GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Gerhard Richter's Ema (Nude on a Staircase), is a photograph of a Richter painting by the same name (at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany), which itself was painted from a slightly blurred Polaroid taken of his then-wife, Ema. An homage to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, this work simultaneously references art history and Richter's personal history.
Richter's art deals with perception, imagery, and meaning, and takes an extremely broad range of forms in doing so. Richter began to create his mature work in the early 1960s after moving to Düsseldorf from East Germany, taking part in the fertile atmosphere of that city's art academy, a center of the post-World War II avant-garde. At first adapting the ideas of American pop art alongside his colleagues Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg (later Fischer), Richter expanded his painted adaptations of family shapshots and other "low-acting" images to embrace a vast range of art-making strategies that mirrored, but did not duplicate, minimalism, conceptualism, photography, and abstraction. In spite of their diversity, Richter's paintings, prints, photographs, and editioned works can all be seen as an investigation into the mechanics and meanings of art.
Since the early 1960s, Richter has turned to myriad artistic forms to raise questions about the twinned issues of seeing and thinking, especially in relation to art and the wider world around us. Richter's wariness of ideologies and diverse artistic approaches tie him to no one school, challenging the notion of an individual, authentic artistic style. Richter's entire career may, in fact, be seen to depend on mechanically produced, supposedly inauthentic images and objects. He deliberately plays with the representation of photographic and painting techniques to make plain that this is a photo of a painting of a photo. In other words, the "models" for Richter's works are not the things themselves, but previous representations of these things. Richter is making pictures of pictures.
Adapted from
- Bonnie Pitman, ed., "Sphere I (Kugel I) (1999.261)," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 312.
- Charles Wylie, DMA unpublished material, 1999.
NOTES
- updated provenance and geo x ref
Acquisition Justification:
- This complete group of the editioned art of Gerhard Richter, dating from 1965 to 1999 and representing 91 separate works of art totaling 192 individual objects, is a commanding retrospective of this towering artist's multi-faceted and searching art. Comparable to Walker Art Center's exhaustive holdings of Joseph Beuys and Sigmar Polke multiples, the group embraces key passages in the history of one of our era's most complex artists, and offers crucial insights into Richter's confrontation with the social, intellectual and artistic developments and upheavals of the recent past. In acquiring this great body of Richter's art, the Dallas Museum of Art would be the sole owner in the world, either private or public, collector or institution, of every one of Gerhard Richter's editioned works. Based on the rarity of its images and objects, and on the effort required to assemble it, it is highly unlikely that a complete collection of Richter editions will ever again be formed. The chance to acquire this group, then, is emphatically unique.
- Since the early 1960s, Richter has turned to myriad artistic forms to raise questions about the twinned issues of seeing and thinking, especially in relation to art and the wider world around us. Richter's use of the edition accords with his wariness of ideologies, as his diverse approaches tie him to no one school, and it challenges the notion of an individual, authentic artistic style. Richter's entire career may, in fact, be seen to depend on mechanically produced, supposedly inauthentic images and objects. His "photopaintings" (e.g. the DMA's Apples, 1988) are based on photographs; and his "abstractions" often look machine-made, although Richter actually uses squeegees and other tools to create them.
- In Richter's first entry in this series of editioned works, the extremely rare Hund (Dog) [cat. no. 1] from 1965, we see the same dynamic at work. Here Richter registers the dog through a silkscreen technique, and then smears the ink by hand with a tool. The definition of "print" becomes problematic: Hund contains the crisp uniformity of the printed image and the satisfying facture of a heavily brushed, "authentic" oil painting.
- Richter further blurs ideas behind edition and original with his ingenious editioned paintings. Among these are a brown painting on canvas (one of 130) [cat. no. 38], a red-blue-yellow painting on canvas (one of 100) [cat. no. 41], and a green-blue-red painting on canvas (one of 115) [cat. no. 69]. These individual paintings were part of a grid of canvases Richter painted on as he would a single large canvas. Though painted by hand, and separated out of its grid, each canvas is but one of an entire group of least 99 other closely related works which Richter created en masse, making the line between "original" and "manufactured" increasingly difficult to distinguish.
