Lot 238
Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), German
ONKEL RUDI, 2000
cibachrome print mounted to aluminum dibond
signed and numbered 60/80 to mount verso; there are also 25 artist's proofs numbered in Roman and 1 trial proof printed on baryta paper; published by Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, Italy
Estimate: $20,000—30,000 CAD
-
Provenance:
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, UK
Private Collection, Toronto, ON - Dimensions: 34.3 x 19.7 in — 87 x 50 cm
- Literature: Hubertus Butin, ed., Gerhard Richter: Editions 1965 - 2004 Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfildern, 2004, no. 111 (illustrated).
- Medium: cibachrome print mounted to aluminum dibond
-
Notes:
In the following essay, Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay, Amir Eshel, Professor of Humanistic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Standford University, takes a look at Richter’s series Birkenau and specifically the painting Onkel Rudi, 1965.
The present photograph issued by Gerard Richter in 2000 after the eponym painting.
BEYOND THIS SENSELESS EXISTENCE
To fully grasp poetic thinking in Birkenau, we must first turn to Richter’s artistic beginnings, especially to those works that touch on Nazism and its aftermath. Since the early 1960s, when he became transfixed by pop art, Richter has sought to transform various photographs into paintings. Inspired by Andy Warhol, Richter’s early photo paintings turned our attention to familiar artifacts: a table, a chair, a piano. Along with the mundane objects of consumerist culture and its celebrities, however, these photo paintings also paid close attention to historical subjects: from jet fighters and bombers to family members whose lives were decisively touched by recent German history.[1] This is hardly a coincidence.
Richter was born in Dresden in 1932, so his early life was shaped under Nazism and marked by the Second World War, the destruction of Dresden, and the oppressive regime of the so-called German Democratic Republic, whose grip he escaped when he fled to the West in 1961.[2] In 1965 Richter painted three works that have become canonic in regard to his interest in this history: Onkel Rudi (Uncle Rudi; CR 85), Tante Marianne (Aunt Marianne; CR 87), and Herr Heyde (Mr. Heyde; CR 100).[3] All three paintings avoid presenting history through the distancing lens so typical of “history painting” as a genre.
The traditional task of history painting was to represent an event or historical actors in the context of their time with the aim of preserving the past and, occasionally, lifting historical figures to the status of idols. But in Richter’s paintings, we don’t have heroes, kings, or armies in the throes of immense power clashes, resulting in works that, like Francisco Goya’s The Second of May 1808, intentionally or not, elevate the pain of war to the level of a moral tale. We instead encounter history in these works as the gray, leaden matter of everyday life, as it touches and ravages the lives of individuals, even of one’s own family members.
Gerhard Richter, Onkel Rudi
The painting Uncle Rudi was created from a photograph taken just before Richter’s maternal uncle Rudolf Schönfelder (nicknamed “Rudi”) died while fighting for Hitler’s Wehrmacht.[4] The family was left with an image of the smiling man, who cannot know what is about to come. Blurring the specificities of Rudi’s face, uniform, and insignia, the painting invokes the factual uncle. Uncle Rudi is Richter’s artistic reaction to the original artifact rather than a representation of his uncle: it renders the person almost faceless. Emphasizing reaction, I follow Florian Klinger, who encourages us to focus less on the capacity of Richter’s paintings to represent an individual than on the artist’s imaginative response to the material he is working with; in this case, we should pay close attention to the act of blurring.[5] Reaction also captures how we encounter the painting: the range of our somatic and mental responses to what we see—our visceral sensations, emotions, associations, and thoughts. Richter is consistent in his belief in art’s capacity “to help us think something that goes beyond this senseless existence.”[6] His creative procedure in paintings such as Uncle Rudi counts on our ability to both recognize what we see (e.g., the haunting quality of the almost faceless Rudi and his ominous surrounding) and, crucially, to go beyond to reflect, ponder, debate with others something only we may create: insight, recognition, judgment, decision, and perhaps even some form of action.
