Gerhard Richter Oktober 18. 1977

Since 1962, Richter has been compiling his Atlas, a collection of mainly found photographic images from magazines, newspapers, books, and family albums. Collected in the Atlas are nine panels of blurred photographs documenting the activities and deaths in prison of members of the Baader-Meinhof, or Red Army Faction (RAF), group. Selections from these photographs formed the basis for a suite of fifteen blurred gray paintings that must count as one of the twentieth century’s greatest “history paintings,” if we adapt the term to include paintings that do not idealize the past. The title of the cycle, Oktober 18, 1977, refers to the date when three members of the ultraleftist terrorist group where found dead or dying in their cells in Stammheim prison in Stuttgart, although the events depicted cover a longer period. The cycle was painted ten years after the titular date, an interval in which the traumatic events of the mid-1970s, after a period of saturation coverage in the mass media and heated ideological dispute, had fallen from public view.

Richter has said that the deaths of the terrorists, and related events both before and after, “stand for a horror that distressed me and has haunted me as unfinished business ever since, despite all my effort to suppress it. In this light, the ten-year delay between the events and Richter’s cycle mirrors the greater repression of and subsequent preoccupation with the Holocaust. Indeed, Richter has admitted that the cycle was a displaced means of making paintings about the Holcaust: “I realize that, perhaps, and surely not consciously, that was the only way for me to paint concentration camps.” It was postwar Germany’s amnesia and incomplete denazification of its political and business elites that provoked the left-wing Baader-Meinhof group’s terrorist activity against what they believed was a fascist state. As Weibel points out, “The RAF phenomenon was a social and political effect of the traumas of World War II and the Holocaust.”

Although the three deaths were officially declared suicides, the suspicion persists that the prisoners were in fact murdered by the state police. This uncertainty makes the RAF members both perpetrators of terror and possible victims of state power. Richter is careful to depict them neither as martyrs nor as monsters. In fact, this sort of polarization of ideological positions was something Richter aimed to defuse with this work. As a child under National Socialism and a young man in communist East Germany, Richter learned to distrust radical ideologies and utopian aspirations of both the left and the right. Why, then, did he chose to commemorate the RAF? Richter used press and police archive photographs as the basis for his paintings because, as he said, photographs are “more direct, more emotive, more intimate.” But he also noted that while the photograph of a dead young woman induced horror, the blurred painting of it softened one’s emotive response to sorrow. His hope may have been that the rage provoked by the RAF on both the left and the right could be tempered though something like pity—incidentally, an emotion that Barthes closely associated with the photographic punctum.

Much of the discussion of the painting concerns the furore over the group’s activities and its members’ deaths. When discussion focuses on the paintings themselves, it mainly concerns the extent to which they alter the photographic documents by cropping and blurring. What is particularly striking about the cycle is the great variety of blurring treatments, rendering the word “blur” hopelessly imprecise. For example, the painting of Ulrike Meinhof, based on a photo taken before she cofounded the RAF, is blurred by a soft feathering of wet paint and resembles the effect of air-brushing in a studio portrait. At the opposite extreme is the almost violent effect of vertical scoring down the painting of Andreas Baader’s cell. Richter’s photopaintings make the images less legible than the original photographs, but not in a painterly or expressionist way.

What is less often considered in the critical literature is the formal variation and rhythm of the cycle as a whole. This extends to the images’ size, proportions, point of view, blurring techniques, and other characteristics. I understand from the curators of the Tate Modern’s retrospective of Richter’s work in 2011 that the artist gave few instructions, within certain constraints, for the installation of the cycle. Robert Storr’s monograph on the cycle, published by the Museum of Modern Art, assumes a broadly chronological sequence, and the text refers to this arrangement as if it were definitive. Yet this fixity would seem to be counter to the artist’s own sense of the cycle. While the fifteen paintings must be regarded as one work and must be hung in a single room, its installation comes with built-in indeterminacy. The variation of the paintings themselves precludes a systematic grid—a form of display common in the Atlas, the color charts, and many other Richter works. My suggestion is that Richter attempted to convey the affect of pity or mourning at the level of form, through not only through the gray tones but also a kind of “musical” rhythm of variation, modulation, repetition, and visual crescendos and diminuendos. This explanation of the formal character of the work seems to me more persuasive than Storr’s suggestion that the cycle incorporates elements of cinematic form— stop motion, zoom, fade out. This notion works best with the three images of Gudrun Esselin, called Confrontation 1, 2, and 3, which are based on photographs shot at three consecutive moments and plausibly form a cinematic series. However, the three paintings, all titled Dead and based on a single image of Meinhof’s head after her hanged body had been cut down, are usually shown in a series of diminishing size that has no cinematic counterpart. It is this group that evokes most strongly in me a feeling of pity, but the cycle as a whole aims to convey a sense of wordless mourning. In his notes for the press conference for the first exhibition of Oktober 18, Richter wrote:

It is impossible for me to interpret the pictures. That is: in the first place they are too emotional; they are, if possible, an expression of speechless emotion. They are the almost forlorn attempt to give shape to feelings of compassion, grief and horror (as if the pictorial repetition of the events were a way of understanding those events, being able to live with them).

Unfortunately, he does not comment on the unusual repetition and variation of size and proportion, which, in my view, help to convey this “speechless emotion.” However, the cycle’s visual musicality may be hinted at by the inclusion of a painting of Baader’s record player.

Richter chose to depict an event around which views were polarized; he wanted the paintings to elicit an emotional response but also understanding, a space for thought or what Aby Warburg called Denkraum. One way artists have of creating that space, according to Warburg, is through the use of grisaille; a horrific scene can be represented in gray tones so as to make it bearable. As Warburg observed in his Grisaille Notebook (1928-29): “The strength of the artist in keeping these forces at bay without forfeiting their vitalizing influence is symbolized in the artistic means of grisaille.” This potential of art to create psychic distance undoubtedly relates to Warburg’s close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, especially the following passage: “Even the image of the angry Achilles is only an image to him whose angry expression he enjoys with the dreamer’s pleasure in illusion. Thus, by this mirror of illusion, he is protected against becoming one and fused with his figures. Richter draws on traumatic-mediatic material, the equivalent in the technological age of Warburg’s dangerous and energizing classical imagery, and transforms it into something that can form the basis of meaningful experience and vivid memory.

Traumatic imprinting, disappearance, displacement, reemergence, acknowledgment, pity, and wordless mourning are all compressed in this complex cycle of paintings.

Margaret Iversen, Photography, Trace, and Trauma. (Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Works Cited

Gerhard Richter, Atlas, ed. Helmut Friedel (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006)

Gerhard Richter, Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters, 1961-2007, ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009)

Peter Weibel, “Repression and Representation: The RAF in German Postwar Art,” in Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures, ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (New York: Abrams, 2009)

Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter, October 18, 1977 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002)

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981)

E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967),

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