Dead (Tote) from October 18, 1977.
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Larger Image |
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Title |
Dead (Tote) from October 18, 1977. |
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Alternative Title |
Dead, from October 18, 1977 series, 1988. |
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Creator |
Richter, Gerhard (German painter, born 1932) |
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Date |
1988 |
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Cultural Context |
German
West German
European
Western European |
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Style/Period |
Contemporary
Postmodern |
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Subject |
Activists
Left-wing extremists
Terrorists
Dead persons
Death
Suicides
Social justice
Political issues
Politics & government
Protest movements
Opposition (Political science)
Student movements
Terrorism |
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Description |
"[…] the German painter Gerhard Richter […] looked back mournfully on painting's loss of public function in his October 18, 1977 (1988), a cycle of 15 paintings which mimicked the appearances of blurred black-and-white photographs. Richter had initially produced 'photo-paintings' just before Malcolm Morley in the 1960s. However, by contrast to Morley, his works frequently possessed a metaphysical cast which aligns him with a lesser-known American-based artist, the Latvian-born Vija Celmins. […] This oscillation between an informationally saturated surface and elusive subject assumed a political edge in Richter's October 18, 1977. The cycle dealt with the apparent suicides, ten years previously, of members of West Germany's militant Red Army Faction. Having lived under a Stalinist regime in Eastern Europe, Richter abhorred ideological dogmatism. Nevertheless he felt some sympathy for the terrorists as misguided heirs of the idealism of 1968. Aware that photographs had originally been instrumental in implanting ideologically tinged images of the terrorists in the German public's mind, Richter submitted such imagery to his painterly blur. As though reversing the terms of Eric Fischl's reworking of Géricault [The Old Man's Boat and the Old Man's Dog, 1982; Raft of the Medusa, 1819], he filtered photographic imagery through a former technology of public address (the depictions of dead terrorists echoed previous paintings such as Manet's Dead Toreador or 1864). At the same time, by obliging his spectators to adjust their positions in relation to his blurs (in order to 'focus' them), he implied that, just as painting and photography were making competing demands from within the same object, so ideology's claims were unresolvable." (Excerpts, pp.214-216) |
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Material |
Oil on canvas
Oil paint (pigmented coating)
Paint
Canvas |
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Measurements |
62 x 62 cm |
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Technique |
Oil painting (technique)
Painting (image-making) |
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Work Type |
Paintings
Oil paintings |
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Repository |
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) (New York, New York) |
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Source |
Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945-2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP, 2000. (p.216, fig.111) |
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Rights |
Photograph reproduced in Hopkins courtesy: The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. Photo © 2000, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. |
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Digital Publisher |
University of Louisville Department of Fine Arts/Allen R. Hite Art Institute Visual Resources Center |
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Format |
image/jpeg |
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Digital File Name |
VRC 826-21.jpg |
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Rating |
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