The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gerhard Richter · 18. Oktober 1977 · a cycle of fifteen paintings scored as one work, under nine titles: Festnahme 1 and 2 (Arrest), Gegenüberstellung 1 to 3 (Confrontation), Erschossener 1 and 2 (Man Shot Down), Zelle (Cell), Plattenspieler (Record Player), Erhängte (Hanged), Tote 1 to 3 (Dead), Jugendbildnis (Youth Portrait), Beerdigung (Funeral) · oil on canvas, in grey without hue, each canvas painted from a photograph and blurred · 1988 · The Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 1995 · all fifteen surviving and kept together, as painted
Mode
History painting from the photograph; a cycle of grey photo-paintings that withholds the verdict
Mythos
A passion read through the titles, from the taking to the entombment, with Antigone’s burial of outlaws under it; built in the parts, evoked in the whole
Phase
From an arrest of 1972 to a burial of 1977; painted in 1988, eleven years after the night it names
Presentation
Fifteen canvases in oil under nine titles, four motifs repeated across ten canvases and five single images; grey without hue, each from a photograph, each blurred
Register
Cold dread, low in key; flat records, a tender turning face, and three heights in the hanged woman, the dead head and the burial
Scale
Fifteen canvases, from one with the width of a history painting to a head the size of a hand; three of the dead, an arrest and a burial
Governing Proposition
Fifteen grey paintings, made in 1988 from the photographs through which West Germany knew the Red Army Faction, carry an arrest, a woman turning her head, two bodies, a cell, a record player, one head painted three times and a burial, and none of them says what happened. Every image is blurred to the distance at which it can be known. The wager of the cycle is that a society knows its own violence through images it cannot read, that a painting made from those images can show their claim to knowledge failing, and that the dead can be mourned there without either verdict, the state’s or their own side’s.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The title names a night. On 17 to 18 October 1977, in Stuttgart-Stammheim prison, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe of the Red Army Faction died, Baader and Raspe of gunshot wounds and Ensslin by hanging, hours after the hijacked Lufthansa aircraft Landshut was stormed at Mogadishu. The state found suicide; the finding has been disputed ever since. Ulrike Meinhof had died in the same prison on 9 May 1976. The events, and the press, television and police photographs through which West Germany knew them, are the cycle’s matter and stand outside it, as do the related sheets of Richter’s Atlas and his notes and interviews of 1988 and 1989.
Richter painted the cycle in 1988, eleven years after that night, at a time when he was known for abstraction. There are fifteen canvases in oil under nine titles: Festnahme 1 and 2 (Arrest); Gegenüberstellung 1, 2 and 3 (Confrontation); Erschossener 1 and 2 (Man Shot Down); Zelle (Cell); Plattenspieler (Record Player); Erhängte (Hanged); Tote 1, 2 and 3 (Dead); Jugendbildnis (Youth Portrait); and Beerdigung (Funeral). Four motifs are repeated, across ten canvases; five are single images. Six canvases show the living, nine the dead or what they left. The work is the fifteen together, and no canvas stands alone.
Every canvas is painted from a photograph, in grey from near black to near white, with no hue, and every one is blurred by dragging the wet paint across it. The degree of blur is chosen canvas by canvas, and it is greatest in Hanged and the third Dead. The grey withholds the colour of blood and of flags; nothing is captioned, sharpened or allegorized. The method was Richter’s own, used in his photo-paintings since 1962 and in Eight Student Nurses of 1966, painted from photographs of victims. What is new is its object: the most contested event of the Federal Republic’s own history, painted as a cycle, with no hero, no allegory and no judgment.
Movement II
The two canvases of Arrest show an arrest of 1972, the beginning of the story whose end the title names. They are nearly identical and hard to read. In them the image loses its legibility in the blur without gaining meaning, and one of the two might serve where both are given. They are the flattest records in the cycle and the part of it that could most easily go.
The three canvases of Confrontation show Ensslin. She walks, turns, and almost smiles. They are three moments of one turn of the head, and none can be taken away. Together they do what a photograph cannot: they catch a face between expressions no single frame could hold, and show that one instant of a photograph is not the event. With its repetitions the cycle is a film strip slowed to fifteen frames, and here the frames stand closest. The register is tender rather than elevated, and it is the warmest the cycle allows.
