FiLM & ART: Gerhard Richter, Real Memories This is an insightful, truthful film about making art, the best one I’ve ever seen about the artistic process. There’s a wonderful moment when Richter approaches two wall size white canvasses with a large bucket of bright yellow paint and a large housepainter’s brush. The anxiety of the white room, the blank page. Then he gashes the surface with giant arm-waving slashes of yellow, followed by red, blue. Later, he pushes and pulls giant “squeegees” over the surface. They look like huge scrapers or a cement mason’s hand floats. He applies paint along the edge, or not, and scrapes away and overlays the past with present meaning, sometimes many times. . He waits, hours, days, goes back, reworks: if it isn’t “good”, it will get painted over again. It is finished when nothing is wrong with the painting, he says. He is a deeply focused, compressive, detached, and humane presence: if I were told he were a New Englander, a Vermonter, I’d believe it. His words about painting sound like what I think Robert Frost might say. Richter has a unique historical position from which to paint. A German post-war artist in East Germany, he escaped to West Germany, became a political refugee, and never saw his parents again. The early Social Realism he painted there is buried now, and Richter’s oeuvre is broad. In the 1980’s he returned to East Germany for an exhibition, welcomed as a “favorite” son, no longer a prodigal. It’s fascinating, the spectacle of government repentance. Repressive regimes are sterile, implode and then struggle to recover what they rebuked and scorned. Ai Weiwei, Wu Guanzhong, Shostakovich come to mind. Germany wins the prize for the worst history to live down, but we do have our own atrocities on our national conscience, it’s well to remember. In one scene Richter muses over old photos of his childhood, and considers destroying them. He has few real memories, only photo memories, and their elusive relation to his past. His small son, clad in a bright yellow rainslicker, peeks into the studio inquiringly, then turns and scampers away. This is an insightful, truthful film about making art, the best one I’ve ever seen about the artistic process. There’s a wonderful moment when Richter approaches two wall size white canvasses with a large bucket of bright yellow paint and a large housepainter’s brush. The anxiety of the white room, the blank page. Then he gashes the surface with giant arm-waving slashes of yellow, followed by red, blue. Later, he pushes and pulls giant “squeegees” over the surface. They look like huge scrapers or a cement mason’s hand floats. He applies paint along the edge, or not, and scrapes away and overlays the past with present meaning, sometimes many times. . He waits, hours, days, goes back, reworks: if it isn’t “good”, it will get painted over again. It is finished when nothing is wrong with the painting, he says. He is a deeply focused, compressive, detached, and humane presence: if I were told he were a New Englander, a Vermonter, I’d believe it. His words about painting sound like what I think Robert Frost might say. Richter has a unique historical position from which to paint. A German post-war artist in East Germany, he escaped to West Germany, became a political refugee, and never saw his parents again. The early Social Realism he painted there is buried now, and Richter’s oeuvre is broad. In the 1980’s he returned to East Germany for an exhibition, welcomed as a “favorite” son, no longer a prodigal. It’s fascinating, the spectacle of government repentance. Repressive regimes are sterile, implode and then struggle to recover what they rebuked and scorned. Ai Weiwei, Wu Guanzhong, Shostakovich come to mind. Germany wins the prize for the worst history to live down, but we do have our own atrocities on our national conscience, it’s well to remember. In one scene Richter muses over old photos of his childhood, and considers destroying them. He has few real memories, only photo memories, and their elusive relation to his past. His small son, clad in a bright yellow rainslicker, peeks into the studio inquiringly, then turns and scampers away.

 This is an insightful, truthful film about making art, the best one I’ve ever seen about the artistic process.  There’s a wonderful moment when Richter approaches two wall size white canvasses with a large bucket of bright yellow paint and a large housepainter’s brush.  The anxiety of the white room, the blank page.

Then he gashes the surface with giant arm-waving slashes of yellow, followed by red, blue. Later, he pushes and pulls giant “squeegees” over the surface.  They look like huge scrapers or a cement mason’s hand floats. He applies paint along the edge, or not, and scrapes away and overlays the past with present meaning, sometimes many times. .  He waits, hours, days, goes back, reworks: if it isn’t “good”, it will get painted over again.  It is finished when nothing is wrong with the painting, he says.

He is a deeply focused, compressive, detached, and humane presence: if I were told he were a New Englander, a Vermonter, I’d believe it.  His words about painting sound like what I think Robert Frost might say.  

Richter has a unique historical position from which to paint.  A German post-war artist in East Germany, he escaped to West Germany, became a political refugee, and never saw his parents again.  The early Social Realism he painted there is buried now, and Richter’s oeuvre is broad.  In the 1980’s he returned to East Germany for an exhibition, welcomed as a “favorite” son, no longer a prodigal.  It’s fascinating, the spectacle of government repentance.  Repressive regimes are sterile, implode and then struggle to recover what they rebuked and scorned. Ai Weiwei, Wu Guanzhong, Shostakovich come to mind.

Germany wins the prize for the worst history to live down, but we do have our own atrocities on our national conscience, it’s well to remember.  In one scene Richter muses over old photos of his childhood, and considers destroying them.  He has few real memories, only photo memories, and their elusive relation to his past. His small son, clad in a bright yellow rainslicker, peeks into the studio inquiringly, then turns and scampers away.  aption

Would that it all could be swept away, but the purging leaves its inevitable tracks, like a glacier scrapes the mountainside.  At one point, the squeegee  is so large and heavy he must lean into it with his shoulder to push it across the large canvas. In another, he seems to have left it to partially dry, and he wrenches it loose to continue to pull the draperies over what was before, now only posited by say-so.  

 Despite his star problem, he moves back and forth between the deeply private studio experience and the hysteria of world-wide fame.  His painting remains rigorous and truthful; at 80 he’s not on auto-pilot, no golden age nostalgia has seduced him - perhaps because he remains cool, somewhat detached, the observer hiding in plain sight behind canvas spectacles.