The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gerhard Richter · a single canvas, scored as one object · oil on canvas · one figure, half length, seen from behind and to the side, her head turned fully away over her shoulder, before a dark grey field · painted from a photograph · 1988 · Saint Louis Art Museum · whole, nothing replaced or dispersed, and no later hand known
Mode
The portrait refused; a photo-painting of a family snapshot, finished close to the photograph and turned toward a grey field
Mythos
The figure seen from behind, the Rückenfigur of German Romantic painting, with the backward glance and the child turning from the father beneath it; evoked, not built
Phase
One instant of a photograph of a child, painted in 1988, years after it was taken
Presentation
Oil on a single canvas; one figure and one ground; a near-photographic finish, softened at the edges; one saturated passage, one light, one dark
Register
Cool and quiet; tenderness and withdrawal, one height held by stillness rather than by event
Scale
One girl, half length, one grey field, one instant; the turn of a head seen four ways
Governing Proposition
A girl in a red and white patterned jacket turns her head fully away over her shoulder, toward a dark grey field that fills about half the canvas, and nothing of her face is seen but the edge of a cheek. Richter painted his daughter from a photograph of her as a child, with a finish so close to the photograph’s own that the hand nearly disappears. The wager of the canvas is that the closer an image comes to a person the more plainly it shows what it cannot hold, and that a painting of a past instant, turned toward a blank, can carry that knowledge as tenderness rather than as loss.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The canvas is Betty, oil on canvas, painted by Gerhard Richter in 1988 and held by the Saint Louis Art Museum. It shows a girl, half length, seen from behind and to the side, her body turned toward us and her head turned fully away over her shoulder, so that no part of her face is seen but the edge of the cheek. Her fair hair is drawn back and tied. She wears a patterned jacket or top, red and white, with a floral or ornamental figure, and it is the only strong colour in the field. Behind her, and toward where she looks, is a dark grey ground, flat and featureless, filling about half the canvas. There is one figure and one ground, and almost nothing else.
The sitter is the painter’s daughter, whose name is the title, and the canvas is painted from a photograph of her as a child; the photograph is commonly dated about ten years before the painting, though that date is not given here as fact. The method was Richter’s own, established from 1962 in the photo-paintings, with their blur, their found and family snapshots and their argument against both the hand and the photograph. Here the handling is close to photographic, sharper than the blurred photo-paintings of the 1960s, softened rather than smeared. The figure is held at a single focus, and only at its edges does the softness show that this is paint.
The canvas was painted in the same year as the cycle 18. Oktober 1977, Richter’s fifteen grey paintings of the dead of the Red Army Faction. That cycle is a separate work and is context only: one turned toward history and the state, this one toward a single child. The work scored here is the single canvas, as it stands. Nothing in it is known to have been lost, replaced or reworked, and nothing has been dispersed; the photograph from which it was painted, and any other picture of the same sitter, stand outside it.
Movement II
The turn is the canvas’s centre. The head is carried fully away over the shoulder, and the edge of the cheek and the drawn-back hair stand for the whole face. The portrait is invoked and refused in the same act: everything about the picture, the half-length figure, the closeness, the care of the rendering, belongs to a portrait, and the one thing a portrait gives is withheld. The viewer’s wish to see the face is the content. Turn the head to us and the painting becomes what it refuses; turn it further and the person is gone into the ground.
The hair is the hinge. Drawn back in strands of light and shadow and tied, it shows the nape and the line of the cheek, which carry the person in a few centimetres of paint. The turn is held at the instant before the head comes round or goes further, the camera’s instant, and the stillness of that instant is where the canvas rises. The figure seen from behind, looking into a space the viewer cannot enter, is the Rückenfigur of German Romantic painting, Friedrich’s figure before the sea or the mist, with a grey field where the sea was. Behind it stand the backward glance of Eurydice and of Lot’s wife, and the daughter turning from the father toward her own world.
None of these patterns bears the canvas’s weight; they are brought to it by the memory of other pictures. What the canvas states on its own is plainer and holds: the image of a person is not the person, and the more exactly a painter renders someone, the more plainly the image shows what it cannot hold. A father paints his daughter with the closest attention, and she turns from him toward something he too cannot see into. That needs no outside knowledge. The refused face is there to be seen.
