, 143, 187 bpk / Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne, photo: Britta Schlier: p. 13 bpk / Sprengel Museum Hannover / Aline Herling / Michael Herling / Benedikt Werner: p. 105 bpk / Staatsgalerie Stuttgart: p. 40 Carl Brunn: p. 79 Jana Ebert, Berlin: pp. 118, 128–129, 131, 136, 148, 149 Christoph Fein, Essen: pp. 132, 148, 149 r., 150 b., 151, 153 a. Karl Fülscher, Stuttgart: p. 113 Musées d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, photo: Flora Bevilacqua: p. 32 Kunsthalle zu Kiel, photo: Renard Kiel: p. 78, 186 Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf: pp. 127, 143, 151 a., 152, 153 a., 154 a., 172, 175 Kunstsammlung Deutsche Bundesbank, photo: Wolfgang Günzel: p. 99 Jochen Müller: p. 85 Neues Museum Nuremberg, photo: Anette Kradisch: pp. 96, 135, 170 Photoarchiv Heidi Horten Collection: p. 58 P. Schälchli, Zurich: p. 55 Christof Schelbert, Olten: p. 147 SIK-ISEA, Zurich, photo: Jean-Pierre Kuhn: p. 57; photo: Lutz Hartmann: p. 106 Courtesy Sotheby’s: pp. 115, 168 Stavanger Kunstmuseum and Nasjonalmuseet, photo: Jacques Lathion: pp. 182–83 Andreas Süß: p. 84 Simon Vogel: p. 49 Uwe Walter, Berlin: p. 46 Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Museum Collection, photo: Susanne Marschall: p. 37 Julius Winckler: p. 169 Andreas Zimmermann Fotografie: p. 103 Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, photo: Richard Learoyd: p. 26

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We have tried to identify all the photographers or rights holders of the images. If this was not possible, however, entitled claims will be settled within the framework of the usual agreements.

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