I've been to have a look at the Gerhard Richter portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. As far as I'm aware, these are the first Richters I've seen, but I shall certainly be taking an interest from now on. As any fule kno (well, any fule who read the art reviews), these portraits are painted from photographs - or rather they are photographic images transformed into paintings (while yet remaining recognisably photographic in origin). Richter, who frankly sounds like rather a dry stick, regards the photograph as being, because of its mechanical origins, 'the most perfecft picture'. The photographs he uses for his portraits are sometimes of family members or people he knows, sometimes of famous people, often of entirely anonymous individuals. 'I don't think the painter need either know or see the sitter,' he says. ' A portrait must not express anything of the sitter's soul, essence or character.' An unusual approach to portraiture, to say the least.
Seen in reproduction, these portraits look like photographs - blurry, streaky, out-of-focus, but definitely photographs. However, the originals are unmistakably paintings. They are transformed in recognisably painterly ways - the blurring, for example, is used in part to remove distracting detail and concentrate attention on what matters, and it is recognisably the work of a dry brush. The parts of the images - even the black and white ones - that are in focus are often notated with a degree of painterly gusto. And as Richter moves into colour, the painterly qualities become more apparent, and the dark, sinister undertones of some of the earlier works fall away. There's an extraordinary, richly coloured oil on wood of his daughter Betty, at ten years old, that hardly has any sign of a photographic origin, and suggests the rapt scrutiny of love rather than the objective camera lens (or maybe that's a sentimental reading).
Later portraits such as the Vermeeresque The Reader or Betty (above), the same daughter 11 years later, are, when seen close to, quite fabulously painterly, remarkable feats of extremely delicate brushwork and coloration - and yet still recognisable as photographic in origin. The sense is of a painter who can't help loving the business of handling paint, breaking out from the austere restrictions he's imposed on himself. At least that was how it felt to me - and why I was glad to have seen these remarkable pictures for myself.
