Cosmopolis : Gerd Richter aka Gerhard Richter before he became famous

Sep 04, 2020 at 17:16

From August 29 until November 29, 2020 the Gerhard Richter Archiv at the Saxony state museum Albertinum in Dresden showcases Gerd Richter aka Gerhard Richter before he became famous and found his own style(s). The cabinet exhibition Gerd Richter 1961/62. Es ist, wie es ist / It is, as it is and the accompanying publication by Dietmar Elger explore the hitherto largely unkown period in Gerhard Richter’s life from his flight from Dresden in Communist East Germany (GDR) to the Federal Republic of Germany at the end of February 1961 until the beginning of his “official” oeuvre Richter began at the end of 1962 with the painting Tisch, which he designated artwork number one.

From mid to end of February 1961, Gerd Richter spent two weeks of study in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow. At the end of the month, together with his wife Marianne (Ema), he left Dresden and fled via Berlin to West Germany. They were flown out from West Berlin to the Federal Republic of Germany and first took refuge at his parents-in-law, Professor Heinrich Eufinger and his wife Erna in Sanderbusch.

Shortly after moving to Düsseldorf, Gerhard Richter, who at that time still called himself Gerd (until 1964), attended the Staatliche Kunstakademie there and within 18 months developed an independent style of painting based on photographic models and inspired by American Pop Art.

The exhibition and publication Gerd Richter 1961/62illustrate Richter’s consistent liberation from his figurative pictorial language established in Dresden to abstraction and non-objective experiments, by means of paintings and drawings created during these months, which for years were considered destroyed by the artist. All five surviving paintings by Gerd Richter from 1961/62 are shown in the Albertinum exhibition. In addition, numerous letters, which the Gerhard Richter Archive at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden was able to acquire in 2008 and 2009, document this important early development of the artist.

The first convolute contains 46 letters, postcards, and photographs dating from 1959 to 1964, written by Gerd Richter to Helmut and Erika Heinze in Radebeul, near Dresden. Helmut Heinze was born in 1932, just as Richter was. He began studying sculpture in 1950 at the Dresden Hochschule für Bildende Künste. In 1956 he married the costume designer Erika Simmank. From 1961 onward, Heinze taught nude drawing at the Technische Hochschule Dresden.

The recipient of the second convolute of letters written by Gerd Richter was the sculptor Wieland Förster in Berlin, who was born in Dresden in 1930. He began studying at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden in the winter semester of 1953 and moved to East Berlin in 1961. That year he was expelled from the master’s program at the Deutsche Akademie der Künste Berlin. Förster received a total of 20 letters and documents from Richter in 1961 and 1962. The replies to all of Richter’s letters are missing.

Dietmar Elger writes that, in these letters, Gerhard Richter spontaneously, directly and trustingly shares his life experiences as well as his artistic doubts and ambitions with his correspondents. They are not filtered through the lens of time or purposefully controlled, as later interviews with the artist were.

Back to the exhibition. The five surviving paintings from 1961/62 show the influence of Western artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Jackson Pollock on the young Gerhard Richter. One painting, Fleck, made in October 1961 (German private collection), strongly ressembles artworks by Jean Fautrie. The French artist had a show at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf from October 17 to November 16, 1961. It featured 12 gouaches made by Fautrier between 1958 and 1961. When asked in 2019, however, Gerhard Richter could not confirm that he had actually seen this exhibition. Anyway, the influence of Jean Fautrier is evident. His painting Fleck is almost a copy.

In the catalogue, Gerd Richter 1961/62. Es ist, wie es ist / It is, as it is, Dietmar Elger writes that, in 1961/62, Gerhard Richter tested a stylistic articulation somewhere in between figuration and abstraction, set up his first catalogue of works for the months June to December 1961, dissolved linguistic terminology into illegible textual images in his artbook Comic Strip, and defamiliarized found textual material for the opening of his show in Fulda. At the Albertinum exhibition, you can admire the original of the Comic Strip book, which the Gerhard Richter Archiv was able to acquire in 2018.

Gerd Richter had his first exhibition at Galerie Junge Kunst in Fulda from September 8 to 30, 1962. His works were shown next to some by his friend Manfred Kuttner. The show only happened because another one was canceled. Richter was unable to sell a single work. The artist told Dietmar Elger that this was in fact great for his subsequent career. Had the Fulda exhibition been a commercial success, he would have continued the work he did back then. The failure forced him to search hard for his own artistic expression. What followed — slowly, over several decades — was a rise to worldwide fame and extremely high prices for his works.

The Gerhard Richter Archiv exhibition at the Albertinum museum shows that already the young Gerd Richter had the will to systematically document his oeuvre, to experiment, to find a way between figuration and abstraction. He said about his fellow students in Düsseldorf that they were lazy. The same cannot be said about Gerhard Richter who, even today, continues to experiment with new materials, methods and styles.

The Gerhard Richter Archiv situated in the Albertinum organizes the exhibition at the Albertinum museum in Dresden. The exhibition takes place from August 29 until November 29, 2020.

Article published on www.cosmopolis.ch.