Painting After All

Ivan Klein
January 2021

Gerhard Richter, Birkenau paintings

Gerhard Richter’s “Painting After All.” – An exhibition at the Met Breuer, March 4, 2020, and subsequently at the Metropolitan Museum until January 18, 2021 – featuring “Birkenau,” abstractions based on four photographs smuggled out of the Birkenau death camp in 1944.

The accompanying text notes that in 2014 Richter revisited sketches he had made of the photographs and painted them over “to produce heavily disturbed, ruptured surfaces. This veiling holds in tension the complex relationship of history and memory with the forces of destruction and reconstruction, and with abstraction and representation.” — In the world beyond museum speak, the viewer wonders if this has any currency whatsoever.

Painting After All

Nobody has the right to proscribe, to affix judgment to true artistic expression; otherwise, it would be the death of art and that unfettered individual we call the artist. – A question as to what Richter brings forth in these abstractions, and, whatever it may be, mustn’t we respect the desire not to merely create artifacts? — Those large-scale sketches of the Birkenau photos covered with paint and then literally squeegeed over so as to be something else again. – Abstract mirrors of the Unconscious made by an old man of great reputation with paint and time and perhaps, in his own mind, blood on his hands.

The Jew And The Abstract Truth:

The Jew himself as artifact / as obstacle to free breathing for the forward- looking post-war German. Can art exonerate, liberate the over-burdened creator’s psyche? If such a way out isn’t available to the layman, what is left to break those oppressive bonds but brazen denial, hatred, rationalization? — How much easier those haters and deniers must have it than their agonized countryman fiddling with the whole mess, painting things over one coat at a time.

Sonderkommandos – Lit. “Operations” commandos. – Members of the Jew death squad (at Birkenau) who shepherded their brethren to the gas chambers, then shoveled their ashes and cleaned things up. Trading the lowest form of labor a Jew could perform for a bit more breath for themselves. Sonderkommando – a perfect Nazi euphemism. (See Victor Klemperer’s “The Language of the Third Reich”). – Jews acting in such a way with their tongue-in-cheek title. – The Nazis could point to them as one further proof of Jew degeneracy.

The four photos smuggled out of Birkenau that are the most explicit life and death proof of the existence of the gas chambers, taken by a death squad member at risk of instant execution or worse. The photos mounted along with Richter’s Birkenau abstractions. “Retroactively [exposing] a thread of sorrow and guilt in the invariably subtle work of this German painter,” according to the respected art critic Peter Schjeldahl.

Suppose we go whole hog and concede the Jew his unabashed humanity. What then? Why then there’s a thorn in their side – we’ll call it guilt – and what a drag, as we used to say, way back when. Guilty every time they take a good damn look – every time they allow themselves an unguarded thought.

What is an artist, a celebrated painter in his last innings to do? — What sort of heavily-layered smear can he conjure to obliterate the terrible unwritten laws of the soul?

Layer it with coats of paint,

many-colored.

Leave it unrecognizable,

somewhat beautiful.

although maybe not so gorgeous

as a clean slate.

Abstraction

of

what

exactly?

A blotting out of the four Birkenau photographs and their damning proof in favor of thickly-painted surfaces, polarities of thought and feeling…

Painting After All

Words not required – Not Birkenau – Not Jew – Not blood — Not anything.
Absolutely entitled to paintings signifying nothing but themselves. – A right to exist…

Once Richter uses “Birkenau” in his practice, certain questions do arise…

The photos:

1)  The march of naked stricken women to the gas chambers.
2)  The shoveling of remains, ashes.
3)  One squad member seems to walk a tightrope through a field of the dead while others engage in consultation.
4)  Among the dead.

Should we allow for Richter’s feelings being so overwhelmed that these abstractions are his purest emotional response? Again, of course, he is an artist free to express himself in whatever form he wishes…

In Susan Tallman’s “The Master of Unknowing” for the New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020 issue, she quotes Richter as saying that a good picture “takes away certainty because it deprives a thing of its meaning and name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that precludes the emergence of any single meaning and view.” She adds that, “his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.”

