This painting depicts seven men in sailor’s uniforms, facing the viewer. Five of the men are shown standing up while two further men are kneeling in front of them. Executed in a monochrome palette, its blurred contours give the painting the appearance of an out-of-focus photograph, in which the motif seems to elude the viewer. About this at-the-time characteristic blurring in his paintings, Richter asserts: “I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant.” (Gerhard Richter – Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Eds.), Thames & Hudson, London, 2009, p. 33.)

The work is based on a newspaper clipping that can be found on sheet 12 of Atlas, Richter’s collection of source material. The painting is not a one-to-one copy of the source image, however, as Richter altered the composition somewhat and two of the men in the photograph do not appear in the final work.

Group portraits such as this are a significant element in Richter’s early oeuvre. Starting in 1963 with the painting Party (CR 2-1), the subject recurs in his work throughout the 1960s: the 1964 paintings Family (CR 30), Negroes (Nuba) (CR 45); Swimmers (CR 90) and Nurses (CR 93), both executed in 1965; and The Liechti Family (CR 117) that was painted in 1966, the same year as Sailors, to name but a few.

Sailors, as with all of the works mentioned above, is based on a photographic source. Richter chose to paint from photographs because “the photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style. Both in its way of informing, and in what it informs of, it is my source.” (Gerhard Richter – Text, p. 30)

When asked what the work means to him today, Richter replied: “I like that it is so very delicate and so blurred. The source image is from the same time I painted the picture. That was the first time since WW2 that we had seen pictures of the military. I myself was never in uniform. When I look at it now I remember particularly how strange and mysterious these men and their world seemed to me back then.” (Tittel, C. (2010) Gerhard Richter – Die Hälfte im Museum ist Müll [Gerhard Richter – Half of what’s in museums is rubbish], Welt Online [online], http://www.welt.de/kultur/article9843144/Gerhard-Richter-Die-Haelfte-im-Museum-ist-Muell.html (accessed 24/09/2010).)

Notes prepared by editorial team