Iceberg in Mist

Between 1968 and 1970 Gerhard Richter painted a remarkable range of 'damaged landscapes', as they are termed by Mark Godfrey, the curator of Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama. These include aerial views of cities in thick grey paint, the colour of ash and rubble, that Richter later likened to images of the destruction of Dresden but which might equally be seen as warnings of some future apocalypse.  One of these, Townscape Paris (1968), is a painting I referred to rather tentatively in one of my very first blog posts here.  At the same time Richter was also painting a very different kind of townscape, reproducing details of architectural models, and these too seem dystopian - windowless blocks showing no sign of life, casting shadows over empty white roads that resemble the patterns on a circuit board.
 

Another monochrome aerial view from 1968, Clouds, provides glimpses of an abtsracted version of the German countryside - imagery that Godfrey compares to the opening sequence (above) of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935). Two years later Richter began a very different series of cloud paintings, this time treating them as isolated objects, white against featureless blue-green skies.  They resemble Alfred Stieglitz's famous cloud photographs, Equivalents (1927), which in turn (as Rosalind Krauss points out in that weighty tome Art Since 1900) could be viewed as Duchampian readymades - uncomposed and detached from their environment.  Alps II (1968) might be a close-up of a storm cloud and is barely recognisable as a landscape painting, certainly a long way from the heroic image of German mountains celebrated in those early Reifenstahl films.

Seascape (Sea-Sea) (1970) is described in the exhibition as a 'collage of two photographs of the sea, one inverted to appear as the sky. The painting creates a momentary illusion of a coherent seascape, until it becomes clear that the ‘clouds’ in the upper half of the painting are waves. It creates a sense of discontinuity and suggests Richter’s acknowledgement of the gulf separating him from the moment of Romanticism.' It made me think of Rothko's grey paintings, with the patterns of waves replacing Rothko's brushtrokes.  Mark Godfrey views them as a cross between Capar David Friedrich and Blinky Palermo: an attempt at the kind of radical abstract statement Palermo was making in his Cloth Paintings using the traditional medium of a seascape.  Another point of comparison is Vija Celmins and, like her, Richter also produced images of black and white fields of stars.

In 1971 an exhibition of Richter's recent work, painted in flat colour rather than black and white, prompted various critics to compare him with Friedrich.  Landscape near Hubbelrath (1969), for example, shows an empty view with a road sign where we expect to see, in Friedrich, a church spire.  Richter said that his art lacked the spiritual underpinnings of Romanticism: 'for us, everything is empty'.  However, Mark Godfrey argues that Richter and Friedrich both aimed to create a sense of unfulfilled desire (readers of this blog may recall an earlier post on the way Friedrich composed 'obstructed views').  This approach may have seemed particularly appropriate to a post-war German artist working at a time when the purpose of painting itself was being called into question.

There is one more interesting example of Richter's engagement with Friedrich later in the exhibition, a painting called Iceberg in Mist (1982).  I have mentioned various artists here before who went north to paint the Arctic seas -  Peder Balke, Lawren Harris, Per Kirkeby - and Richter made his own trip in 1972, looking for a motif as powerful as Friedrich's The Sea of Ice.   Mark Godfrey mentions that on his return Richter made 'an extraordinary and little-known book of black and white photographs of icebergs', printed, like the two halves of Seascape (Sea-Sea), both upside down and right side up.  In this way Richter rejected the single sublime image and arranged the photographs in such a way that 'their overt subject became more or less irrelevant.'  Richter's urge to thwart our desire for spectacular landscapes is also evident in the later painting, where we cannot even glimpse the tip of the iceberg as the whole view is shrouded in mist.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, 1823-4

Soft pink landscape

Earlier this week I was sad to read Waldemar Januszczak tweet 'Oh no, Richard Hamilton died this morning. That is a HUGE loss. Probably Britain's most important post-war artist.'  But, as he went on to say, 'Richard Hamilton was working on a big touring retrospective when he died. So at least there is that to look forward to.' Back in 1992 I went to a sizable retrospective at the Tate Gallery and have just been re-reading the catalogue. This reminded me that five years before his famous collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, Hamilton was helping to make large map-models of New Towns (Harlow, Basildon and Speke) for the Festival of Britain's Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research.  There is a small black and white photograph of one of these in the catalogue (like a Ghost Box album cover), where it is contrasted with Landscape (1965-6).  This later work is mixed media added to an enlarged postcard image of the South Downs - panoramic landscape as a 'self-reflexive, game-playing switching of representational codes, rather than as a mimetic, miniaturised simulation of the new Socialist Britain.'

In the early sixties Hamilton was struck by a new advertising campaign for Andrex toilet paper that featured photographs of girls posed in a forest glade.  He described the scene: 'Nature is beautiful.  Pink from a morning sun filters through a tissue of autumn leaves.  Golden shafts gleam through the the perforated vaulting of the forest to illuminate a stage set-up for the Sunday supplement voyeur.'  It is a masturbatory fantasy: 'the woodland equipped with every convenience.  A veil of soft-focus vegetation screens the peeper from the sentinel.  Poussin?  Claude?  No, more like Watteau in its magical ambiguity.'  In Soft pink landscape (1971-2) he reproduces this scene in misty paint, as if seen through half-closed eyes, with a roll of Andrex placed on the ground.

In 1975 Hamilton exhibited Andrex-inspired work at the Serpentine Gallery along with other landscape views derived from postcards.  Some of these show Miers, the French spa noted for the laxative properties of its waters.  There were also nine pastel images of sunsets, each with a giant turd in the foreground.  One further view was of sunrise over Cadaqués with a turd blotting out its church, and Hamilton linked this with Jung's account of a dream he had: 'the cathedral, the blue sky, God sits on his throne, high above the world - and an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.'  Hamilton's interest in the Andrex adverts continued and in 1980 he completed Soft blue landscape (the cover of the Tate's 1992 exhibition catalogue, below, shows a detail from this painting, omitting the toilet roll).  It was at this point that Hamilton discovered the rather surprising identity of an artist who had actually worked on the original 1960s Andrex campaign... Bridget Riley.