- Richter has, not surprisingly, delved into photography, using two of his abstract paintings as subjects for two of his editions: Uran (Uranus) [cat. no. 57], titled after its "original" painting, and Abstract Photograph [cat. no. 58]. These photographs carry all the illusion of Richter's abstract paintings, particularly Richter's mechanical-looking "brushstrokes." But these photographs are black and white gelatin silver prints, not the paintings they portray, and the color in the original paintings is now completely gone. Like Jasper Johns, Richter makes new images from old in a constant shift from one medium to the next. As a result, seeing, naming, and knowing in Richter' art become tenuous.
- Richter is, however, no mere theoretician; his work displays a blazing formal intelligence, sensuality, and even humor. This can be seen in images and objects such as his sublime Canary Islands landscapes [cat. nos. 32, 33] and other Caspar David Friedrich-like locales (including nearly hallucinatory seascapes [cat. nos. 24 and 28]), spectacularly optical color charts [cat. 42], ghostly, Romantic candles seen burning in splendid, cold isolation [cat. nos. 54, 56a, 56b], bracingly formalist reductions of the Swiss Alps [cat. no. 16], perfect polished steel spheres that literally "mirror" yet distort the world they reflect [cat. nos. 59, 64, 65], a series of eerie photographic self-portraits [cat. no. 62], huge lozenges of viscous-looking color made with industrial technology, such as Ophelia [Richter editions 1998-99 no. 3], and the five versions of a single motif of an achingly beautiful, fragile orchid stem [Richter editions 1998-99 no. 7]. Richter's wry humor is perhaps nowhere more evident in the strange, impossible-looking, constructed wooden objects he photographed to look "real" in a nine series work [cat. no 20]. All these diverse works unfailingly prove Richter is not above creating beguiling visual images.
- Yet nothing with Richter is easy. Take for instance the "print" [cat. no. 63] of the painting, Betty (collection The Saint Louis Art Museum). Betty is one of Richter's most desirable images for its dazzling "realism" and icon-like composition. Richter's daughter is seen turning her shoulder from the viewer in Richter's bravura painting performance. The editioned Betty print then has a fascinating lineage, one that may be likened to taking apart a Chinese puzzle box, of which the print is only the latest incarnation: Richter has made a print of an original painting (the St. Louis painting) that is in turn based on a photograph Richter took of his daughter--who was at that moment looking back at one of Richter's own paintings in his studio.
- Still there is more. In photographing the Betty painting to create the Betty print, Richter lit the painting when it was photographed so that the texture of the canvas is more pronounced in the print than it is in the original painting. In doing so, and by using shellac on the paper to make the print sheet shiny, Richter emphasizes both the object-ness of the Betty painting and the Vermeer-like light that plays across his daughter's hair and clothing, making the Betty print look more like a painting than the original Betty painting itself. With editions like Betty, Richter is able to express most fully his essential notion that nothing is necessarily as it appears.
- Richter suggests with his gathered works that our usual definitions fail us when confronted with anything of hybrid nature. Richter's complete editions are an investigation into the often unreliable and inadequate dynamics of our feeling, thinking and knowing, expressed in an art of constant variation, persistent rigor and, more often than not, enrapturing, mystifying beauty.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
Until 1999: Anthony D'Offay Gallery, London, England
From 1999: Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art League Fund, Roberta Coke Camp Fund, General Acquisitions Fund, TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund, and the Contemporary Art Fund: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon E. Faulconer, Mr. and Mrs. Bryant M. Hanley, Jr., Marguerite and Robert K. Hoffman, Howard E. Rachofsky, Deedie and Rusty Rose, Gayle and Paul Stoffel, and two anonymous donors, purchased from above.
AUDIO ASSETS
VIDEO ASSETS
IMAGE ASSETS
WEB RESOURCES
ARCHIVAL RESOURCES
FUN FACTS
- The DMA is the only public or private collection to house Richter's complete work in editions from 1965 to the present.