Movement III
The jacket is the one warm, crowded passage in the field: a red and white pattern, floral or ornamental, on a body turned toward the viewer. It is the body’s presence when the face is withheld. Remove it and the figure loses its warmth and its one assertion of colour, and sinks into the ground. The canvas has one saturated passage, one light passage in the hair, nape and cheek, and one dark field, and the pattern is what makes her present while she looks away.
The making is load-bearing here as everywhere on the canvas. The pattern is held in the folds of the turning body without losing its flat ornament, so that it is at once a printed cloth and a body under it. The transfer of the photograph into paint is so exact that the hand all but disappears, and the meaning depends on its not quite disappearing: the soft focus at the figure’s edges keeps the image from becoming either photograph or illustration. The range of mark is narrow by design, and the canvas commands one problem completely rather than many.
The pattern is a given of the photograph, not a choice, and the composition too is given by the photograph rather than built. The particular stays particular: a girl in a patterned jacket, dated by her clothes only lightly. The canvas does not lift her into a type. It keeps to what the camera saw, and what it saw was ordinary; the attention spent on it is what is not.
Movement IV
Before her, and toward where she looks, is the dark grey field, flat and featureless, filling about half the canvas. On the canvas it reads as depth rather than as wall, an opening she looks into that gives nothing back. Remove it and she turns toward nothing in particular: the canvas becomes a snapshot of a child looking round, and its second subject, painting itself, its blank, its withholding, goes.
The grey is commonly read as one of Richter’s own grey monochrome paintings, photographed with her. That reading is not verified here, and on the canvas the field is simply a dark grey ground. Read so, the picture sets the painter’s figuration and his abstraction in one image, the figure turned toward the blank he had painted in the 1970s; read without it, she still looks into a field the viewer cannot enter. In either case the departure of 1988 is the meeting of figure and grey field in one canvas, with the figure rendered almost without the protective blur.
The grey is not a different kind of painting from the figure. It is rendered as the figure is, at the same focus and from the same distance, laid so that it reads as depth and also as a painted surface. Everything in the field is the light of a photograph translated into paint, and that one law holds from the crowded pattern of the jacket to the empty field. What the grey is, a painting, a wall, the abstraction he practised, death or nothing, remains open, and it is the canvas’s first question.
Movement V
A painting from a photograph is a painting of a past instant. The child in the picture had ceased to exist when the paint was laid: the canvas holds childhood seen from after its end, in the years between the photograph and the painting. As the photograph alone it would be a family snapshot. It becomes something else because a photographed instant has been remade by hand over long labour, so that attention is spent on a person who withholds herself, and the snapshot’s accident becomes deliberate. At a distance the canvas passes for a photograph; near to, it declares itself as paint.
To paint his own child tenderly and exactly in the late 1980s, when illusionistic painting was widely held to be indefensible, risked the charge of sentiment, academicism and kitsch. The canvas met that charge with full critical seriousness and became one of the emblems of Richter’s figurative painting and of painting from photographs, widely reproduced and among the best known of his images; much of that reach belongs to the method and the career rather than to this picture. In the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, in oil on canvas laid smoothly and thinly, it survives whole after thirty-eight years.
