The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gerhard Richter · Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) · a single canvas scored as one work: one woman, full length and unclothed, coming down a flight of stairs toward the viewer at about life size · oil on canvas, 200 by 130 cm, painted from a photograph and blurred · 1966 · Museum Ludwig, Cologne · the canvas whole, as painted, with nothing replaced or dispersed
Mode
The nude painted from a photograph; a photo-painting in colour, blurred, set against Duchamp’s verdict on painting
Mythos
The descent, built: a woman coming down from an upper level toward the one who looks; the nude’s tradition from Venus to Duchamp summoned by the subject and evoked
Phase
One instant of a descent, taken by a camera; painted in 1966, a year after a grey woman descending a staircase and fifty-four years after Duchamp’s
Presentation
Oil on an upright canvas of 200 by 130 cm, drawn from a photograph and worked wet so that every edge softens; warm flesh against a cooler ground
Register
Warm and quiet: a lowered face, a body neither displayed nor hidden, nearness held at a distance; held breath rather than transport
Scale
One woman on one stair, at about life size; one figure, one ground, one light
Governing Proposition
A woman comes down a flight of stairs toward the one who looks, unclothed, full length and about as tall as the person standing before her, her face lowered. She is the painter’s wife, painted in 1966 from a photograph, in colour, and every edge of her is softened by a brush passed over the wet paint. Fifty-four years earlier Duchamp had sent a nude down a staircase as a machine in phases, and the verdict he came to stand for was that painting of this kind was finished. The wager of the canvas is that the body can come down the stairs whole and in flesh, and that what has changed is the way of seeing it, the photograph’s way, which paint can take and make its own.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, painted Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) in 1966. It is oil on canvas, 200 by 130 centimetres, an upright field of 2.6 square metres, and it holds one figure: a woman, full length and unclothed, coming down a flight of stairs toward the viewer. She is about life size. The canvas hangs in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. The work scored is that single canvas, whole and as painted; nothing in it has been replaced and nothing dispersed.
Since 1962 Richter had been painting from photographs, most of them in grey and most of them found: press pictures and album pictures. Each was drawn from the photograph and then softened by a brush passed across the wet paint, so that the painting kept the photograph’s light and lost its edges. Ema is made the same way, and departs from the others in three things at once. It is in colour. It is a nude. And the sitter is the painter’s wife. Who took the source photograph, and whether it was made for the purpose or found, is left open here; the picture’s argument does not rest on it.
What the canvas shows can be stated simply. The body is warm against a ground that is cooler and darker. The stair runs down under her toward the bottom edge, and she is on it, mid-descent. Her face is lowered. The whole field is in soft focus, the figure, the treads and the ground alike, with no passage sharper than another. There are few elements and no incident: one woman, one stair, one ground, one light, and the soft passage of the brush over all of them. Everything the picture does it does with these.
Movement II
In 1912 Marcel Duchamp painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The body in it comes down the stairs as a mechanism, broken into the successive phases of a movement, like the frames of a machine. It was refused at the Salon des Indépendants in 1912, turned away by the Cubists, and made notorious at the Armory Show in 1913. Duchamp came to stand for a verdict: that painting made for the eye alone was finished.
By 1966 that verdict was the common sense of the avant-garde. Fluxus was active in Düsseldorf around the painter; Pop had arrived; the readymade had been revived. By Richter’s own later account, given here in paraphrase and not in his words, Ema is a response to Duchamp’s Nude and to the verdict it had come to carry. The account can be discounted and the reference remains, because it is built into the subject. Of all the poses a photograph of a sitter allowed, the picture is a full-length nude coming down stairs, painted a year after his grey Woman Descending the Staircase. The stair is the argument, not a caption to it.
The answer is a body that comes down whole. Fifty-four years after a nude descended as a machine, a nude descends in flesh, at life size, toward the one who looks. Duchamp’s mechanised body did not end the painted nude; what changed was the way of seeing it. The nearest sight a painter has now reaches him already as a photograph, with its instant, its soft focus and its distance, and paint can take that way of seeing and make it its own without going back to the studio nude. The stake was real. A beautiful painted nude in 1966 risked reading as kitsch or as reaction, and Richter’s standing among the advanced artists rode on the method not being taken for either.
Movement III
The year before, in 1965, Richter had painted a clothed woman coming down a staircase, in grey, from a found photograph. Ema takes the same descent and changes its terms: unclothed for clothed, colour for grey, his wife for a woman in a found picture. The grey canvas keeps the distance of a news picture. This one keeps the distance of a wife, which is nearer and no less a distance. The pair shows what colour does here: it makes the subject flesh rather than record, and separates the canvas from the grey documents around it.
