The “Front Yard Show” in Wuppertal - Richter’s New Realism
The spontaneous show in the garden, or rather the front lawn, of the Wuppertal Galerie Parnass on a cold day in February 1964 was seminal for Richter’s artistic career. The present painting “Alster (Hamburg)” was part of this legendary event. The gallery owner Rolf Jährling recalls: “One day in 1964, the group of ‘Capitalist Realists’, that’s Fischer-Lueg, Richter and Polke, called to see if they could show their stuff. 'Sure,' I said, 'of course!' And a little later the bell actually rang and there they were at my door with a small delivery truck with a tarpaulin [= waterproof tarpaulin]. “‘Come out,’ they said.” (quoted from: https://zadik.uni-koeln.de/homepage/default.aspx?s=470). Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg and Manfred Kuttner, at that time still students at the Düsseldorf Academy, presented their paintings, leaning them against the trees and bushes in the gallery's snow-covered front garden. Jährling documented this creative attack by the up-and-coming young generation of artists with his Minox camera. His photographs from that time also show Richter's fascinating city view “Alster (Hamburg)”. It is based on an detail from a photograph published in the magazine “Stern” in October 1963. This detail, along with other iconic Richter motifs, is now part of Richter's famous “Atlas” collection. In addition, plate 10 also shows a photograph from a Kodak advertisement Richter took from ‘Stern’ magazine for his famous black-and-white painting “Motorboot” (1965, permanent loan at State Art Collections, Dresden), as well as the newspaper clippings used for the photo paintings “Bomber” (1963) or “Mother and Daughter (B.)” (1965), which shows Brigitte Bardot with her mother. The “Front Lawn Show” of the young Düsseldorf painters convinced the Wuppertal gallerist Jährling: He dedicated the first exhibition “Neue Realisten. Richter, Polke, Lueg” to these promising young representational positions in art on November 20, 1964. As early as in the summer of 1964, “Alster (Hamburg)” was shown in Munich as part of Richter’s first solo exhibition “Gerd Richter. Fotobilder” at Galerie Friedrich and Dahlem. In addition to the wonderfully blurred Hamburg panorama, they also showed other early photo pictures like “Tisch” (1962), “Schloss Neuschwanstein” (1963), “Kuh” (1964), “Bomber” (1963) and “Familie am Meer” (1964), all of which are owned by important international museums and private collections today.

The Photo Paintings – Perfect Balance Between Sharpness And Blur
Standing in front of Richter's first townscape "Alster (Hamburg)", the wide Hamburg panorama from 1963 in evening light, one quickly senses the outstanding quality of Richter's painting: It is the fascinating combination of closeness and distance that Richter's unique painting technique evokes. Richter right away conceals what he initially brought onto the canvas in finest details behind a delicate painterly veil of an even, gentle painting with soft brushes. However, it's not just the technical mastery that impresses in "Alster (Hamburg)", but also Richter's keen eye in screening and selecting the photographic material from print media and private photo albums, and which ultimately helps him to identify the perfect image section of the printed template. This process becomes particularly well comprehensible in the rich contrast city silhouette of “Alster (Hamburg)”, since the photograph published in “Stern” on October 27, 1963 has an even stronger panorama format. Richter only selected the right half of the picture as basis for his painting, where the tree branches only partially reveal the view of the city skyline on the other bank of the Alster.

In the present work he entirely focuses on the fascinating contrast between fore- and background, between light and shadow and an objectivity that is partially covered by the abstract structures of the branches and thus additionally veiled. “Alster (Hamburg)” shows a wonderful combination of the representational elements of a townscape with the abstract, superimposed structures of the foreground, thus anticipating elements that can be found in landscape paintings from the late 1990s, such as “Sommertag” (1999) (Albertina, Vienna), and which, in return, are ultimately decisive for Richter's late abstract works. Richter realized not only the finest transitions by using a wide variety of brushes, but even attained a completely homogeneous pictorial surface: “I blur to make everything the same, everything equally important and equally unimportant. I smudge so it doesn't look artsy and crafty, but technical, smooth and perfect. I blur so that all the parts move together a little. I might also wipe out what I regard as too much unimportant information.” (Gerhard Richter, Notizen 1964/65, quoted from: Gerhard Richter, Text, Cologne 2008, p. 33).
“Alster (Hamburg)” is an outstanding testimony to Richter's artistic struggle for the perfect balance between sharpness and blur, between photorealistic perfection and the seemingly random process of subsequent blurring, which hides the objective motifs behind a gentle veil and thereby creates that unique poetic otherworldliness that characterizes Richter's painterly work.

