Photography In-the-Round: Gerhard Richter’s “48 Portraits”, 1972 and 1998

Abstract

This paper looks at the different photographic appearances of Gerhard Richter’s work “48 Portraits” — a group of 48 individual paintings of famed men, based on photographic portraits sourced from encyclopaedias. First devised for the German Pavilion of the 1972 Venice Biennale, his “48 Portraits” have since seen a range of site-specific arrangements. After a first photographic set in 1972, Richter finally authorized a photographic edition of the paintings in 1998, which resulted in increasingly different installations that now divert more and more from the original hanging instructions. This paper considers examples of these installations (displayed in long single rows or montaged in grids) as well as the four versions of the piece (as paintings of photographs, as photographs of painted photographs with and without borders, and as part of “Atlas”), in order to discuss the variable nature of what is considered to be a piece of work, its non-biographical treatment of archival sources, its transformation through media, questions of authorship, spectatorship and documentation as well as display strategies of inverting and reverting methods of theatre “in-the-round”.

Acknowledgements

Thank you very much to Dietmar Elger, Ulrich Tillmann, Paul Moorhouse, Konstanze Ell and Gerhard Richter for all invaluable help and information provided.

Notes

¹ The opening of the 36th Venice Biennale was on 11 June 1972. The “48 Portraits” were exhibited in the centre space of the pavilion, its central stage, while the side galleries showed Richter’s Townscapes, Mountains, Clouds, and Green paintings; exhibition catalogue supplemented by an illustrated Painting Overview (a catalogue raisonné).

² What does this apparent indivisibility of exhibition and photography produce, add or take away when work is judged through photographic means? A “bad” installation photograph might perpetuate a less successful aspect of a hang or show the work from a distorted or misleading angle thus taking on a life of its own. Equally, a single image can become the logo-image of an exhibition rendering the work synonymous with just one aspect while at the same time the photographers are rarely named.

³ In comparison to Barthes’ description of the sitter’s pre-photographic freeze into a posture in his Camera Lucida, the source photographs of Richter’s “48 Portraits” were taken by professional photographers and therefore based on similar conventions of posing and lighting their subjects in the studio context.

⁴ “A photograph — unless the art photographers have “fashioned” it — is simply the best picture I can imagine. It is perfect […]. It has no style. The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information; even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified” (Richter qtd. in Obrist 56–57).

⁵ Richter in 1966: “I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no programme, no style, no direction. […] I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty” (qtd. in Obrist 58).

⁶ See Foucault and Foster on the function of the archive as an all-too homogenous space that constructs meaning as soon as something is fitted inside its iconic code system.

⁷ Richter explained that his stepfather was born in 1907, but wasn’t aware of W.G. Sebald’s account of the “silent generation” (Richter and Leister telephone).

⁸ Richter acknowledged: “it wasn’t until Moritz was born that I started to know what a father is” (Storr, Doubt and Belief 101).

⁹ Buchloh stressed the dialectic of Richter’s “divided heritage” between East and West Germany not only as something that influenced his personal formation but also played out in his work as a dichotomy between socialism and consumerism, Socialist Realism and modernist abstraction, Stalinism and Fascism, modernist abstraction and postmodern dismantling of traditions (“Divided Memory” 60–64).

¹⁰ Richter enlarged the stamp-size encyclopaedic portrait reproductions by re-photographing and enlarging them to prints of about 6 × 5 cm / 6 × 8 cm size. He then used an episcope to enlarge these source images onto canvas (Ehrenfried 47, 23).

¹¹ Richter adds that a palette of grey is of course only ever an ideal, a fiction, a model (Obrist 70). “[T]he grey colour simulated the intricate links between his conception of painting and the popular conventions of amateur photography” (Buchloh, “Divided Memory” 65). Richter also stresses that at the time he chose these photographic sources on the basis of them being as “banal” as possible, but it is problematic that he talks of photographs as “pure” images (Ehrenfried 64–65).

¹² “Atlas” also includes biographies for some of the selected portraits, at first glance suggesting an interest in individuals. The nameplates are exhibited as part of the work and are amended when the person had died, seemingly suggesting an interest in the subjects.

¹³ Buchloh based on Kracauer calls this the “anomic” function of photography, the destruction of memory caused by mass cultural representation (Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’” 118, 134; “Divided Memory”: 64).

¹⁴ “Richter’s technical facility coated the pill he offered those with doctrinaire modernist taste, but it also heightened suspicion” (Storr, Forty Years 16). See Sayre on “undecidablility”, style-less-ness, circulation between media and pluralist readings (xiii).