The Jew as enigma to humankind – to the artist above all. – Make him into a non-person, a cipher – a mystery not possible to decode.

Cancel Him Out.

Tallman makes her liberal obsequies in regard to the Sonderkommando photos: “Here meaning and name are untouchable.” — The name is intact – “Birkenau” – simple. The essence of the meaning has indeed been touched and touched up some more. Is no longer apparent to me. – A deliberate blur AFTER ALL.

Of the Birkenau paintings she writes, “They are complex, scarified” and also – here’s the rub – “beautiful.”

Before my very eyes on 9/11, nineteen years ago to the day my pen is touching paper, the great orange fireball of the glittering second tower against a perfect cobalt sky had a shocking aesthetic death beauty. – A fact not decently to be dwelt upon.

Toward the conclusion of Tallman’s essay: “The events of 1944 are beyond our reach. The subject of these paintings is not that world, but our own – the place where we actively choose to know or not know, see or not see…”

— The subject of these paintings is Richter’s own consciousness on which history has managed to insinuate a great weight, despite his resistance of various sorts, early and in advanced age. Here, in his after all, he paints what he can, given his belatedly-announced subject and career-long obsession.

Does anyone really believe that this particular history is said and done? — Violating as it does Wm. Faulkner’s rubric that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Here, or in Germany, all you need is the evidence of your senses.

Tallman’s final take: “The story always changes with the telling. Uncertainty is truth.”

Did Richter wish for the Birkenau paintings to abet such thinking as consonant with his artist convictions or his early belief that he was guilt-free and that the burden of conscience his generation labored under was mere posturing? — A deep ambivalence, I think. – And a danger that in the process the truth can magically disappear like so many Yiddish ghosts.

W.G. Sebald, an important German writer born in 1944, explores the whole business of the war’s aftermath and its psychological consequences in his On the Natural History of Destruction. An inquiry as to why an older generation of German writers and artists “would not or could not describe the destruction of German cities as millions experienced it.” – Shame, guilt, the humiliation of defeat occlude the view of the past. – Buried alive in the deepest part of themselves. Can it be resurrected – brought into clear focus? Or must some other sort of reality be superimposed?

Sebald offers his notes on the subject to “cast some light on the way in which memory (individual, collective and cultural) deals with experiences exceeding what is tolerable.”

THE HORROR OF WAR

He relates a story he heard about a deranged woman fleeing the bombing in Hamburg with a child’s corpse in her suitcase.

Understandable, this evasion, memory erasure of these terrors brought home. – Can a people accept the challenge to look beyond their collective amnesia, dread, guilt? — To lift the veil a tiny bit and then look fully with their eyes wide open?

In regard to his countryman, the pre-war novelist Alfred Andersch, Sebald writes, “When a morally compromised author claims the field of aesthetics as a value free area, it should make his readers stop and think.”

Aesthetics in “the after all” is the home base for the visual artist…still, it seems to me that the Jew never rises above the level of fossil in his concentration camp paintings. – No, I don’t think Sebald, who was finely attuned to holocaust issues, would have been inclined to give Richter’s “Birkenau” a pass.

In the forward to the Destruction book, he puts it most precisely regarding his countrymen: “When we take a retrospective view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.”

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh traces the obsessive thread of the artist’s involvement with the Shoah in his essay “Documents of Culture, Documents of Barbarism, Richter’s Birkenau Paintings” for the Metropolitan’s catalog. – Six decades worth beginning in 1957 when, as a recent graduate of the Dresden Academy of Art, he made twelve anodyne drawings to illustrate an edition of “The Diary of Anne Frank”.

Grappling with “the question,” according to Buchloh, “whether any artist, and more improbably any German painter, could possibly construct a credible mnemonic representation of the destruction of European Jews under the rule of German Nazi Fascism.” — Mnemonic – an aid to memory – from the Greek for “mindful.” And given all that, those European Jews of this Teutonic handwringing do not approach the Yiddish ghosts of I.B. Singer’s Nobel acceptance speech – the descendants of poets and prophets who lovingly brought up their children and found “happiness where others [saw] nothing but misery and humiliation.” — No, a mere trope, a creative conundrum in their rendering.