Youth Portrait stands apart: Meinhof as a young woman, looking out, softly lit, the one face before the story. Without it the cycle would be a police file. It is clearer than any image of the dead, and the cycle’s one law ranks the two: every image is a photograph painted, grey, and blurred to the distance at which it can be known, and the life is clearer than the death. The cycle gives Ensslin a turning face and Meinhof a girlhood, and gives the cause no image at all.
Movement III
The two canvases of Man Shot Down show Baader dead, the body foreshortened on the floor, as the old masters foreshortened the dead Christ. Death is in nine of the fifteen canvases, and here it is first laid out. The second canvas of the pair adds less than the third canvas of Dead adds to its sequence; after the Arrest pair, it is the repetition the cycle could best spare.
Cell and Record Player show objects where the bodies were: the bookshelves of a cell, and a record player. They are among the questions the official finding left, and they are set down without comment. An ideology ends here, in a cell, among books and a record player; it is present in the cycle as books on shelves and as its absence from every image. These two canvases are flat records by design, and they are not to be taken away: without them the bodies would have no room and the finding no furniture.
Read through its titles, the cycle has the shape of a passion: the taking, the prisoner shown to the authorities, the death and the body laid out, the deposition, the entombment. The particulars stay particular, a turntable, a bookshelf, a pullover, and Richter gives the pattern no sign. How far it bears the cycle depends on a sequence that cannot be shown to be fixed, for whether any order of hanging is fixed is not known. It is there for the viewer who brings it.
Movement IV
Hanged shows Ensslin, a body at full height in the grey of the cell, almost dissolved. The blur is deepest here, and the figure can almost disappear without the canvas going dead. It is the plainest case of what the blur does throughout: it measures the distance between the viewer and what happened, and it deepens where knowledge is least. A body at the edge of visibility obeys the same law as the young face, and stands at the far end of it.
Dead is one head painted three times, Meinhof’s, after the cord. Each canvas is smaller and fainter than the one before, and the third is a smear the size of a hand. The shrinking and the fading are the argument, a face going out of reach as it is looked at, and none of the three can be taken away. The wet paint is dragged to a degree chosen for each, so that the three grade the vanishing step by step. Where the cycle rises, it rises here, and in Hanged, and in the burial.
The making holds all fifteen to one method. The tonal range is kept in grey from near black to near white, every canvas keeps its photograph’s light, and the scale is managed from the crowd of Funeral, held as one surface, to the smallest head. The facture is one method throughout, narrow by choice. Nothing in the fifteen breaks the law it sets: public and private, persons and objects, the living and the dead, 1972 and 1977 are held in one register, and the register never varies.
Movement V
Funeral is the only public image and the only ending: three coffins carried through a crowd, the crowd closing over them under a pale field. It is the one canvas with the width of a history painting. Under it runs Antigone, the burial of outlaws against the city, and Stuttgart in the event permitted the burial. The state that appears in the cycle as police and prison appears last as the power that allowed the dead to be buried.
The cycle was shown from 1989. It invited the charge of glorifying terror and the charge of aestheticizing it, and its sale abroad was attacked. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the fifteen in 1995 and holds them together; they have been shown as a group in the Richter retrospectives and on the collection floors, and they have never been dispersed. The paint is oil on canvas, thinly and evenly laid. The surface is fixed to its moment in one way: the names and events of 1972 to 1977 must now be told to most who stand before it.