TEACHING IDEAS
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Apply to objects where number equals 1999.270
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General Description
Gerhard Richter's Ema (Nude on a Staircase), is a photograph of a Richter painting by the same name (at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany), which itself was painted from a slightly blurred Polaroid taken of his then-wife, Ema. An homage to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, this work simultaneously references art history and Richter's personal history.
Richter's art deals with perception, imagery, and meaning, and takes an extremely broad range of forms in doing so. Richter began to create his mature work in the early 1960s after moving to Düsseldorf from East Germany, taking part in the fertile atmosphere of that city's art academy, a center of the post-World War II avant-garde. At first adapting the ideas of American pop art alongside his colleagues Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg (later Fischer), Richter expanded his painted adaptations of family shapshots and other "low-acting" images to embrace a vast range of art-making strategies that mirrored, but did not duplicate, minimalism, conceptualism, photography, and abstraction. In spite of their diversity, Richter's paintings, prints, photographs, and editioned works can all be seen as an investigation into the mechanics and meanings of art.
Since the early 1960s, Richter has turned to myriad artistic forms to raise questions about the twinned issues of seeing and thinking, especially in relation to art and the wider world around us. Richter's wariness of ideologies and diverse artistic approaches tie him to no one school, challenging the notion of an individual, authentic artistic style. Richter's entire career may, in fact, be seen to depend on mechanically produced, supposedly inauthentic images and objects. He deliberately plays with the representation of photographic and painting techniques to make plain that this is a photo of a painting of a photo. In other words, the "models" for Richter's works are not the things themselves, but previous representations of these things. Richter is making pictures of pictures.
Adapted from
- Bonnie Pitman, ed., "Sphere I (Kugel I) (1999.261)," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 312.
- Charles Wylie, DMA unpublished material, 1999.
Fun Facts
- The DMA is the only public or private collection to house Richter's complete work in editions from 1965 to the present.
Archival Resources
Web Resources
Notes
- updated provenance and geo x ref
Acquisition Justification:
- This complete group of the editioned art of Gerhard Richter, dating from 1965 to 1999 and representing 91 separate works of art totaling 192 individual objects, is a commanding retrospective of this towering artist's multi-faceted and searching art. Comparable to Walker Art Center's exhaustive holdings of Joseph Beuys and Sigmar Polke multiples, the group embraces key passages in the history of one of our era's most complex artists, and offers crucial insights into Richter's confrontation with the social, intellectual and artistic developments and upheavals of the recent past. In acquiring this great body of Richter's art, the Dallas Museum of Art would be the sole owner in the world, either private or public, collector or institution, of every one of Gerhard Richter's editioned works. Based on the rarity of its images and objects, and on the effort required to assemble it, it is highly unlikely that a complete collection of Richter editions will ever again be formed. The chance to acquire this group, then, is emphatically unique.
- Since the early 1960s, Richter has turned to myriad artistic forms to raise questions about the twinned issues of seeing and thinking, especially in relation to art and the wider world around us. Richter's use of the edition accords with his wariness of ideologies, as his diverse approaches tie him to no one school, and it challenges the notion of an individual, authentic artistic style. Richter's entire career may, in fact, be seen to depend on mechanically produced, supposedly inauthentic images and objects. His "photopaintings" (e.g. the DMA's Apples, 1988) are based on photographs; and his "abstractions" often look machine-made, although Richter actually uses squeegees and other tools to create them.
- In Richter's first entry in this series of editioned works, the extremely rare Hund (Dog) [cat. no. 1] from 1965, we see the same dynamic at work. Here Richter registers the dog through a silkscreen technique, and then smears the ink by hand with a tool. The definition of "print" becomes problematic: Hund contains the crisp uniformity of the printed image and the satisfying facture of a heavily brushed, "authentic" oil painting.
- Richter further blurs ideas behind edition and original with his ingenious editioned paintings. Among these are a brown painting on canvas (one of 130) [cat. no. 38], a red-blue-yellow painting on canvas (one of 100) [cat. no. 41], and a green-blue-red painting on canvas (one of 115) [cat. no. 69]. These individual paintings were part of a grid of canvases Richter painted on as he would a single large canvas. Though painted by hand, and separated out of its grid, each canvas is but one of an entire group of least 99 other closely related works which Richter created en masse, making the line between "original" and "manufactured" increasingly difficult to distinguish.