“Der Hitler” and a portrait of political prisoners being hung above a split image of movie starlets. – Richter painted them in 1963 after he had defected to the West and then destroyed both after his first group show in his new home.

In 1964-65 he did “Uncle Rudi” and Aunt Marianne,” realistic portraits based on family photographs. – Uncle Rudi grinning in his Wehrmacht overcoat and cap before going off to be cannon fodder on the eastern front and Aunt Marianne, who had cradled him as a baby, then succumbed to schizophrenia and was starved to death under the Nazi fitness to live program. – A rubbing out of the weak, feeble minded, unproductive. – These works realistic and heartfelt. – The war come home in spades.

In the career-long Atlas that Richter maintained for conceptual sketches, he did several sheets of Euro pornography juxtaposed with concentration camp photos in 1967. – A puerile and obsessive exercise from a grown man. But all of a piece, evidently, with his stated obsession with these images from his student days.

Established as a leading artist in the reunited Germany, he was commissioned in 1997 to create towering panels for the entrance to the reconstructed Reichstag in Berlin. Richter fashioned one panel using rectangles of the German national colors and another of his by now ubiquitous concentration camp images. He finally rejected the latter concept (or gesture) and settled on six enameled glass panels in the colors of the flag.

It is stunning to me that he can’t leave off the Jews. How, I ask myself, can he create that proper mnemonic that Buchloh believed he was striving to achieve with the voyeuristic exhibition of these starved and slaughtered victims stacked high? — How could it be that nowhere in his oeuvre do we find a single living Jew looking him and us in the eye? — That universal Jew who Joseph Goebbels claimed could be shamed just by detecting who and what he was? – When the artist can’t literally or figuratively scrawl sorry over the whole tragic mess? — That is, a sign of human contrition beyond East Germany’s state-sponsored self-righteous “memory culture” or West Germany’s open-handed reparations and conspicuous memorials. – Something beyond mere fixation. Something nearer to the artist and his art — in the vanguard of what is prototypically thought of as human.

Obviously dissatisfied with what he had done up until that time, Richter made large-scale sketches of the four photos smuggled out of Birkenau in 2013. He then painted them over until they evolved into those abstract paintings. Giving him his due, a wide angle of the installation in Dresden shows the impressive breadth of a world-class artist.

Buchloh very reasonably questions “whether and how painterly abstraction could actually represent a fundamentally unrepresentable historical subject.” — And if “Art After All” is the answer, we feel compelled to ask what is it an answer to?

Originally presented as simply “Four Abstract Paintings” at the Dresden Albertinum in 2015, Buchloh writes that “only after a period of additional reflection did the artist reluctantly decide to refer to these works as the “Birkenau paintings.” The four smuggled photos were added to the exhibit, formally wedding them to the finished paintings. – Whatever else there is to think, there was no letting go of the subject for Richter.

These large-scale abstractions were created over a period of three weeks in August 2014. Painting over the sketches of the foundational photographs on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th and again on the 13th and 14th, he appears to be striving for what he finally achieves on the 25th with the last of the series. – A muted, complex blending of colors that seems to mirror the emotional state of its creator. – Provoking a reaction in the viewer in the way that living paintings do.

A beautiful picture if you choose to call it such. He did say he wished to make more than beautiful pictures. Could it be construed as a kind of against-the-grain interiority of atonement? — And was its purpose, whatever that purpose might have truly been, achieved? — A mystery, at least to me.

Atonement – originally to be at one with oneself, reconciled. And each soul lives and dies alone.

The MET’s virtual exhibition tour→

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Ivan Klein published Toward Melville, a book of poems from New Feral Press, in July 2018. Previously published Alternatives to Silence from Starfire Press and the chapbook Some Paintings by Koho & A Flower Of My Own from Sisyphus Press. His work has been published in the Forward, Urban Graffiti, Otoliths, and numerous other periodicals.