Pure Painting – The Townscape in Richter's Work
Richter's dreamful view of Hamburg, "Alster (Hamburg)," is the first townscape in the official counting in Richter's oeuvre, which Richter began with the painting "Tisch" from 1962, created after he had moved to Düsseldorf. Richter completed his studies at the University of Fine Arts in his hometown Dresden with a diploma in mural painting in the mid-1950s and worked there as a master student, accepting state commissions from the GDR government. During this time, he primarily created murals and an early painterly body of works, of which only a few survived. In retrospect, Richter excluded these works from his official oeuvre. It is said that a Dresden townscape was among these works. As a young art student in Dresden, Richter must have inevitably dealt with the art-historical tradition of veduta painting, as famous panoramic views of Dresden by the Venetian painter Bernado Bellotto, known as Canaletto, executed in fine Old Master painting in the mid-18th century, have always been key pieces of the ‘Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister’ in Dresden. The comparison with Canaletto and the Old Master genre of the townscape, clearly shows how Richter seeks to engage with traditions when implementing this historically significant subject: like Canaletto, he chooses the traditional view of the city from the other side of the river bank. However, by using a photograph as a template, the reduction to black and white color values, and through his unique signature style of oscillating between sharpness and blur, he enters realms of an extremely modern visual language, which, owing to the use of photographic templates, contains elements of American pop art, while he attains a completely unrivaled painterly result.

With his unique way of working, Richter reinvented representational painting at a time when the abstract art of Informalism, “ZERO” and Concrete Art was en vogue in Europe and the shrill, graphic style of Pop Art began to conquer the USA. “New Realists” was the title of the exhibition that Rolf Jährling dedicated to the progressive representational works by the young Düsseldorf art students Richter, Polke and Lueg in November 1964. Apart from the painting “Verwaltungsgebäude”(Administration Building, 1964), today part of the renowned Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Richter did not revisit the genre before 1968, when he received a commission from Siemens AG to make the painting “Cathedral Square, Milan” (1968), which was auctioned in New York in 2013 and today holds the fourth highest hammer prices for a Richter painting at an international auction. In the course of his occupation with this painting, he also made a first series of “Stadtbilder” (Townscapes), for which Richter fragmented a large-format aerial painting of Milan into nine individual paintings. Other aerial views of Madrid, Munich, Paris and Frankfurt followed, all of which are in important international private collections and museums today and, with their coarse black-and-white flow, laid the basis for the later mountain and cloud pictures that ultimately led to the gray "Inpaintings".

Gerhard Richter - Internationally Celebrated Artist
Today Gerhard Richter is not only associated with a range of superlatives with regards to the general acknowledgment of his work, but with his success on the international art market: He is nothing less than the most important German artist, whose impressive work has been with utmost appreciation making him one of the most expensive living artists. In 2020, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York honored the epochal work of the exceptional German artist with a grand solo exhibition "Gerhard Richter - Painting After All" (March 4 to July 5, 2020), while the Museum of Modern Art (2002) dedicated the retrospective show "Gerhard Richter. Forty Years of Painting” to an oeuvre that goes from black-and-white photo-based pictures to the late large abstract works in intensive colors. In view of the record prices that Richter’s paintings fetch, his early blurred, representational photo paintings and his later abstract creations are on a par. In our collective memory, the name Gerhard Richter is primarily associated with early works like "Sekretärin" (1963, State Art Collections Dresden), "Motorboot" (1965), "Domplatz, Milan" (1968), "Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) ”(1966, Museum Ludwig, Cologne), and the so-called RAF cycle" Zyklus 18. Oktober 1977" (1988, Museum of Modern Art, New York). In these photo -based works, Richter not only invented a new objectivity, but also confronted the German post-war society with its contemporary history or - as is the case with the townscapes - with its national identity. Richter's first city view "Alster (Hamburg)" is one of this epochal early works. In 2011, it was part of the grand retrospective "Gerhard Richter. Bilder einer Epoche” at the Bucerius Kunst Forum in Hamburg, alongside other main works from this creative period provided by international lenders (fig. 9 and 10). Even if the respective motifs are usually no more than the formal starting point for Richter, it is precisely what makes the early black-and-white photo paintings so special. Once viewed, you can’t get the unique gentle flow and the glowing blur in a mellow evening light of "Alster (Hamburg)" out of your head. Today most works of similar quality from this early and significant creative phase are in significant international private and museum collections. [JS]