421 Gerhard Richter

421 Richter, Gerhard

Obres | https://www.gerhard-richter.com/

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden on 9th February 1932, the first child of Horst and Hildegard Richter. A daughter, Gisela, followed four years later. They were in many respects an average middle-class family: Horst worked as a teacher at a secondary school in Dresden and Hildegard was a bookseller who liked to play the piano. In an interview with Robert Storr, Richter described his early family life as “simple, orderly, structured – mother playing the piano and father earning money.
While too young to be drafted into the German army during the Second World War, the war nonetheless had a deep impact on Richter. The family experienced economic hardship and personal loss: Hildegard’s brothers, Rudi and Alfred, and sister, Marianne, all died as a consequence of the war. “It was sad when my mother’s brothers fell in battle. First the one, then the other. I’ll never forget how the women screamed,”Richter recalls. Marianne, who suffered from mental health problems, was starved to death in a psychiatric clinic.

Even though Waltersdorf was spared the extensive bombing that nearby Dresden was exposed to, it was not sheltered. Speaking to Jan-Thorn Prikker, Richter has said: “the retreating German soldiers, the convoys, the low-flying Russian planes shooting at refugees, the trenches, the weapons lying around everywhere, artillery, broken down cars. Then the invasion of the Russians […] ransacking, rapes, a huge camp where us kids sometimes got barley soup.”¹³ As a child, the military had fascinated Richter: “When the soldiers came through the village, I went up to them and wanted to join them. He explained to Storr: “when you’re twelve years old you’re too little to understand all that ideological hocus- pocus.”¹⁵ Richter remembers playing in the woods and trenches with his friends, shooting with forgotten rifles which they found lying around.
Richter’s interest in art and culture began to take shape in the aftermath of the Second World War. He receives a simple plate camera as a Christmas gift from his mother. Werner Jungmichel, a camera shop owner in Waltersdorf teaches the young Richter how to develop photographs, a skill that will prove useful throughout his career.

Around the age of 15, Richter started to draw regularly. One of his early sketches, from 1946, was a nude figure copied from a book, which his parents reacted to with both pride and embarrassment. He also created landscapes and self-portraits, working mainly with watercolours.
Soon after leaving the theatre, Richter applied to study painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden [Dresden Art Academy]. It is unclear whether he had been planning to do so, or whether his dismissal prompted him to consider a fresh start. But it was clearly a decision to which he remained committed, even after his first application was rejected. The examiners advised him to find a job with a state-run organisation, as state employees were given preferential treatment in applications at the time. During the following eight months Richter worked as a painter at the Dewag textile plant in Zittau. In the summer of 1951, he returned to his birth city Dresden, ready to begin his formal art studies.

Although a traditionally conservative institution, in the 1950s the Academy appeared almost liberal in comparison with the Soviet authorities – whose agenda was increasingly imposed on the Academy during Richter’s time there. “The goal was socialist realism and the Dresden Academy was especially obedient in this regard.” In conversation with Jan Thorn- Prikker, Richter said: “It became increasingly ideological. For example, we weren’t able to borrow books that dealt with the period beyond the onset of Impressionism because that was when bourgeois decadence set in.” The study of this modern period of experimentation, identified as ‘formalist art’ by the authorities, was not permitted. There were, however, exceptions. Picasso and Renato Guttoso, for example, were tolerated because of their outspoken support of communism. Richter took the opportunity to engage with such artists when he could, being unsatisfied with the Academy’s insistence on socialist realism. Yet he has remained appreciative of his time there, acknowledging that “the training I received had a great influence on me.”
A turning point came when Richter visited documenta II, taking place in Kassel in 1959. Seeing works by Jackson Pollock, Jean Fautrier, and Lucio Fontana made Richter aware that “there was something wrong with my whole way of thinking,”³⁵ seeing their work as an “expression of a totally different and entirely new content.”³⁶ The exhibition made clear to Richter the creative prohibitions imposed on him, especially in terms of using abstraction as a painterly method. This, and the worsening conditions of the Cold War, led Richter and Ema to decide that they would leave the GDR for West Germany. According to Elger, in March 1961, just a few months before construction of the Berlin Wall began, Richter travelled to Moscow and Leningrad as a tourist, carrying more luggage than he needed. On the journey back, he remained on the train as it went through to West Germany, where he got off and left his bags in storage at the train station. He then returned to Dresden to meet Ema. A friend drove them to East Berlin, where they took the underground train to the West, declaring themselves as refugees on arrival.