¹⁵ Stemmrich stressed that Richter sees “48 Portraits” as part of his constructive works while asserting that he has no ideological construction rather stressing a constructive emptiness in the work (123), while Richter insists that he has never been a conceptual artist or indeed never tried making any “Konzeptkunst” (Richter and Leister telephone). The dematerialization of the artwork after 1968 was seen as an attempt to widen the traditional borders of the genre after the supposed end of painting. Richter felt “pushed out” through gallerists’ preference of avant-garde American Concept Art. Still, “Richter is not a Concept artist, he neither forms concepts nor produces software, and his own attempts at order are artistically mainly of secondary nature. … But what choice did he have if the avant-garde sanction of non-painting was now actually robbing ‘nevertheless-painting’ of its subversive meaning?” (Harten 44–45)

¹⁶ “Atlas” does not only give insight into the artistic pre-installation process, but it is also a work itself combining conceptual and Warburgean aspects via camouflaging art historical methods. It establishes and destroys its organization of visual materials in order to montage relations on a substantial yet open-ended scale.

¹⁷ “Gerhard Richter: Atlas of the Photographs and Sketches”, Hedendaagse Kunst, Utrecht, 1.-30.12.1972; paperback publication without text. The sketchbook ‘Atlas” was initially created in 1970 as a companion piece to his first catalogue raisonné.

¹⁸ The Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich acquired “Atlas” in 1996 from the Dürckheim Collection when it included 583 plates (white cardboard, each 66.7 × 51.7 cm). Richter pointed out in 1999: “The ‘Atlas’ belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich — it’s long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it’s interesting because it looks different each time” (Elger and Obrist 350). Richter established a meticulous order of how to arrange the plates in exhibition (Friedel and Wilmes 374–75, 384–87; 633 plates). Richter insists on film for the 2012 exhibition at Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau in Dresden that he does not see the “Atlas” as “art”, but Lenbachhaus curator Friedel disagrees (Richter web).

¹⁹ Richter’s Kafka painting is based on a famous picture of a famous person, probably the image Kafka is most associated with. It stands out from the group because of its high contrast with reverse backdrop lighting. Richter cropped the source image, the portrait, to such an extent that the eyes don’t seem to stare at the viewer any longer, rather looking moody with lowered eyelids — the effect is similar to blurring an image with the lens as Richter did in many of his sketches (i.e. “Atlas” plate 26). Kafka himself once argued that even the most automated photo-portrait made in a photo-booth is always the perfect “Mistake-Thyself” because it unavoidably “obscures” the sitter, questions a real person as its “model”, making its origin rather obsolete (Janouch 144). This matches Richter’s own writing about the image-world, characterized by doubt and rejection, involved a constant battle with the possibilities of representation, creating non-like portraits that still trigger the viewer’s wishful thinking towards a personalizable referent.

²⁰ “Acht Lernschwestern” consists of a similar constellation of eight pictures depicting one nurse each, but, different from the “48 Portraits”, those eight women belonged together prior to the work because they were part of the same student group, wearing the same uniform, killed by the same serial killer. The source images are equally “banal”, standardized class pictures, while Richter’s painterly “blurring” homogenized them further into a collective identity (Storr, Forty Years 39).

²¹ The image-object “not only looks back at the observer; it makes the observer by looking, and the other way around”; Elkins on intersection of gazes in Lacan (70–75).

²² Compare “Betty” painting (1988) and offset edition (1991) with similar correspondence between painting and framed prints. What is remarkable is that Richter made an edition of 25 offset prints of “Betty” in 1991, three years after painting his eleven-year-old daughter Betty in 1988, when the original photograph taken by Richter in 1978 was already ten years old (Gronert 57).

²³ Richter stressed in conversation with Ehrenfried in 1990 that both versions are of equal value because the paintings based on photographs have not only a similar quality to the photographs, but also because the paintings have their starting point in photographs and their re-transition into photography is therefore part of his intention (49–50; 43,182).

²⁴ Richter suggested that in this case he also might have photographically de-focused the images, but could not quite remember (Richter and Leister telephone).

²⁵ ”Immediately after the original installation (and the sale) of ‘48 Portraits’, Richter decided to negate the work’s pictorialization of the painted photographs and its precarious monumentality by producing an exact photographic simile edition of the series. This seemingly paradoxical inversion of the process of representation (from photographic reproduction to original painting to photographic reproduction) was paralleled in the inversion from monumental installation to a reinscription of the image onto the plane of the archival registry and the photographic document from which they had originally been drawn.” Buchloh suggests that this is not just based on a de-auratization of the painted reproductions into photographic re-reproductions, but that is based on a negating the monumental gesture of the paintings in the German Pavilion thus re-translating them into the photographic medium thus re-affirming what he described as “the radical democratic potential of the photograph and the inescapable realities of the conditions of technical reproduction” (“Divided Memory” 76).