The readings have multiplied rather than settled: mourning, as Richter’s own notes suggest, or a critique of terror, of the state or of the media image; the blur as ethical tact or as evasion; the grey as a refusal of judgment or a judgment passed. Robert Storr’s monograph for the Museum of Modern Art (2000) returns to it at length, and Don DeLillo set his story “Baader-Meinhof” (The New Yorker, 2002) in the gallery before the paintings. The cycle holds the state, history, death, the image and a consciousness trying to see; it holds no family, no labour and no victim of the Red Army Faction. The photographs settle nothing, and the paintings say so.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, canvas by canvas. Funeral cannot go: it is the only public image and the only ending. Youth Portrait cannot go: it is the one face before the story, and without it the cycle is a police file. Cell and Record Player cannot go: objects where bodies were, the questions the official finding left, set down without comment. Dead cannot lose a canvas: the head shrinking and fading from the first to the third is the argument, a face going out of reach as it is looked at. The three canvases of Confrontation, three moments of one turn of the head, hold for the same reason. What yields is the Arrest pair, two nearly identical, hard-to-read frames of one event where one might serve, and the second Man Shot Down, which adds less than the third Dead.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, and holds beyond West Germany. A society knows its own violence through images it cannot read: the photographs that made the Red Army Faction public property settle nothing about what happened in those cells, and a painting made from them shows the photograph’s claim to knowledge failing in front of the viewer. Second: the dead whom a state calls enemies and whom their side calls martyrs can be mourned without either verdict. The cycle gives Ensslin a turning, almost smiling face and Meinhof a girlhood, and gives the cause no image at all. Third: an ideology ends in a cell, among books and a record player. These are claims, not a mood. What holds the axis is that much of the disclosure is withholding: the grey and the blur say what cannot be known more often than what can.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The elevation is dread, cold and low in key, and the cycle refuses most of the means by which painting lifts. Where it rises, it rises high: in Dead, the face receding through three canvases until the third is a smear the size of a hand; in Hanged, a body at full height almost gone into the grey of the cell; in Funeral, the crowd closing over three coffins under a pale field, the one image with the width of a history painting. Against these, Arrest, Record Player and Cell are flat records by design, and the three canvases of Confrontation are tender rather than elevated. Height counts with frequency: about a third of the canvases reach the dreadful, and the rest hold the register down.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Something old is built here, in the parts. Read through the titles, the cycle has the shape of a passion: the taking (Arrest), the prisoner shown to the authorities (Confrontation), the death and the body laid out (Man Shot Down, foreshortened on the floor like the dead Christ of the old masters), the deposition (Dead, the head after the cord), the entombment (Funeral). Under it runs Antigone: the burial of outlaws against the city, which Stuttgart in the event permitted. The particulars stay particular: a turntable, a bookshelf, a pullover. But how far the structure bears load depends on a sequence that cannot be shown to be fixed, and Richter gives the pattern no sign; it is there for the viewer who brings it. Built in the parts, evoked in the whole.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: the painting of history, which the century had largely given up after Guernica; and, in West Germany in the 1980s, a history painting of the Nazi past in a mythic and expressive register, in Kiefer, Baselitz and Immendorff. The departure is to paint the most contested event of the Federal Republic’s own history, eleven years after it, from press and police photographs, in grey and blurred, with no hero, no allegory and no judgment, as a cycle. Parts had precedents: Richter’s own photo-paintings from 1962, his Eight Student Nurses (1966), from victims’ photographs, Warhol’s death and disaster pictures, Manet’s Execution of Maximilian, made from press reports. The stake was real: it came when Richter was known for abstraction, it invited the charges of glorifying terror and of aestheticizing it, and the sale abroad was attacked. But the method was his own and proven.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Substitute another form and nearly everything goes. As photographs, the images are evidence, and the cycle’s subject is that evidence failing: the passage from photograph to painting is the knowledge. The blur is not a style here. It measures the distance between the viewer and what happened, and it deepens where knowledge is least, in Hanged and the third Dead. The grey withholds the colour of blood and of flags. With its repetitions the cycle is a film strip slowed to fifteen frames: the repeated motifs show that one instant of a photograph is not the event, and the three canvases of Confrontation catch a face between expressions no single frame could hold. The scale runs from Funeral, the public ending, to the third Dead, the private vanishing. Only the Arrest pair carries little of this.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: thirty-eight years, and the readings have multiplied rather than settled. Is it mourning, as Richter’s own notes suggest, or a critique of terror, of the state or of the media image? Is the blur ethical tact or evasion? Does the grey refuse judgment or pass one? Robert Storr’s monograph for the Museum of Modern Art (2000) and a long run of writing in German and English keep returning to it, and Don DeLillo’s story “Baader-Meinhof” (The New Yorker, 2002), set in the gallery before the paintings, is itself a reading. The canvases yield formally on return as well: the degree of blur, the intervals of the repeated motifs. Held below the top because the span is short and the debate keeps returning to one question, painting and the photograph of death.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European and American painting of the late 1980s. Intrinsic force: the cycle showed that painting could take up a recent political trauma, from its media images, without heroics or allegory, and made the grey history picture painted from photographs a serious form for the end of the century; inside German painting it was the decisive answer to the mythic history painting of the same decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the grey, blurred painting of history and violence from photographs in the 1990s and 2000s descends from Richter’s method, of which this cycle is the fullest statement on history, and the cycle entered literature through DeLillo. Discounted because that reach is hard to separate from his photo-painting as a whole, and for the short span.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the fifteen are whole and together in one collection and have never been dispersed; nothing that makes the work is known to be lost or replaced. Presence: shown since 1989, at the Museum of Modern Art since 1995, as a group in the Richter retrospectives and on the collection floors, its standing rising with Richter’s. Fabric: oil on canvas, thinly and evenly laid, the smallest charge. Against it: the surface is fixed to its moment in a way a viewer must be told about, names and events of 1972 to 1977 that are already history to most who stand before it, and the cycle has not yet outlived the memory of its subject. Thirty-eight years is a short record, and wide presence in the art world is not proof of permanence.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas from photographic sources. The making is load-bearing. The tonal range is held in grey from near black to near white with no hue, and every canvas keeps its photograph’s light. The blur is controlled, not a filter: the wet paint is dragged across with a broad brush or blade to a degree chosen for each canvas, so that the three canvases of Dead grade the vanishing step by step, and the figure in Hanged can almost disappear without the canvas going dead. The scale is managed from the crowd of Funeral, held as one surface, to the smallest head. The costs: the facture is one method throughout, its range narrow by choice, and in the Arrest pair the image loses legibility without gaining meaning.
