A special feature of Richter's painting that can be noted across his entire oeuvre “is working in repetitions, work groups, and sequences, in other words, an interest in the reproduction of the image”, as the Swiss curator and author Dieter Schwarz remarked on the occasion of Gerhard Richter's 2014 retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel. (quoted from Hubertus Butin, Unikate in Serie, Cologne 2017, p. 12) This is also true of the present townscape, the first in a series of eight completely different works (178-1 to 178-8), which nonetheless have one thing in common: they come in black and white and are based on details cut out from Richter's Atlas sheet 124 from 1968. Richter painted this "Stadtbild" in 1968 as part of a series of townscapes he was occupied with in the late 1960s. They are among the early photo paintings that dominated his artistic output from the 1970s until Richter increasingly turned to abstract themes. Alongside the color charts, the gray paintings, the seascapes, and the cloud paintings, the townscapes play an important role at this stage.




Formal evanescence
Seen from a distance, the painting offers an austere, monochrome close-up of a landscape of buildings from a bird's eye view. As we approach, however, Richter's seemingly rigid geometries dissolve into a blurred juxtaposition of rich impasto surfaces. With their grid-like structures and oblique angles, they question the legibility of their figurative subjects and transform them into an illusionistic vision of reality. Richter replaces the hitherto meticulous attention to detail in his photographic paintings with bold gestures that reinforce the indistinct blurriness of his earlier works through subsequent smudging. With thick brushstrokes and the formal dissolution of the original artwork, we see first hints of the liberated abstract expression that would define his style in the following decades. Richter attained another special effect in his painting of the 1960s by using an extensive palette of gray tones that enabled him to dispense with extreme contrasts.




Richter's first townscape was a view of Piazza del Duomo in Milan, a commission work for the company Siemens Elettra. According to an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1993, this commission marked the beginning of Richter's subsequent focus on townscapes: "Yes, sometimes I liked doing commissions as a way of discovering something that I wouldn't have come up with on my own. In that sense, by commissioning a townscape, Siemens initiated all subsequent townscapes." (Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter. Text 1961 bis 2007. Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne, 2008, p. 308).
It is striking that Richter refrains from placing the cathedral, Milan's most famous landmark, at the center of the picture. Instead, he focuses on the immediate surroundings of the cathedral, on the square and its surrounding architecture. And it is also striking that the artist uses a kind of advertising photography in this work and only uses an aerial photograph for the first time in another city view of Milan, a decision that leads to this haunting work complex of the "Stadtbilder".




Observing gaze
The "Stadtbilder" are largely based on photographs from architectural magazines that illustrate urban structures without these being identifiable by their titles. As is intrinsic to Richter's work, the artist archives these photographs and documents them in his compendium “Atlas”. Richter describes them as “reflections on the new face of Europe and the other surviving remnants of old Europe”. (Cf. Robert Storr, “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, ex. Cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2002, p. 42). As a child, Gerhard Richter witnessed the bombing of Dresden, and it is a logical consequence that many of the towncapes, especially those showing sections of the sprawling urban infrastructure, are reminiscent of aerial photographs of cities bombed during World War II. In other towncapes, including the present work, Richter also devotes himself to the expressionless concrete buildings built during the period of reconstruction. In Richter's work, the post-war edifices resemble utopian urban landscapes: the architecture of the future, towering high in the sky as symbols of economic recovery! By the late 1960s, however, this vision of renewal had already begun to fade. The gray, uniform, and faceless former beacons of hope conveyed a deep sense of loss: haunting memories of a story that could never be restored. Richter's deliberate abstraction of these buildings captures precisely this momentum and puts their idealism in a mesmerizing light. As the structure dissolves into an indeterminate mass of color, any sense of function or purpose disappears. The building becomes an illusion that eludes our grasp.

Hence, his 1960s creations were essentially based on his observation and the use of photographs. When Rolf Schön asked Gerhard Richter in a 1972 interview why photography played such an important role, Richter replied: "Because I was surprised by the photograph, which we all use to such a massive degree daily. All of a sudden I was able to see it in a different light, as an image that gave me a different perspective without all the conventional criteria that I had previously associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment, it relieved me of personal experience, it was pure image. That's why I wanted to have it, to show it - not to use it as a means for painting, but to use painting as a means for the photograph.” (in: Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007. Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, Cologne, 2008, p. 59) At times, photographs therefore provide a rather arbitrary reason to paint, the starting point and center of Richter's artistic activity. The declared goal of Richter's work is to make the representational indistinct, thereby addressing the uncertainties of our perceptions. His strategies include coarsening, chromatic manipulation, and the use of blurring. In this way, the artist at times removes the unambiguity from his subjects and along with it a certain burden of meaning. Richter removes these models from their original context by immersing them in uniform gray or black and white and often reinforces this effect by adding blur. The result is a hazy impression that allows us to associate an image of memory removed from actuality, making it a component of his pictures and putting our perception to the test, as was the case with early historical highlights such as "Bomber" (1963), bomb-dropping airplanes with American national emblems, "Mustang Staffel" (1964), English WWII fighters, or "Onkel Rudi" (1965), a portrait of a close relative in uniform.

The color gray has a diverse range of functions in all of these pictures. First of all, it asserts a realism in which Richter identifies black and white photographic models as direct examples, thus creating a direct reference to photography. In addition, the monochrome gray is associated with a uniformity that veils the thematic dimensions and simulates pictorial alienation as the artist's ostensible interest. By removing the color from the pictures and limiting them to achromatic shades of gray, he deliberately aims for a painterly effect, to bring the pathos of the past into the picture. In this respect, the townscapes have much in common with Richter's seascapes, mountainscapes, and cloudscapes from this period. Once upon a time, these subjects were also symbols of nature, immortalized as signs of admiration and hope by the artist of Romanticism in the 19th century.

Photographic veracity as a motif
However, in Richter's city paintings, their photographic veracity disintegrates into an impenetrable web of brushstrokes and surfaces, revealing the character of their artistic interaction. In a statement accompanying the towncapes, Richter abandons the concept of "illusionistic painting". "A spot of color should remain a spot of color, and the motif has no need to make a statement or allow for interpretation," he wrote. (Gerhard Richter. Text 1961 to 2007. Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, Cologne, 2008, p. 53). Richter thus questions the entire concept of visual representation. The motif becomes inaccessible, only painting itself remains, the illusion of a reality that eludes the possibilities of art, but which would become the foundation of his later abstract approach.

Richter's early works in black and white from the 1960s have significantly shaped our current perception of his work. Family photos, advertising images, and pictures from various other print media provide the basis for Richter's portraits, Alpine paintings, and cityscapes from these years. While Richter initially painted the contours of his motifs onto canvas in a soft manner, thus achieving his famous painterly blur, he also began to experiment with a loose, rough, and thus already per se blurred painting style, as in this abstract cityscape. This cropped quality, which largely alienates the representational motif, also characterizes Richter's present cityscape in a pronounced way. Richter painted the present "Stadtbild" the same year as the famous "Domplatz, Mailand", which fetched around 29 million euros at Sotheby's in New York in 2013, making it the artist's most expensive figurative painting. [MvL]