Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (Hardcover)

by Robert Storr (Author), Gerhard Richter (Author), Museum of Modern Art (Corporate Author)

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Amazon.com Review
Destined to rank among the most eloquent and thorough examinations of a major suite of paintings, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 combines a lean, persuasively argued text with an elegantly sober design suited to the subject matter. Richter's 15 black-and-white paintings commemorate the day two leaders of the radical German Baader-Meinhof group, disillusioned men and women in their 30s and early 40s whose loyalty to the dogma of the Red Army Faction had led them to commit numerous terrorist acts, were found dead in their prison cells. Gudrun Ensslin appeared to have hung herself. Andreas Baader had been fatally shot. Jan-Carl Raspe was near death from a bullet wound. Two other members of the group had died in prison earlier in the '70s: Holger Meins after a hunger strike; Ulrike Menihof, by hanging. On the Left, there was widespread suspicion the dead had been murdered. Photographs of the Baader-Meinhof members were ubiquitous in newspapers of the day; their images were as familiar to Germans as machine gun-toting Patty "Tania" Hearst was to Americans. Using photographs as models, Richter painted the dead with a subtle technique--a blurring of certain details and an elegiac use of gray--that calls into question the murkiness of historical "knowledge" and emphasizes the uneasy mixture of compassion and horror evoked by the group's fate.

Yet, even though Richter waited until 1988 to paint the series, he was denounced either for glorifying a bunch of killers or for using his international fame to exploit the Left. Author Robert Storr, a curator at MoMA, which now owns the series, answers these arguments by looking systematically at postwar German politics, the tradition of history painting, and the dilemmas and decisions of a leading contemporary painter. --Cathy Curtis

Product Description
A Museum of Modern Art Book

Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) is one of the most highly regarded of contemporary artists, and his series of 15 paintings known as October 18, 1977, is one of the 20th century's most famous works on a political theme. It commemorates the day on which three young German radicals, members of the militant Baader-Meinhof group, were found dead in a Stuttgart prison; they were pronounced suicides, but many people suspected that they had been murdered. Richter's paintings, created 11 years after this traumatic event, are among the most challenging works of the artist's career.

These hauntingly powerful images, derived from newspaper and police photography, are now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and will be on view beginning in September 2000 as part of the MoMA2000 series of exhibitions. In this book, Robert Storr provides necessary political background to the series, but his approach is art historical, offering insight into the complexities of "history painting" in the modern era.

ROBERT STORR is curator in the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Painting and Sculpture. His previous books, also available from Abrams, include Modern Art Despite Modernism, Tony Smith, and Chuck Close.

85 illustrations, 65 in full color, 9 x 111/2"

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (December 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810961040
• ISBN-13: 978-0810961043
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,367,201 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gray Anatomy, October 24, 2005

By	EJD (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977 (Hardcover)

The spectre that continues to haunt the twenty-first century is on full-display in this collection by the great German artist Gerhard Richter. It is the spectre not of communism but of the failure of the radical left in Germany to achieve the revolutionary transformation of society they hoped for and of the seduction of some of the members of that generation by an apocalyptic embrace of violence.

The book itself is a reproduction of the fifteen paintings that Richter did in 1988 of the Baader-Meinhof Bande---a small group of radical left activists who, around 1970, increasingly pursued violence as a strategy for fomenting revolution within Germany---accompanied by an introduction and four essays by Robert Storr that seek to set Richter's work and its subject in both a social-political and aesthetic context. The essays will be particularly welcome to those whose knowledge of German politics in the mid `70s is hazy, as well as those who are unfamiliar with the larger body of Richter's work. While I found some aspects of Storr's treatment of the Baader-Meinhof group contradictory---he dismisses all but Ulrike Meinhof as lacking "a developed grasp of practical or theoretical politics" but later informs us that Baader's library of nearly a thousand volumes was almost entirely devoted to revolutionary literature and political texts---these are minor quibbles compared to the immense value one gains from reading his essays. Physically the book is beautiful, well-bound with a small rectangle detail from the final painting in the series (Funeral 1988) appearing on the cover. In addition to the haunting reproduction of Richter's paintings, the book contains photos of the members of Baader-Meinhof before their deaths, images of the turbulent times in which they lived, and reproductions of other work that has made reference to Baader-Meinhof. All of this admirably achieves Storr's aim of situating the work in a larger context.

As Storr points out in his introduction, when this cycle of paintings first appeared in Cologne, Germany in 1989, it was widely criticized by both the German left and right. For the left the cycle represented a banal and bourgeois attempt to resurrect the unsettling spectre of Baader-Meinhof as part of the bathetic project of national healing. For these critics on the left, Richter's cycle served to make visible a period of the German past that many bourgeois Germans wished to forget only to perform an effective concealment of what the group stood for through its sentimental evocation of their deaths. By contrast, the right criticized what it saw as Richter's identification with the group emblematized by his decision to paint the group at all. Storr attempts to navigate between these two poles and find what he believes to be Richter's rather more complex and ambivalent position on the subject.

Having read the book, I have to say that he largely succeeds. From the biographical record on which Storr draws, it is clear that Richter was about as distant as one could get from the ideological clarity and zeal (some would say zealotry) of the members of Baader-Meinhoff. Richter's decision to leave East Germany, his embrace of certain aspects of capitalist culture during his Capitalist Realism phase, as well as the clarity of his comments on the subject of the damaging nature of ideology found in the notes to his 1988 interview reveal Richter's conservatism with respect to the group's beliefs. Nevertheless, the paintings themselves reveal a startling ambivalence towards the members of Baader-Meinhof. To the extent that Richter has chosen to portray their pathetic deaths rather than the revolutionary vigor of their lives, Richter's cycle can be accused of sentimentalism. But given that the circumstances of their imprisonment and death constitute a shaming indictment of the West German state and its willingness to succumb to its own worst tendencies, Richter's cycle of paintings deserve recognition as an ambivalent gesture of good faith toward Germany's defeated and disorganized left while simultaneously warning of the dangerous seductions of ideology.

The paintings themselves---highly formal studies of a small handful of subjects, each object rendered in subtle grays and carefully blurred with an almost photographic imprecision---have a haunting quality that serve both to convey the artist's distance from the radicalism of his subjects and his refusal to allow either the ghost of what animated them or the reality of the shameful manner of their deaths to be altogether exorcised from the collective German unconscious. It is the very ambivalence of this gesture that so fascinates the viewer and makes repeated exposures to the paintings so necessary.

For those interested in the relation of art to politics this is an important collection. Richter's cycle is one of the major works of our time, a revival of history painting at a time when history had been widely declared by many postmodern (Lyotard) and liberal-capitalist apologists (Fukuyama) to be at an end. Required reading.