Asked why his paintings look like blurred photographs, Richter replied, “I’ve never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image. A landscape painted with exactness forces you to see a determined number of clearly differentiated trees, while in a blurry canvas you can perceive as many trees as you want. The painting is more open.”[7]
In its openness, Uncle Rudi invites us to discover how individuals and families are implicated in events we habitually assign to the realm of history: it displays the interdependencies of the private and the public. History is not a set of events that takes place on some grand historical stage (for example, history paintings such as the 1807 Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David). It takes place everywhere, including in such intimate locations as a family. Uncle Rudi also allows us to see in the concrete figure many more things—for example, the countless German soldiers evoked in Pagis’s “Testimony,” those who “definitely were / human beings: uniforms, boots.” Like the poem, in which the poet considers the perpetrators as a group of humans, Uncle Rudi reacts to the image of one German soldier by blurring the specific features, by exposing many others in the one. Yet Richter’s hardly identifiable figure enables an even broader thinking regarding men and women of various times and places who opt to become faceless—who volunteer their bodies to the exercise of blind military might.
Evading the concreteness of a discernible personality and an exact time and place, inherent in the original photograph, Uncle Rudi considers personal motivation as it intersects with ambition, ideology, and thoughtlessness: What kinds of choices do men and women face under historical duress? How do they make moral choices? What is the relationship between personal agency and collective belief in charting the course of their individual and communal lives? These and other thoughts emerge from the artwork itself. After all, in Uncle Rudi it is not only we who look. Staring at us, the figure of the carefree soldier questions us as well, asking where we actually stand and whether we will join him eventually. We must wonder what it means to be a human being in a world populated by Rudi and his ilk.”
[introd.] Amir Eshel, Poetic Thinking Today: An Essay (Stanford, California, Stanford University Press), 2019.
[1] On the difference between Richter’s work and American pop art, see e.g., Robert Storr and Gerhard Richter, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York Museum of Modern Art, 2003), p. 57.
[2] On Richter’s unique approach to German history in the 1960s, see ibid., p. 58.
[3] I present Richter’s paintings by referring to the works’ designation in Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné, vols. 1-5 (Ostfildern, Hatje/Cantz, 2011), and on his website, https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/ (accessed March 13, 2017).
[4] Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, trans. Elizabeth M. Solaro, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 140.
[5] Klinger, Florian. Theorie Der Form: Gerhard Richter und die Kunst des pragmatischen Zeitalters, (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2013), pp. 9, 21–22, 62, 133–136.
[6] Robert Storr, “Interview with Gerhard Richter,” in Storr and Richter, Gerhard Richter, 183.
[7] “Interview with Irmelinde Lebeer, 1973,” Richter, Gerhard, Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, (London, Thames & Hudson, 2009), p. 81. - Condition: Very good overall condition.
Accepted Forms of Payment:
American Express, MasterCard, Money Order / Cashiers Check, Visa, Wire Transfer
Shipping
The Auctioneers will not undertake packing or shipping. The purchaser
must designate and arrange for the services of an independent shipper
and be responsible for all shipping and insurance expenses. The
Auctioneers will, upon request, provide names of professional packers and
shippers but will not be held responsible for the service or have any liability
for providing this information. Reliable pre-auction estimates of shipping
costs of lots offered in this sale may be obtained from:
Pak Mail
Attn: Taurus Chan
4981 Hwy 7 East, Unit 12A, Markham, ON L3R 1N1
Tel: 905.470.6874; 416.293.8225
Fax: 905.470.6875
[email protected]
www.pakmailmarkham.ca
Permits may be required for international shipments due to export restrictions on endangered species.
Waddington's
View full terms and conditions
| From: | To: | Increments: |
|---|---|---|
| CA$0 | CA$199 | CA$10 |
| CA$200 | CA$499 | CA$20 |
| CA$500 | CA$999 | CA$50 |
| CA$1,000 | CA$1,999 | CA$100 |
| CA$2,000 | CA$4,999 | CA$200 |
| CA$5,000 | CA$9,999 | CA$500 |
| CA$10,000 | CA$19,999 | CA$1,000 |
| CA$20,000 | CA$49,999 | CA$2,000 |
| CA$50,000 | CA$99,999 | CA$5,000 |
| CA$100,000 | CA$299,999 | CA$10,000 |
| CA$300,000 | CA$999,999 | CA$25,000 |
| CA$1,000,000 | CA$1,999,999 | CA$50,000 |
| CA$2,000,000 | CA$2,999,999 | CA$100,000 |
| CA$3,000,000 | CA$4,999,999 | CA$200,000 |
| CA$5,000,000 + | CA$300,000 |