The elements are each required. Without the stair there is no descent and no answer: a nude standing, not a nude coming down. Without the blur the picture becomes the sharp, posed academy nude it declines to be. Without the colour it rejoins the grey paintings of the year before. The size is compelled, since at the scale of a snapshot she would be a photograph again. What is not required is the arrangement. The crop, the angle and the placing of the figure in the field were set by the camera and accepted rather than composed; a step more or less, a little more ground at an edge, and nothing the picture knows would change.
The descent is the one archetype the canvas builds: a woman coming down from an upper level toward the one who looks, with the stair as the structure of the picture, not its setting. The rest is brought by the subject. The nude carries its long tradition with it, Venus, Eve, the bride, the figure revealed, and the Annunciation and the Madonna have been seen in the picture’s warmth and its lowered eyes. Nothing in the canvas makes them load-bearing. Duchamp’s Nude is a modern myth, and the canvas, by answering it, inherits a story rather than building one. The woman stays one woman, on one stair.
Movement IV
The drawing comes from the photograph; the painting is what is done to it. The paint is worked across while wet so that every edge softens, and the flesh is modelled in warm tones against cooler surroundings in transitions fine enough that the light seems to come from the skin. The stair and the ground are kept softer and cooler than the body, so that the body advances. The blur is hard to do well: too much and the picture is fog, too little and it is a sharp figure with smudges. Here it is held level across a whole field of two metres. The costs are chosen. The drawing is the camera’s and not the hand’s, so command of composition is ceded by design, and the range of mark is one procedure applied evenly.
The blur is not a veil laid over a finished image. The soft transitions are the image, so that the figure seems to emerge from the ground rather than to be outlined against it, as a thing remembered emerges. The size completes it. At about life size the figure is as tall as the person before her, and the descent becomes an approach toward the viewer’s own place. The body glows against the darker ground and comes forward out of the blur as if out of memory. It is the picture’s one height. It does not rise again anywhere in the field, and its softness lowers its pitch: the canvas soothes as much as it lifts.
The lowered face is the centre of it. She comes toward the one who looks and withholds her look; nearness and distance arrive at once. The same law governs the face and the stair treads, the most intimate passage and the most inert: the same soft passage of the brush, the same photographic light, the same remove. Every part of the field stands at one distance, and the law reaches past the surface to the relation of subject and means, wife, photograph and paint held near and unreachable together. The colour keeps it, the warm body against the cool ground, with no passage in another key. Nothing resists, and the field the law governs is small.
Movement V
Sixty years on, the canvas is whole, in a public collection, shown and reproduced as a standard image of the painter and of painting after photography, and its standing has risen with his. Its presence is wide within its field, though it is not the public’s idea of a painting. Its condition is not known here in detail, and only the general risk of oil on canvas is noted. One thing ties it to its moment: the surface takes the look of the photography of the 1960s, its colour cast and its soft focus. So far the image has outlived that look rather than dated with it.
The reorganisation it belongs to, the photograph taken as the model for painting, was made by the photo-paintings of 1962 to 1965, and that practice stands behind much of the figurative painting since the 1980s that works from photographs. Ema is among its canonical images and the standard illustration of the answer to Duchamp: an emblem, strong as an image, shared as a cause. Its literature returns to it with open questions: whether a beautiful picture can carry an argument; what the blur is, photographic truth, painterly distance or the refusal of a single meaning; and the gaze of a painter on a woman posed and unclothed, which the lowered face seems already to know. Much of that writing is about the method, with this canvas as its example.