The questions it keeps open are real: whether it is sentiment or a critique of sentiment, why a child was painted years after the photograph and in the year of the October cycle, whether the near-sharp finish concedes to the photograph or sharpens the refusal. The figure gives most of itself at once, and the canvas holds four orders in one turn, the family, a consciousness with its own object, art and time, and leaves out labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order. Within that small territory it is exact. She turns away, and the painting is the record of that turning.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, element by element, and there are few elements, which is part of the claim. Remove the grey and she turns toward nothing in particular, toward a wall: the canvas becomes a snapshot of a child looking round, and its second subject, painting and its blank, goes. Remove the jacket’s pattern and the body loses its warmth and its one assertion of colour, and the figure sinks into the ground. Turn the head to us and the painting becomes the portrait it refuses. The drawn-back hair, showing the nape and the line of the cheek, is the hinge of the turn. What yields: the proportion of grey to figure could shift a little, and the ornament of the pattern is a given of the photograph, not a choice.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Two propositions can be stated and hold. First: the image of a person is not the person, and the more exactly a painter renders someone, the more plainly the image shows what it cannot hold. A father paints his daughter with the closest attention, and she turns from him toward something he too cannot see into; the refused face is on the canvas and needs no outside knowledge. Second: a painting from a photograph is a painting of a past instant, and the child in the picture was gone when it was painted. A third is less secure: that figuration faces the blank. What holds the axis is that much of what the canvas gives is a state, withdrawal and tenderness, and the second and third lean on knowledge brought to it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The elevation is real, cool and quiet, and of one register. It comes in the contrast at the centre of the field, warm pattern and pale hair against the dark grey, which gives the figure a presence out of proportion to its plainness; in the turn itself, held at the instant before the head comes round or goes further; and in the grey, which reads as depth rather than wall, an opening she looks into. What holds the axis: there is no grandeur of scale, no terror, and no recurrence of summits across the field. The canvas rises once and holds that height, by stillness rather than by event, and it has one higher moment and a flatter remainder.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The archetypes are present and evoked, not built. The figure seen from behind, looking into a space the viewer cannot enter, is the Rückenfigur of German Romantic painting, Friedrich’s figure before the sea or the mist; here the sea has become a grey field, and the allusion is real and placed. The backward glance of Eurydice and of Lot’s wife is summoned by any figure turning over the shoulder, and the daughter turning from the father toward her own world is the oldest family story there is. None of these bears load: the canvas is built on the photograph and the turn, and the myths are brought by the viewer’s memory of other pictures. The particular stays particular, a girl in a patterned jacket. Evoked well, built not at all.
Score: 7.5 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: Richter’s own photo-painting, established from 1962, with its blur, its found and family snapshots and its argument against both the hand and the photograph; and his grey monochromes of the 1970s. The departure is to bring the two into one canvas, the figure turned toward a field in the grey he had made his own, and to render her with a finish close to the photograph’s, almost without the protective blur. The stake was real: in the late 1980s, when illusionistic painting was widely held to be indefensible, to paint a child tenderly and exactly risked the charge of sentiment, academicism and kitsch. What holds the axis: the photo-painting and the Rückenfigur were proven paths, the swerve is made within a system the painter had built himself, and the canvas confirms more than it overturns.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Substitute another form and nearly everything goes. As the photograph alone it would be a family snapshot; the work knows what it knows because a photographed instant has been remade by hand over long labour, so that attention is spent on a person who withholds herself, and the snapshot’s accident becomes deliberate. The turned head is the form’s centre: the portrait is invoked and refused in one act, and the viewer’s wish to see the face is the content. The grey field is form as argument, the blank set as the thing the figure looks at. The softened, nearly photographic finish lets the canvas pass for a photograph at a distance and declare itself as paint near to. Held below the top because the form completes a method twenty-five years old, and part of what it knows the method already knew.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise: thirty-eight years of return, and repeated reading as one of the key images of Richter’s figurative painting. The open questions are real. What is the grey: a painting, a wall, the abstraction he practised, death, nothing? Is the canvas sentiment or a critique of sentiment? Why paint a child years after the photograph, and why in 1988, the year of the October cycle? Is the near-sharp finish a concession to the photograph or a sharpening of the refusal? What holds the axis: the figure gives most of itself at once, the surface does not hold the formal inquiry a long look rewards in the greatest canvases, much of the writing concerns Richter’s position rather than this picture, and the span of evidence is short.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of painting in Germany and the West in the 1980s. Intrinsic force: modest as a reorganisation, since the method belongs to Richter’s work of the 1960s and 1970s; what the canvas adds is the meeting of figure and grey field in one image, and a demonstration that tender, finished figuration could be made with full critical seriousness in a decade that doubted it. