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GERHARD RICHTER (b.1932) VESUV (VESUVIUS) 407 signed, numbered and dated "Richter, 1976 Nr. 407" ...
Currency:USD
Category:Everything Else / Other
Start Price:NA
Estimated At:1,800,000.00 - 2,500,000.00 USD
NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
0.00USD+ applicable fees & taxes.
This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2003 May 15 @ 19:00UTC-05:00 : EST/CDT
GERHARD RICHTER
(b.1932)
VESUV (VESUVIUS) 407
signed, numbered and dated "Richter, 1976 Nr. 407"
on the reverse
oil on wood
26 x 373/8 in. (66 x 95 cm)
painted in 1976
ESTIMATE: $1,800,000-2,500,000
PROVENANCE
Private collection, SWITZERLAND
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, LONDON
EXHIBITED
PARIS, Centre national d'art et de culture Georges Pompidou-Museé national d'art moderne, GERHARD RICHTER, February 1-March 21, 1977, p. 7 (illustrated)
HANOVER, Sprengel Museum, GERHARD RICHTER: LANDSCAPES, October 4, 1998-January 3, 1999, p. 68 (illustrated)
LITERATURE
U. Loock and D. Zacharopoulus, GERHARD RICHTER, MUNICH, 1985,
p. 44 (illustrated)
B.H.D. Buchloh, P. Gidal, B. Pelzer and A. Thill, GERHARD RICHTER: CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ, BONN, 1993, Vol. III, no. 407 (illustrated)
Throughout Gerhard Richter's prolific career, landscapes occupy a significant position within his oeuvre; no other genre has fascinated him to the same extent, nor has consumed his devotion with such intensity. Perpetually vacillating between photography's singular capacity to capture the world, as it appears to be, and the painter's absolute discretion completely to transfigure it, Richter's landscape paintings blur nature's edges, just as surely as they do differences between media. While landscape elements initially appeared in works of 1963, Richter began his independent series of landscapes in 1968 after an excursion to Corsica and, after a period of time, in 1976 Richter painted seven views of Mount Vesuvius in Italy.
While Richter's landscape paintings, such as Vesuv, present a veritable catalogue of the natural world-land and sea, clouds and sky, plains and mountain in both their compositional formats and subject matter-these paintings are often thought to invoke the tradition of the sublime and to recall especially the seductively beautiful and poignant paintings of nineteenth-century German Romantics, most notably Caspar David Friedrich. While Friedrich imbued nature with human emotions, Richter emphasizes a simultaneous and disconcerting awareness of nature's inherent beauty and its complete disregard for human needs, desires and fears. Richter explained that "my landscapes are not only beautiful or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all they are 'untruthful'...By 'untruthful' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature-Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it has no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless: the total antithesis of ourselves" (J. Lloyd, GERHARD RICHTER: THE LONDON PAINTINGS, London, 1988, unpaginated).
Thus, the complex truth of Gerhard Richter's Vesuv, and of his landscapes of these years more generally, is that they are at every level, disconcerting and equivocal, entrapping and seductive. Richter's famously soft-focus photographic landscapes are not this at all, of course, but paintings. "They are made to state their untruthfulness, unmask their dream, and reiterate their artificial construction" (R. Nasgaard, GERHARD RICHTER: PAINTINGS, New York, 1988, p. 52). Richter painted his "untruthful" landscapes by projecting a photographic image onto a barren surface, roughly articulating its outlines with pencil, and then filling these contours with oil painting. This process of paintings, which has indeed become one of Richter's signature styles, only enhances the subject's evocative potential. Richter explains, "the simple and familiar and entirely efficient means of being blurred [heightens] their subtle erasure revealing more than enough to entice us into romantic reverie, and withholding just enough to deny our immersion in fulfillment" (D. Elger, ed., GERHARD RICHTER LANDSCAPES, OSTFILDERN-RUIT, 1998. p. 30). Richter further goes on to explain that "if the Abstract Pictures show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning...[T]hese pictures are motivated by the dream of classical order and a pristine world-by nostalgia, in other words-the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and contemporary quality" (H.Obrist, GERHARD RICHTER: THE DAILY PRACTICE OF PAINTINGS, WRITINGS AND INTERVIEWS 1962-1993, CAMBRIDGE, 1995, p. 98).
Auction Location:
United States
Previewing Details:
Saturday May 3, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 4, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 5, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 6, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 7, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 8, 2003 10am to 5pm, Friday May 9, 2003 10am to 5pm, Saturday May 10, 2003 10am to 5pm, Sunday May 11, 2003 1pm to 5pm, Monday May 12, 2003 10am to 5pm, Tuesday May 13, 2003 10am to 5pm, Wednesday May 14, 2003 10am to 5pm, Thursday May 15, 2003 10am to 2pm
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