The canvas holds four orders, the body, the marriage and the household, the history of the nude from Venus to Duchamp, and the photograph as the way a modern eye sees the nearest things, and integrates them by one image and one distance. It holds no labour, no state, no natural order, and no history: the German past that Richter’s family portraits of the same years carry is not in this picture. On this desk it stands level with Duchamp’s Fountain, at 8.0, stronger in the making and weaker in consequence, and half a point below the painter’s October 18, 1977, at 8.5, which it exceeds only in survival. One woman comes down one stair, whole, and does not look up.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the configuration. The elements are few, one figure, one stair, one ground and the soft passage of the brush over all three, and each is required. Remove the stair and the descent goes, and with it the answer to Duchamp the picture exists to give: a nude standing, not a nude coming down. Remove the blur and it becomes the sharp, posed academy nude it declines to be. Remove the colour and it rejoins the grey paintings of the year before, at the distance of a news picture rather than of a wife. The size is compelled: at the scale of a snapshot she would be a photograph again. What gives is the arrangement. The crop, the angle and the placing of the figure were set by the camera and accepted, not composed, and a step more or less would change nothing the picture knows.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Two things can be stated, and they hold. First: the nearest and most private sight a painter has, his wife unclothed, comes to a painter of 1966 already as a photograph, and painting can take the photograph’s way of seeing, its instant, its soft focus, its distance, and make it its own without going back to the studio nude. Second: Duchamp’s body, broken into the successive phases of a machine, did not end the painted nude; the body can come down the stairs whole and in flesh, and what has changed is the way of seeing it, not the possibility of painting it. These are meanings, not moods. What holds the axis is that much of what the canvas gives is a state, tenderness and a nearness held off; that both propositions concern painting and photography, a narrow world; and that the marriage is present as a fact of the picture and discloses nothing of itself.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The elevation is of one kind: beauty. The body glows against a darker, cooler ground and comes toward the viewer out of the blur as if out of memory, at about the height of the person who stands before her. The register is warm and quiet: a lowered face, a body neither displayed nor hidden, light on skin softened until it seems to come from within. Height counts with frequency, and there is one summit, the figure. It does not rise again elsewhere in the field; the stair and the ground are the means of its light, not further heights. There is no terror and no grandeur beyond the life size. The softness that makes the beauty also lowers its pitch: the picture soothes as much as it lifts, and before it the response is held breath, not transport.
Score: 7.8 / 10
One archetype is built: the descent. A woman comes down from an upper level toward the one who looks, and the stair is the structure of the picture, not its setting. The rest is summoned by the subject alone: the long tradition of the nude, Venus, Eve, the bride, the figure revealed. The Annunciation and the Madonna have been brought to the picture’s light and its lowered eyes; that is allusion, and nothing in the canvas makes it load-bearing. Duchamp’s Nude is a modern myth in its own right, the painting that turned the body into a machine and was turned away by the Cubists; the canvas answers it, and so inherits a story rather than building one. The particular stays wholly particular, one woman on one stair, and its depth is brought to it.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is twofold. In the field: Duchamp’s verdict that painting made for the eye alone was finished, by 1966 the common sense of the avant-garde, with Fluxus in Düsseldorf around the painter, Pop and the readymade revived; and his Nude of 1912, which made the body a mechanism. In the painter’s own practice: the photo-paintings since 1962, mostly grey and mostly from found pictures. The departure: a full-length nude of his wife, in colour and at life size, in oil painting’s most traditional subject, set as the answer to the man who had closed it. The stake was real: a beautiful painted nude in 1966 risked reading as kitsch or reaction, and his standing among the advanced artists rode on the method not being taken for that. Held below the gate because the method was his own proven path; the turn is in subject, colour and target, not in means.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What the work knows is that the body is seen at the distance of a photograph and possessed again in paint, and the form carries exactly that. Paint it sharp and it becomes the academy nude; leave it a photograph and the touch, the size and the colour go, and with them the claim that painting can still hold a body. The blur is not a veil laid over a finished image: the soft transitions are the image, so that the figure seems to emerge rather than to be outlined, as a thing remembered does. The life size turns the descent into an approach toward the viewer’s own place. The colour separates the canvas from the grey documents of the year before and makes the subject flesh rather than record. Held below the upper band because the composition, crop and viewpoint, is the camera’s, and a different framing of the same figure would know nearly the same thing.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: sixty years, and a literature that returns to the canvas. The answer to Duchamp, and whether a beautiful picture can carry an argument. The blur, read as photographic truth, as painterly distance, as the refusal of a single meaning. The wife as subject, read for tenderness and read for the looking it cannot escape, a painter’s gaze on a woman posed and unclothed; and the canvas seems to know the question, since the lowered face keeps the viewer out at the moment she comes toward him. The relation to Woman Descending the Staircase of the year before. On return the image gives more than its first softness. Held below 8.0 because much of the literature is about the painter’s method in general, with this canvas as its example, and because the central meaning is plain and agreed.