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: wide as image, one of the emblems of Richter’s figurative painting and of painting from photographs, carried to later painters who work from snapshots in a softened, withholding manner, though no direct descent from this canvas is claimed. Discounted because much of that reach belongs to the method and the career, not to this picture.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: one canvas, whole, with no loss, damage or reworking by another hand known. Presence: thirty-eight years, in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, and reproduced as one of the best known of Richter’s images; fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: oil on canvas in a smooth, thin, sound technique, the smallest charge. Its presence is wide within its field but not of the widest kind: the canvas is known to the art public more than to the general one. The surface is barely fixed to its moment, since a child in a patterned jacket dates by her clothes only lightly. Against it all: a survival of decades does not outscore one of centuries.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of oil on a single canvas. The making is load-bearing: the meaning depends on the transfer of a photograph into paint so exact that the hand all but disappears, and on its not quite disappearing. The hair, drawn back in strands of light and shadow; the nape and the edge of the cheek, which carry the whole person in a few centimetres; the jacket’s pattern, held in the folds of the turning body without losing its flat ornament; the grey, laid so that it reads as depth and as a painted surface; the soft focus at the figure’s edges, which keeps the image from becoming either photograph or illustration. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, the composition is given by the photograph and not built, and one problem is commanded completely rather than many.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the warm, figured, crowded pattern of the jacket and the empty dark grey field. They obey one law: everything is the light of a photograph, translated into paint at a single focus and a single distance. The grey is not a different kind of painting from the figure; it is rendered as the figure is, and that is the canvas’s most exact coherence. The turn obeys the same law, the camera’s instant held. Nothing departs from it: no second kind of mark, no expressive passage, no symbol painted in. What holds the axis is the size of the territory, one figure, one ground, one light, one instant, for narrowness is not coherence. Within it the range from ornament to void is wide, and the law holds across it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the family, a father and the daughter he paints; consciousness, in the turned head, a mind with its own object of attention; art, in the meeting of the figure and the blank field; and time, in the years between the photograph and the canvas, childhood seen from after its end. They are integrated, one turn seen four ways. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent, which is most of what the rubric lists: no labour but the painter’s own, implied; no state; no history in the frame, for the year of the October cycle stands outside it; no sacred order and no natural order. A half-length figure before a grey field cannot hold more, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.8, then The Living Form at 8.7, with The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.6. A transfer of a photograph into paint so exact that the hand all but disappears, and does not quite; a form in which the portrait is invoked and refused in one act, and the viewer’s wish to see the face is the content; a canvas whole and widely present after thirty-eight years, in a sound technique; and one law, the light of a photograph at a single focus, holding from the crowded pattern of the jacket to the empty grey.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.4: the family, a consciousness, art and time are held in one turn, and there is no labour, no state, no history in the frame, no sacred and no natural order. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.5 and The Sublime at 7.8: the figure seen from behind and the backward glance are evoked, not built, and the canvas rises once and holds that height by stillness, with no grandeur, no terror and no recurrence of summits across the field.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, The Swerve at 7.9 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.5 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met at its edge: The Archetypal Deep stands at 7.5 exactly, against 7.5, and no other axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8. The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.4. The twelve sum to 97.0, an average of 8.08 that displays 8.1.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas Betty, oil on canvas, painted by Gerhard Richter in 1988 and held by the Saint Louis Art Museum, and of how it was made and received; not from standing before it, and no image or written source for the painting was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas as one object, as it stands now: it is whole, nothing in it is known to be lost, replaced or reworked by another hand, nothing has been dispersed, and nothing stands in place of an original. The subject, date, medium, holder and method are known securely; the surface at the scale of the stroke, the exact colours of the pattern, the condition and the exhibition history only thinly. The photograph from which it was painted, other pictures of the same sitter and the cycle 18. Oktober 1977 of the same year are context, and are not scored. That the grey field shows one of the painter’s own grey paintings is a common reading and is stated as such. No words of Richter’s are quoted, and no inscription or document is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions and proportion of the canvas, its catalogue number, the year it entered the museum, the sitter’s year of birth, who took the photograph and when, earlier portraits of the same sitter, the painter’s own statements on painting in those years, the exhibitions to which it has been lent, and which later painters descend from it.