²⁶ This first photo-version of “48 Portraits” was also acquired by the collector Peter Ludwig, who bought it for a generous price on the basis that Richter wouldn’t do a photographic edition because he was not too happy about the idea that there might be multiples of his paintings. Richter only carried through his plan of a bigger edition in 1998, after Peter Ludwig had died in 1996 (Elger and Leister email 2009). I have only seen this first photo-version in reproduction because it was donated by Ludwig to the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg in 1995, now difficult to access. I am not sure if the film grain is visible on the enlargements or if the prints were slightly softened, and I am also not sure if the contrast is higher in this re-photographed version.

²⁷ Richter asks Siegfried Gohr, director of Museum Ludwig, to be involved in re-installing the work at the museum because of “the difficulty to turn the line into a block” (letter 1986). The 48 paintings were bought by Peter Ludwig shortly after the Biennale (Richter letter 1973) and were transferred from Sammlung Ludwig in Aachen to Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1995, already in individual Perspex hoods.

²⁸ Still, Richter has not always followed these hanging instructions himself — in 2013 he installed six rows of paintings at Museum Ludwig, in 1973 he installed 46 portraits under the title “46 Portraits”.

²⁹ These sketches for different grid installations from the Museum Ludwig acquisition file are an invaluable extension of the “Atlas” pages because they document the later development of the variable nature of the work as the grid which by now has become central to most stagings of the work.

³⁰ The stage performers behave as if they were in a hermetic, unobserved, four-walled environment with a transparent wall facing the audience. “Breaking the proscenium” or “breaking the fourth wall” refers to a direct address of the audience, as in Brecht’s alienation effect, which encourages different focalization, thus motivating the spectator to become a participant.

³¹ Richter stressed that this installation was an experiment and that looking at the installation shot in retrospect it did not look good to him and should remain an exception, suggesting it would have been better to stick to the well-tested model (Richter and Leister email, telephone).

³² 48 photographs on Baryta paper between matt Perspex and Dibond plates, each panel 68.9 × 53.9 cm. The four editions currently owned by: National Galleries of Scotland and Tate, San Francisco MoMA, Los Angeles County Museum, Fundacio Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona.

³³ Indeed, if the 1998 photo-edition would have been printed from new, contemporary negatives the images would have their own conditional report folded into the work, their own exhibition history made visible, since over time the paintings have clearly accumulated surface cracks and other patina. Elger could not imagine that both versions were enlarged from same negatives (Elger and Leister email 02/2014), but nobody at Museum Ludwig could remember Richter recently re-photographing the paintings — and Richter himself could not remember who the photographer was or which negative format was used (Richter and Leister telephone).

³⁴ The shape of the installation was suggested by Moorhouse and developed by Richter after his visit to the NPG to plan the show (Moorhouse and Leister). The NPG exhibition treated Richter’s works mostly as individual portraits though. The extreme shape of the block here took over the lines of sight within the “48 Portraits” as viewers could not really have a frontal relationship with the work, while the compositional centre was moved towards the left.

³⁵ Richter in Tate acquisition file: “The triangle form in London was because of the staircase and would not make sense on a normal wall. In London — preference for the nameplates not to be hung under each plate as not readable. Names can be written all together on one plate to the side so that they can be read.“ This reminds one of Richter working around the handrail in the staircase of Museum Ludwig in 1986.

³⁶ Sehgal allows no photographic documentation of his “staged situations” and “assisted ready-mades”, for his own exhibition purposes or as mementos. He insists on the unphotographable liveness of the performance resulting from the specific moment of interaction between performers and audience.

³⁷ Both Richter and Handke have been critiqued with regard to ideology, but both confront the condition of the work alone, its language and gestures. If this leads to greater awareness of the outside world then this is because artworks are part of our experience of the world, but the relationship between work and world is only indirect as the work must be able to stand for itself, its political position being only theoretically relevant, reflecting the significant movements of an epoch.

³⁸ In the first 1966 staging of the play this phrase was repeated many times by all four speakers, individually and in mocking chorus, before bursting into an extended list of 164 insults and “on-stage devices”, ending the play on the more conciliatory: “you fellow humans you” (31). Final scene “Publikumsbeschimpfung”, Theater am Turm, Frankfurt/Main, 1966, Claus Peymann (dir.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wiebke Leister

Wiebke Leister is a German artist and writer living in London. She studied photography at the University in Essen and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art in London. She is course leader for MA Photography at London College of Communication, co-organizer of the Photography and the Contemporary Imaginary Research Hub and core member of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at University of the Arts London. Her research investigates conditions of photographic Non-Likeness — focusing on representations of faciality and the photographic presentation of expressive signs of the face in relation to its facial canvas.