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of German and European painting of the 1960s: painting after photography and after the readymade. Intrinsic force: the extreme instance of the painted photograph as a reassertion of painting, carried from the document to the nude and to colour, and set openly against Duchamp. The discount: the reorganisation itself, the photograph taken as the model for painting, was made by the photo-paintings of 1962 to 1965, and most of the reach belongs to them as a practice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: that practice stands behind much of the figurative painting since the 1980s that works from photographs, and this canvas is among its canonical images, the standard illustration of the answer to Duchamp. As a single canvas its reach is an emblem’s: strong as an image, shared as a cause.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: one canvas, sixty years, the image whole; nothing is known to have been lost or altered, and nothing is charged. Presence: in a public collection in Cologne, shown and reproduced as a standard image of the painter and of painting after photography, its standing rising with his and never eclipsed. Fame is presence, not proof, and the presence is wide within the field rather than the widest: it is not the public’s idea of a painting. Fabric: oil on canvas, its condition not known in detail, so only the general risk is noted. One charge on form: the surface takes the look of the photography of its decade, its colour cast and soft focus, and a surface tied to a technology is what this axis penalises. So far the image has outlived that look rather than dated with it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The drawing is taken from the photograph, and the paint is then worked across while wet so that every edge softens. The flesh is modelled in warm tones against cooler surroundings, in transitions fine enough that the light seems to come from the skin; the stair and the ground are kept softer and cooler than the body, so that it advances. The blur is hard to do well: too much and it is fog, too little and it is a sharp figure with smudges. Here it is held level across a whole life-size field. The costs: the drawing is the camera’s and not the hand’s, so command of composition is ceded by design, and the range of mark is narrow, one procedure applied evenly. High command within a deliberately narrow means.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the lowered face, the most intimate passage in the picture, and the stair treads, inert architecture. They obey one law: the same soft passage of the brush, the same photographic light, the same remove. Every part of the field stands at one distance from the viewer, and the law reaches past the surface to the relation of subject and means: wife, photograph and paint are held at a single distance, near and unreachable together. The colour keeps the law, the warm body against the cool ground, with no passage in another key. Nothing resists. What holds the axis is that the range is narrow, one figure, one setting, one light and one procedure, and narrowness is not coherence: the coherence achieved is that of a small field.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The orders held are four: the body; the marriage and the household; the history of painting, the nude from Venus to Duchamp; and the photographic medium as the way a modern eye sees the nearest things. They are integrated by one image and one distance, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no labour, no state, no natural order, the sacred only by allusion, and no history. The German past that the painter’s family portraits of the same years carry stands close by in his work and is not in this picture. One person on one stair. The figure describes the form.
Score: 6.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.8, then The Living Form and The Made at 8.6, and The Inner Law at 8.4. Sixty years with the image whole and its standing rising, charged only for a surface that takes the look of its decade’s photography; a form in which the blur is the image and the life size turns a descent into an approach; a blur held level across a whole field of two metres, with flesh that seems to give its own light; and one law, the same soft passage and the same remove, over the lowered face and the stair treads alike.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.3: the body, the marriage, the history of the nude and the photograph as a way of seeing are held in one image, and labour, the state, the natural order and history are absent; one person on one stair. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6, The Sublime at 7.8 and The Bottomless Well at 7.8: the descent is built and the nude’s tradition only brought; the picture rises once, in the figure, and its softness lowers the pitch; and much of its literature is about the painter’s method, with the central meaning plain and agreed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls short by three tenths, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 by half a point, The Unconcealment at 7.9 by six tenths and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 by nine tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 96.2, an average of 8.02 that displays 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV and a full point short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as a whole image (the single figure, the stair, the warm flesh against a cooler ground, the soft focus of the whole field, the lowered face, the size), of its place in Gerhard Richter’s work and of the argument with Duchamp; the surface is known as an image and not passage by passage, and its condition, conservation and exhibition history are not known in detail. The work scored is the single canvas of 1966, Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe), oil on canvas, 200 by 130 cm, in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, as it stands now: whole, with nothing replaced and nothing dispersed. Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), Richter’s grey Woman Descending the Staircase (1965), the source photograph, the later portraits of his family and the rest of the photo-paintings are context, and bear on The Swerve, Pressure on Tradition and The Bottomless Well as evidence and on no other axis. The painter’s own account of the canvas as a response to Duchamp is paraphrased; no words of his are quoted, and no inscription or document is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the catalogue number, the sitter’s given name and the gloss on the name Ema, who took the source photograph and whether it was made for the purpose, the house in which it was taken, the date and manner of the acquisition, the means by which the drawing was transferred to the canvas, the exact set of the arms and the direction of the light, the dimensions of Duchamp’s canvas, the present holder of the grey painting of 1965, the date of the painter’s later paintings after Titian, and the names of later painters said to descend from the method.