Score: 8.8 / 10
One law governs everything: every image is a photograph painted, grey, and blurred to the distance at which it can be known. Take the two most distant elements: Youth Portrait, a living young woman looking out, softly lit, and Hanged, a body at the edge of visibility. They obey the same law, and the law ranks them: the life is clearer than the death. The range is wide: public and private (Funeral and Cell), persons and objects (Ensslin and the record player), the living and the dead, 1972 and 1977. Nothing breaks it; no canvas is coloured, sharpened, captioned or allegorized. What holds the axis is that the range in kind is narrower than the range in subject: the cycle holds many things in one register, and the register itself never varies.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The orders held are several, and the cycle places them in one structure. The state, as police, prison and the burial it permitted. History: the Federal Republic’s war with the children of the generation that made the Third Reich, though that war is nowhere stated. Death, in nine of fifteen canvases. Ideology, present as books on shelves and as its absence from every image. The image itself, the media through which a nation saw the Red Army Faction. Consciousness, in Ensslin’s turn of the head and in the viewer’s attempt to see. The sacred enters only through mourning and burial. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no family, though Ensslin’s father was a pastor and Meinhof had children; no labour; no natural order; and no victim of the Red Army Faction.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.1, then The Inner Law at 9.0 and The Made at 8.8. A form in which the passage from photograph to painting is the knowledge, the blur deepening where knowledge is least and the repetitions showing that one instant is not the event; one law, every image a photograph painted grey and blurred to the distance at which it can be known, which ranks the life above the death; and a blur controlled canvas by canvas, grading one head’s vanishing step by step.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: the state, history, death, ideology, the image and consciousness are placed in one structure, and there is no family, no labour, no natural order and no victim of the Red Army Faction. Below the rest, The Sublime at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3: about a third of the canvases reach the dreadful and the rest are flat records by design, and the passion read through the titles is built in the parts and evoked in the whole, its load resting on a sequence that cannot be shown to be fixed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.6 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 falls short by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.5. The twelve sum to 102.4, an average of 8.53 that displays 8.5.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the fifteen paintings of 18. Oktober 1977, painted by Gerhard Richter in 1988 and held together by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 1995, and of how they were made and received; not from standing before them, and no image or written source for the paintings was consulted. The work scored is the cycle of fifteen canvases as one work, as it stands now: all fifteen survive together, nothing in them is known to be lost, replaced or reworked by another hand, and nothing stands in place of an original. The subjects, titles, sources, date, method and holder are known securely; the dimensions and the exhibition history only thinly; and whether any order of hanging is fixed is not known, so no order is argued and the passion is read through the titles alone. The press, television and police photographs Richter painted from, the related sheets of his Atlas, his notes and interviews of 1988 and 1989 and the events themselves are context, and are not scored. The official finding of suicide is stated as disputed. No words of Richter’s are quoted, and no inscription or document is quoted; titles alone are given. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the canvases and their shares of the whole surface, the identification of the man in Arrest and the place and day of that arrest, what was said to have been hidden in the record player, the date of the burial, whether Raspe appears in any canvas, whether the hand throughout is the painter’s alone, and which later painters descend from the method.