Seascape (slightly cloudy)
| Seascape (slightly cloudy) |
|---|
| Gerhard Richter , 1969 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 200 cm × 200 cm |
| Louis Vuitton Foundation , Paris |
|
Link to the picture |
Seestück (slightly cloudy) is a painting by Gerhard Richter from 1969. It depicts a cloudy sky in gray, white and blue tones over a deep, long horizon line and a gray, mirror-smooth sea surface. The picture is signed, dated and numbered on the reverse with 239-2 Richter 1969 .
story
The painting was created in 1969 as one of the first in a series in which Richter dealt with the subject of sea / sky / clouds. The picture was put up for auction at Sotheby’s in London in 1993 from a German private collection and reached a price of 457,299 US dollars. Christie's first auctioned off in 1998 at an estimated price of around US $ 2 million but failed to find a buyer. It came back to Christie's on May 8, 2012 and sold for $ 19,346,500.
The picture was presented for the first time in 1970 as part of the exhibition “Gerhard Richter, Blinky Palermo, Günther Uecker” in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, then in 2014 in the opening exhibition of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and in 2017 in the National Gallery in Prague.
Seascapes in Gerhard Richter's work
“Seestücke”, a total of 25 pictures (including the Vogelfluglinie from 1967) are among the photo pictures in Richter's catalog raisonné. In his “Seestücke”, Richter depicted the sky and the sea in paintings on the basis of photographs. The first of the series with the designation “Seestück” (1969) is a landscape format 40 × 80 cm (catalog raisonné: 194-23), the last “Seestück” with the same name (catalog raisonné: 852-2) is dated from 1998. These paintings are characterized by a deep, elongated horizon, waves, clouds, haze and fog, light breaking through, subtle color effects and smooth brushwork.
At first glance, the pictures look realistic. However, they were created through a montage of photographs that Richter either cut out of newspapers or shot himself, occasionally from an airplane. The photos are collected in Richter's “Atlas”, supplemented by sketches that he has been collecting since the mid-1960s. The seascapes are constructed images, created on the basis of composite excerpts from photographs, they do not depict a real landscape. They are, as Gerhard Richter said in an interview in 1982, the better, "the more beautiful, smarter, more insane and extreme, the clearer and more incomprehensible they depict this incomprehensible reality in parables."
Critics and interpreters of his pictures see Richter on the one hand in the tradition of German Romanticism, above all Caspar David Friedrich , and on the other hand in the tradition of marine painting with its virtuoso representation of water, air and light, but without - so writes the Viennese art historian Alexandra Matzner - “That he took over the heroic or dramatic narratives of these paintings. Instead, Gerhard Richter's seascapes evoke silence and the feeling of eternity. ”They stand in the pictorial tradition of the sublime ,“ which confronts man with the eternity of nature and the finitude of man ”.
Quotes
“My landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, romantic or classic-looking like lost paradises, but above all 'lying' (even if I didn't always find the means to show that), and by 'lying' I mean the transfiguration with which we look at nature, nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it does not know meaning, nor grace, nor compassion, because it knows nothing, absolutely spiritless, is the total opposite of us, absolutely inhuman is."
“Almost all seascapes [...] are motif collages. The sea and clouds come from different templates and are glued together to form a single image. Success depended on finding exactly the right mood combinations. […] I had a guilty conscience […], but then George Maciunas came by and thought they were simply great, and that's why I left them, even if they were too decorative for my taste. "
literature
- Benjamin Buchloh (Hrsg.): Gerhard Richter: Work overview / Catalog Raisonné, 1962-1993 . Volume 3. Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit 1993. p. 159, no. 239-2. ISBN 3-7757-1430-8 .
- Stefan Gronert : Image - (Re) production. On the importance of photography in Gerhard Richter's work , in: Stefan Gronert, Hubertus Butin (ed.): Gerhard Richter. Editions 1965-2004. Catalog raisonné. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2004, pp. 85-105. ISBN 3-7757-1430-8 .
- Stefan Gronert, Hubertus Butin (Ed.): Gerhard Richter: Landscape . Art Forum Vienna. Exhibition catalog. Edited by Lisa Ortner-Kreil et al. Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern 2020, ISBN 978-3-7757-4712-7 .
- Mark Godfrey, Nicolas Serota (Ed.): Gerhard Richter Panorama. Expanded ed. New York: DAP 2016. ISBN 978-1-938922-92-3
- Felix Krämer : Gerhard Richter. Seascapes , in: Seascapes. From Max Beckmann to Gerhard Richter. Munich: Hirmer 2007. pp. 109–118.
- Rolf Wedewer : On Gerhard Richter's landscape type , in: Pantheon, No. 1., 1975, pp. 41–49.
- Armin Second : Seeing, Reflecting, Appearances. Notes on the work of Gerhard Richter , in: Gerhard Richter. Ed. Von der Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen with an essay by Armin Second and the catalog raisonné 1993–2004. Düsseldorf: Judge 2nd amend. Edition 2005. ISBN 3-937572-20-1
Individual evidence
- ^ Seascape (slightly cloudy) Christies's May, Live auction 2557, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, accessed August 3, 2021
- ↑ Gerhard Richter. Atlas . Edited by Helmut Friedel . Cologne: König 2011. 'Seestück (slightly cloudy)', sheet 191.
- ^ Gerhard Richter, text. Writings and interviews. Edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist . Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1993, p. 91.
- ↑ Alexandra Matzner: Guggenheim Bilbao: Gerhard Richter: Seestücke , Art in Words, May 8, 2019, accessed on August 4, 2021.
- ^ Seascape (slightly cloudy) Fondation Louis Vuitton, accessed on August 2, 2021
- ↑ Gerhard Richter. Texts 1961-2007. König, Cologne, 2008. p. 159.
- ↑ Gerhard Richter. Texts 1961-2007. König, Cologne, 2008. pp. 272-273.