- Richter has, not surprisingly, delved into photography, using two of his abstract paintings as subjects for two of his editions: Uran (Uranus) [cat. no. 57], titled after its "original" painting, and Abstract Photograph [cat. no. 58]. These photographs carry all the illusion of Richter's abstract paintings, particularly Richter's mechanical-looking "brushstrokes." But these photographs are black and white gelatin silver prints, not the paintings they portray, and the color in the original paintings is now completely gone. Like Jasper Johns, Richter makes new images from old in a constant shift from one medium to the next. As a result, seeing, naming, and knowing in Richter' art become tenuous.
- Richter is, however, no mere theoretician; his work displays a blazing formal intelligence, sensuality, and even humor. This can be seen in images and objects such as his sublime Canary Islands landscapes [cat. nos. 32, 33] and other Caspar David Friedrich-like locales (including nearly hallucinatory seascapes [cat. nos. 24 and 28]), spectacularly optical color charts [cat. 42], ghostly, Romantic candles seen burning in splendid, cold isolation [cat. nos. 54, 56a, 56b], bracingly formalist reductions of the Swiss Alps [cat. no. 16], perfect polished steel spheres that literally "mirror" yet distort the world they reflect [cat. nos. 59, 64, 65], a series of eerie photographic self-portraits [cat. no. 62], huge lozenges of viscous-looking color made with industrial technology, such as Ophelia [Richter editions 1998-99 no. 3], and the five versions of a single motif of an achingly beautiful, fragile orchid stem [Richter editions 1998-99 no. 7]. Richter's wry humor is perhaps nowhere more evident in the strange, impossible-looking, constructed wooden objects he photographed to look "real" in a nine series work [cat. no 20]. All these diverse works unfailingly prove Richter is not above creating beguiling visual images.
- Yet nothing with Richter is easy. Take for instance the "print" [cat. no. 63] of the painting, Betty (collection The Saint Louis Art Museum). Betty is one of Richter's most desirable images for its dazzling "realism" and icon-like composition. Richter's daughter is seen turning her shoulder from the viewer in Richter's bravura painting performance. The editioned Betty print then has a fascinating lineage, one that may be likened to taking apart a Chinese puzzle box, of which the print is only the latest incarnation: Richter has made a print of an original painting (the St. Louis painting) that is in turn based on a photograph Richter took of his daughter--who was at that moment looking back at one of Richter's own paintings in his studio.
- Still there is more. In photographing the Betty painting to create the Betty print, Richter lit the painting when it was photographed so that the texture of the canvas is more pronounced in the print than it is in the original painting. In doing so, and by using shellac on the paper to make the print sheet shiny, Richter emphasizes both the object-ness of the Betty painting and the Vermeer-like light that plays across his daughter's hair and clothing, making the Betty print look more like a painting than the original Betty painting itself. With editions like Betty, Richter is able to express most fully his essential notion that nothing is necessarily as it appears.
- Richter suggests with his gathered works that our usual definitions fail us when confronted with anything of hybrid nature. Richter's complete editions are an investigation into the often unreliable and inadequate dynamics of our feeling, thinking and knowing, expressed in an art of constant variation, persistent rigor and, more often than not, enrapturing, mystifying beauty.
Catalogue essays
Artist/designers
Cultures
Geography
Process/materials
Historical periods
Individuals
Subject terms
RELATED OBJECTS
PROVENANCE
Until 1999: Anthony D'Offay Gallery, London, England
From 1999: Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art League Fund, Roberta Coke Camp Fund, General Acquisitions Fund, TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art Fund, and the Contemporary Art Fund: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Vernon E. Faulconer, Mr. and Mrs. Bryant M. Hanley, Jr., Marguerite and Robert K. Hoffman, Howard E. Rachofsky, Deedie and Rusty Rose, Gayle and Paul Stoffel, and two anonymous donors, purchased from above.
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