Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977: 150 Works from the Museum of Modern Art [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

The spectre that continues to haunt the twenty-first century is on full-display in this collection by the great German artist Gerhard Richter. It is the spectre not of communism but of the failure of the radical left in Germany to achieve the revolutionary transformation of society they hoped for and of the seduction of some of the members of that generation by an apocalyptic embrace of violence.

The book itself is a reproduction of the fifteen paintings that Richter did in 1988 of the Baader-Meinhof Bande---a small group of radical left activists who, around 1970, increasingly pursued violence as a strategy for fomenting revolution within Germany---accompanied by an introduction and four essays by Robert Storr that seek to set Richter's work and its subject in both a social-political and aesthetic context. The essays will be particularly welcome to those whose knowledge of German politics in the mid `70s is hazy, as well as those who are unfamiliar with the larger body of Richter's work. While I found some aspects of Storr's treatment of the Baader-Meinhof group contradictory---he dismisses all but Ulrike Meinhof as lacking "a developed grasp of practical or theoretical politics" but later informs us that Baader's library of nearly a thousand volumes was almost entirely devoted to revolutionary literature and political texts---these are minor quibbles compared to the immense value one gains from reading his essays. Physically the book is beautiful, well-bound with a small rectangle detail from the final painting in the series (Funeral 1988) appearing on the cover. In addition to the haunting reproduction of Richter's paintings, the book contains photos of the members of Baader-Meinhof before their deaths, images of the turbulent times in which they lived, and reproductions of other work that has made reference to Baader-Meinhof. All of this admirably achieves Storr's aim of situating the work in a larger context.

As Storr points out in his introduction, when this cycle of paintings first appeared in Cologne, Germany in 1989, it was widely criticized by both the German left and right. For the left the cycle represented a banal and bourgeois attempt to resurrect the unsettling spectre of Baader-Meinhof as part of the bathetic project of national healing. For these critics on the left, Richter's cycle served to make visible a period of the German past that many bourgeois Germans wished to forget only to perform an effective concealment of what the group stood for through its sentimental evocation of their deaths. By contrast, the right criticized what it saw as Richter's identification with the group emblematized by his decision to paint the group at all. Storr attempts to navigate between these two poles and find what he believes to be Richter's rather more complex and ambivalent position on the subject.

Having read the book, I have to say that he largely succeeds. From the biographical record on which Storr draws, it is clear that Richter was about as distant as one could get from the ideological clarity and zeal (some would say zealotry) of the members of Baader-Meinhoff. Richter's decision to leave East Germany, his embrace of certain aspects of capitalist culture during his Capitalist Realism phase, as well as the clarity of his comments on the subject of the damaging nature of ideology found in the notes to his 1988 interview reveal Richter's conservatism with respect to the group's beliefs. Nevertheless, the paintings themselves reveal a startling ambivalence towards the members of Baader-Meinhof. To the extent that Richter has chosen to portray their pathetic deaths rather than the revolutionary vigor of their lives, Richter's cycle can be accused of sentimentalism. But given that the circumstances of their imprisonment and death constitute a shaming indictment of the West German state and its willingness to succumb to its own worst tendencies, Richter's cycle of paintings deserve recognition as an ambivalent gesture of good faith toward Germany's defeated and disorganized left while simultaneously warning of the dangerous seductions of ideology.

The paintings themselves---highly formal studies of a small handful of subjects, each object rendered in subtle grays and carefully blurred with an almost photographic imprecision---have a haunting quality that serve both to convey the artist's distance from the radicalism of his subjects and his refusal to allow either the ghost of what animated them or the reality of the shameful manner of their deaths to be altogether exorcised from the collective German unconscious. It is the very ambivalence of this gesture that so fascinates the viewer and makes repeated exposures to the paintings so necessary.

For those interested in the relation of art to politics this is an important collection. Richter's cycle is one of the major works of our time, a revival of history painting at a time when history had been widely declared by many postmodern (Lyotard) and liberal-capitalist apologists (Fukuyama) to be at an end. Required reading.