Gerhard Richter – Wald 3

Commentators writing about Richter’s abstract paintings made in the 1990s and 2000s often dwell on the technique used to make them. They focus on the way in which he would utilise a large, custom-built squeedge to draw layers of paint across the surface of the canvas, as if they were discomfited by the ‘easy’ means of achieving its ‘accidental’ effects. Just as critics from an earlier generation would endlessly worry over Jackson Pollock’s dripping and spattering methods in his abstract expressionist paintings, there is a sense in which the departure from artisanal representationalism and the correlative adoption of non-fine art techniques needed explanation to be thereby validated as art. But this always feels like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The signal consideration for the art viewer is the object as made more than the means of its making, the artistic procedure. Although the method has an intellectual intent in this and other abstract works by Richter, it is always subordinate to the art content that emerges from it.

Gerhard Richter, Forest 3 (Wald 3), 1990

In Wald 3 for example, the knowledge of its scraping method is secondary to the sensation of the colour adjacencies, the thrummingly dark energy that you feel from just a few minutes of looking. Although the title of the work might suggest the tenebrous density of trees through which little light passes, and although parallels might be drawn with the German Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes in works like The Chasseur in the Forest with all its brooding emotional intensity, Richter’s non-figurative abstraction allows for a multiplicity of interpretation and reaction.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Chasseur in the Forest, 1814, oil on canvas, private collection

At a basic level, I just enjoy what feels like a dreadful thrill while looking at this painting and there is so much of it to enjoy as a pure yet endlessly complex aesthetic experience. The vertical and rhythmically stippled blacks which are offset left of centre are the most prominent feature and are interrupted by a horizontal which, in a realist work might define a vanishing-point horizon or a juncture between nature and its reflection on water. But here, the coal-like mottles, these points of darkness, serve as a counterpoint to the dreamy and more hopeful blues and the thrilling shimmer of gold and pink, accents which assert themselves as if in contradiction of darkness, to tell their own story.

Where the scraping technique does merit discussion is in what it helps suggest in terms of the concepts of erasure or effacement and revelation. In one way, the painting might be compared to an archaeological dig, an enquiry into what lies beneath. By removing one layer of deposit to reveal another, and to do so progressively, is like a way to excavate the past. But what is revealed of it remains coloured by the present (the latest layer) so that what we see is a composite account and never the ‘truth.’ Like any history, it cannot but be anything other than partial. Revelation is never complete. By contrast, the idea of effacement is somehow troubling. Attempts to strip away meaning and identity by obliteration or erasure has a socio-political dimension that has a particular resonance for anyone like Richter who has lived through his country’s shamefully turbulent past.

In the final volume of Marcel Proust’s  À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator comments that ‘A book is a great cemetery where on the majority of the tombs we can no longer read the effaced names’ and for me, a painting like this could stand in for such a book-cemetery. We are so accustomed to the idea that objects and ideas (art, books, culture, values, and beliefs) endure that the idea of their erasure violates our sense of propriety. Even if the effacement in the case of this painting has left us with something of scorched beauty, it also speaks of loss. The painting concerns itself with the idea of memory, that faculty which, for good and bad, is critical to the human condition. Without memory we are as nothing and art, like writing, is both a way to cheat death and to represent the process of its cheating.

The wald as an idea and a reality has had a particular hold on the German psyche for many centuries. The Teutoburg Forest was the site of a momentous defeat for the Romans in 9 AD at the hands of an alliance of Germanic tribes and from which the seeds of nationalism were germinated. The forest, unnavigable and threatening to the would-be conquerors, came much later to symbolise an untameable quality for the people living in an around it, to give them their own sense of exceptionalism. In the Romantic period, the woods became a motif for mystical connection, a natural refuge from so-called civilisation but also a place of mystery and menace with its own unfathomable animus. In the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, in Little Red Hood and Hansel and Gretel, for example, the wald has a disturbing dream-like aspect, a place away from villages and towns where magic and transformations happen, but also a place in which it is easy to become lost – it represents the realm of the unconscious, the locus of fear, a place of dangerous freedom where chaos can reign. In the twentieth century, the Nazis perverted the folkloric aspects of the wald and conjured from it the notions of blood and soil, blut und boden, as the source of the essential elements of racial purity. The woods, once a place of sacred oneness with nature, was now co-opted to serve the unspeakable. Buchenwald, which translates as ‘beech forest’, is now a place name redolent of evil, the site of a concentration camp where internees were starved and worked to death or were subject to monstrous horrors.

All of this history, culture, and knowledge, benign and baleful, informs Richter’s work, and it is as if it embodies a baffling collective unconscious, a pool of primal experiences, impressions and emotions that are subject to effacement and revelation that can happen with intentional exploration or by pure chance. The work is deliberately ambiguous and the progress of its cadenced progress, the way that the paint is layed down, merged or rubbed away, is also prone to rupture, schisms, fractures, and breaches which inflect an otherwise harmonious modulation. Most obvious on the right side of this work, we can see places where the paint has been horizontally drawn from the centre to the edge. It reminds me of the ‘shutter drag’ technique seen in photography where a blur is caused by the motion of a body and a slower than usual exposure. The effect of this is to remind us of the concept of time, and change. The smear, like a brushstroke, encapsulates the painterliness of its making’s duration, but also reinforces the notion of art as a kind of chronicle.

The wald seems timeless to an onlooker but is prone to continual movement and to death and regeneration. It is a like a living organism conscious of the events whose stories it helps shape but unable or unwilling to do anything about them. The blacknesses that lurks in the painting are like the periodic episodes of nihilism that punctuate human narratives or the negative energy that lies at the core of the mind and across which synaptic flashes of colour are sustained as its alternative index of evanescent affirmation.