Gerhard Richter's Blurry Death
Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
By Catherine MacLennan
The recent Gerhard Richter retrospective included asbstractions, landscapes, and portraits but the unmistakable black (or greyish) heart of the exhibition were his death paintings.
The Baader-Meinhof paintings awaited several rooms and corridors away. Other deaths led the way. The first, a slap of the nauseatingly recognizable - paintings of the eight nursing students who were murdered in Chicago in 1966. The black and white blurred paintings were based on the photos used in newspaper and magazine stories. As in many of the articles about the case, the portraits/photos were lined up one after the other, in the customary callous way that the media loves - the line-up of the victims, the dead - the line-up, pile-up that deprives them of their individuality and humanity.
The next rooms: death again - Jacqueline Kennedy crying at the assassination; an uncle in a Nazi uniform; another murder victim; a man killed under a huge bolder. The art world has been so accustomed to defending 'outrage' that much of what is dubious at best is not questioned and often celebrated. Forbidden is the suggestion that there is something easy or wrong about it.
The churning of ambivalent responses is appropriate, however for the Baader Meinhof paintings (the October 18, 1977 cycle). It is at least not the invasion of private people made public by their murders. The Baader Meinhof group abducted and bombed and murdered in public. And they are dead. Richter paints an Andreas Baader dead on the floor (Man Shot Down 1, Man Shot Down 2), an Ulrike Meinhof dead on the floor (Dead 1) then dead on the floor again (Dead 2) and again (Dead 3), and Gudrun Ensslin hung in her cell (Hanged). Suicide? Murder? Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide in 1976 in prison. Or was she murdered by the state? Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe "committed suicide" October 18, 1977. Or was it murder? It isn't black and white - it's greyish, and blurry. In interviews Richter expresses ambivalence for them: "I was impressed by the terrorists' energy, their uncompromising determination and their absolute bravery; but I could not find it in my heart to condemn the State for its harsh response." 1 Richter has also described them as "people who died so young and so crazy, for nothing." 2 Youth Portrait shows a pre-terrorist Meinhof, a longhaired schoolgirl, more innocent than what we would know of her later, yet something about her direct gaze suggests that she was even then more than just a schoolgirl. Or are we unable to separate the two Ulrikes? The record player in Baader's room, with an Eric Clapton record still on it makes you think of him as a kid who listens to rock, not an unfeeling ideological killing machine. In Funeral they become the public terrorists again, crowds around the coffins. (These paintings can be seen at the website This is Baader-Meinhof: Germany in the Post-War Decade of Terror 1968-1977.
After all this grey blurry death another part of the exhibition featured... quiet (non blurry) landscapes in colour... leaving one to wonder if they were some kind of joke. Richter: "Of course my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful'... and by 'untruthful' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature - Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves, absolutely inhuman. Every beauty that we see in landscape is our projection; and we can switch it off at a moment's notice, to reveal only the appalling horror and ugliness."3 Gerhard, it's only a tree! It appears that the ambivalence of the grey death paintings lurk behind his clear colour landscapes. The landscapes are beautiful but there is a desertedness, an anxious forboding remoteness to them. Or do they just look that way because we have just walked through paintings and paintings of murders, war, and terrorism?