Quotes
Extracts from Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings 1962-1993
1962
Art serves to establish community. It links us with others, and with the things around us, in a shared vision and effort.
My concern is never art, but always what art can be used for.
Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going, being lost, being a loser, reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.
1964
Photography altered ways of seeing and thinking. Photographs were regarded as true, paintings as artificial. The painted picture was no longer credible; its representation froze into immobility, because it was not authentic but invented.
The first time I painted from a photograph, I did so in a mixture of exhilaration and fear, partly because I was strongly affected by contemporary Fluxus events, and partly also because I once did a lot of photography myself and worked for a photographer for eighteen months: masses of photographs that passed through the bath of developer every day may have created a lasting trauma. There must be other reasons. I can't tell exactly.
I want to have everything very clear, simple and unconditional, and I would rather no art at all than just any old unspecific painting.
I want to leave everything as it is. I therefore neither plan nor invent; I add nothing and omit nothing. At the same time, I know that I inevitably shall plan, invent, alter, make and manipulate. But I don't know that.
I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing: nor is it an identity tag for my pictures. When I dissolve demarcations and create transitions, this is not in order to destroy the representation, or to make it more artistic or less precise. The flowing transitions, the smooth, equalizing surface, clarify the content and make the representation credible (an alla prima impasto would be too reminiscent of painting, and would destroy the illusion).
1970
Art can [be] truly relevant only when it isn't directly employed to do a job. If art represents itself, society can use it; but not if it advertises anything. Then it's advertising design. All this has nothing to do with 'Art for Art's Sake'. There is no such thing as 'Art for Art's Sake'
What painters have you learned from? From every one that I know.Interview with Peter Sager, 1972
1973
One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is total idiocy. From Richter, 'Notes 1973'
1975
When I first painted a number of canvases grey all over I did so because I did not know what to paint, or what there might be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful. As time went on, however, I observed differences of quality among grey surfaces, and also that these betrayed nothing of the destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By generalizing a personal dilemma, they resolved it. Destitution became a constructive statement; it became relative perfection, beauty, and therefore painting.From a letter de Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975
1977
...why no more Photo Pictures? New interests came up, more attractive and more exclusively to do with painting, and these made me forgot about photography. So then came other things: Colour Charts, Grey Pictures and now Abstract Pictures.
Of course photography has influenced the way we see, and also this photographic way of picture-making suits me; it is so the antithesis of 'painting', the act of painting that was formerly almost as important as the outcome, the finished picture. Interview with Amine Hasse 1977
1988
I was impressed by the terrorists' energy, their uncompromising determination and their absolute bravery; but I could not find it in my heart to condemn the State for its harsh response. That is what States are like; and I had known other, more ruthless ones.
The deaths of terrorists, and the related events both before and after, stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my efforts to suppress it. Notes for a press conference, November-December 1988
1989
Without a doubt, ideologies are harmful, and we must therefore take them very seriously; as behaviour, and not for their content (in content, they are all equally false). Notes 1989
1990
In 1976 you began to paint small abstract painting, because you wanted something that you couldn't visualize in advance. In doing so, you invented a method that was absolutely new to you. Was that an experiment of some kind? Yes. It began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to what I had never let myself do; put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part. Interview with Sabine Schutz, 1990
Notes 1992
For about a year now, I have been unable to [do] anything in my painting but scrape off, pile on and then remove again. In this process I don't actually reveal what was beneath. If I wanted to do that, I would have to think what to reveal (figurative pictures or signs or patterns); that is, pictures that might as well be produced direct. It would also be something of a symbolic trick: bringing to light the lost, buried pictures, or something to that effect. Notes 1992
Notes 1993
The image of the artist as a misunderstood figure is abhorrent to me. I much prefer the high times, as in the Renaissance or in Egypt, where art was part of the social order and was needed in the present. The suffering, unappreciated Van Gogh is not my ideal. Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, 1993
