Fragments from “The Pursuit of Art” by Martin Gayford
Chance and Necessity 17: Gerhard Richter: Chance does it better than I can
‘Art should be serious, not a joke. I don’t like to laugh about art.’ But, Richter added happily, ‘I am ridiculously old fashioned.’ And there I suspected he was joking, just a little; after all, he was one of the most radical painters alive, a superstar of contemporary art, at that time regularly heading polls of the most admired artist alive.
This in a way was the story of his life and career: continuing to work in a medium - paint - that was widely believed to have died long ago.
‘I believe in eating too. What can we do? We have to eat; we have to paint; we have to live. Of course not everybody paints, there are different ways to survive. But it’s my best option. I didn’t have much choice when I was young.’
Marianne was later murdered in a Nazi programme to exterminate the mentally ill.
‘I work on, say, six works at the same time. They learn from each other. One is better here, worse there, so I change it. Finishing is the most difficult thing.’
‘Several hours of painting in the studio in the morning and two more in the afternoon. Every day is not possible; you don’t have the right mood every day. But that’s the ideal.’
He named after John Cage, the avant-garde American composer who had once announced, in his ‘Lecture on Nothing’, ‘I have nothing to say and I’m saying it.’ Perhaps that was true of Richter too.
‘Chance does it better that I can,’‘but I have to prepare the conditions to allow randomness to do its work.’
‘Randomness is an important theme to me because it’s the same in life,’ ‘Chance determines out lives in very important ways. If he hadn’t met her, what would have happened to them both?’
‘Of course, the more energetic people are the ones who leave - that’s the simple explanation, but it’s not that simple. We saw modern art in magazines, but we were hungry to see it. When you have everything, naturally you are not so hungry.’
His painting of his aunt Marianne contained terrible memories, whereas Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1996), a picture in the Ludwig Museum here in Cologne of Richter’s first wife, nude, walking downstairs, was full of love and sensuality. If Vermeer had ever painted a naked portrait of his wife, it really might have looked a bit like this.
Only many years later did he discover that Ema’s father had been the commandant of the camp where Marianne died.
For this medieval monument the religious faith, Richter had devised a window of 11,500 hand-blown glass panels in seventy-two shades compatible with the existing stained glass. There were made and put together in accordance with a randomizing computer programme.
Cardinal Joachim Meisner, observed that when culture is cut off from God it becomes ‘degenerate’. That really stirred things up because degenerate - in German, ‘entartete’ -was the word used by the Nazis to describe modern art. The Cardinal was angry, Richter told me, because his window is not a Catholic window. Then he wryly repeated Einstein’s remark, ‘God does not play dice.’
Richter’s strained glass looked fabulous: flickering with light, absolutely contemporary, suggestive of some infinitely complex system. You could see why the Cardinal thought it was scandalously irreligious.
as if you were looking at electrons, molecules and photons in action.
Niels Bohr, another great physicist, responded: ‘Don’t tell God what to do!’
Chance and Necessity 18: Robert Rauschenberg: A Turtle in the Elevator
Rauschenberg, it soon emerged, loved cooking, and gave a characteristically oblique account of why he like it: ‘It’s a very special way just to turn your back and still be there.’
‘I left the church’, he explained, ‘because I did not believe that life was to be spent thinking that everything in the world was evil. But the church showed me what I was: that I wasn’t interested in value judgement and condemnation as a life style. I did not believe in goodness coming from fear.’
It is true that early on Rauschenberg produced some paintings even more austere than his teacher’s, canvases painted entirely in white, for example. These he explained as the result of a militant desire to be fair to paints. He hated the way painters picked on ‘innocent colours’ and had forced them to express their emotions. He didn’t think artists should make pigments, or anything else, express their feelings.
Hughes, with typical verbal gusto, and doubtless conscious of Rauschenberg’s sexual orientation, described Monogram as ‘one of the few great icons of male homosexual love in modern culture: the Satyr in the Sphincter’.
The artist vehemently rejected this account: ‘Most art critics, if you tell them they can’t use any sexual interpretations, they go mute. They don’t know what they are looking at. It’s like candy is sweet; nobody buys bitter candy. It’s a cheap trick. I don’t know how you would get anywhere - if everything had to read through sexuality’. Here was another lesson: how artists see their work may be diametrically different from how it is understood by critics and historians.
He acted on just that principle in 1964 when he won the Grand Prize for Painting a the Venice Biennale. This was a historic victory, which sent shock waves through the European art world, and has often been viewed as marking the moment at which New York definitely took over from Paris as the world capital of culture.
Rauschenberg’s reaction to this triumph was to instruct his studio assistant in New York to destroy 150 of the silk-screens that had been used to make these pictures, so he would not repeat himself.
Those silk-screen pictures that won the prize at the Venice Biennale had for some reason I can’t quite fathom called to me when I was a teenager, so much so that at the age of 18 I had made some collages of my own in homage. They are still there, in a cardboard box in the attic: a possible path in the end I did not follow. Now I regret I didn’t tell Rauschenberg that. On the other hand, I know how he would have reacted: he would have said he didn’t want people to make art like his, but to do something completely different.
Chance and Necessity 19: Desperately Seeking Lorenzo Lotto
he described himself as ‘old, alone, without any stable domestic arrangements and very anxious of mind’.
There is an odd but revealing phrase - ‘in the flesh’ - for seeing art in reality, not reproduction. With Lotto and other Venetian painters it’s almost exact: to appreciate them properly you have to stand in front of them. Only then can you sense the carnal reality of the people they depict, the glistening of their skin, gleam in their eyes, the weight of their bodies, the texture of their clothes. These are physical experiences, because paint is a physical substance: a layer of organic and inorganic chemicals that reflects the light, and consequently changes every time the light alters. There is no substitute for being there.
I hate being lost, so much so that quite often I dream of not being able to find my way. Along with two other nightmares, missing trains and planes, it happens in reality quite frequently: cruelly often when I am searching for church or museum containing a rare work of art.
A contemporary painter, Luc Tuymans, once said to the that it was a sign of a good painting that it could not be memorized. That’s true and explains why it always looks different when you see it again. So, on another day, and mood, they would all seem changed.
The pursuit of art is a journey that never stops; the more you see, the more you want to see.
