Introducing Philosophy of Art by Matravers Derek

Author:Matravers, Derek.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317547310
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

That is, one reason why Richter might want to produce a painting based on a photograph is that the painting is, in part, about how it is possible to rescue painting by borrowing features from photography. Hence, the painting and the photograph are different works of art that are about different things: the photograph is simply about what it is a photograph of; the painting is about the justification of painting. Because the two works of art have different contents, it is possible that they have different values. The value of the experience of the one (had with understanding) is different from the value of the experience of the other (had with understanding).

This, of course, provides only a general way of showing how the value of a painting based on a photograph differs from that photograph; it does not tell us anything in particular about the work we are discussing – Dead 2. However, we might think there is a particular version of this general problem. If the medium of painting is problematic, then it can no longer perform one of its traditional functions: recording and memorializing significant historical events. A painting of the Baader-Meinhof Gang, if it were akin to (say) Franz Hals’s Banquet of the Officers of the St George Civic Company, would look quite silly.

What, then, does being based on photographs bring to the paintings in the October 18, 1977 cycle? Richter himself has said little about the paintings, but what he has said stresses two things and implies a third. The first and the second stand in some tension with each other or, at least, the first stresses the features of photography borrowed by the paintings and the second the features of the paintings besides those borrowed from photography. Both the first and the second draw on the distinction, described above, between a photograph and a painting.

The first of the points Richter makes draws on what we discussed above: using photographs to provide the “composition, color, genre, and style” of the painting. Asked whether he had considered “inventing images on this theme”, as opposed to borrowing from photographs, Richter replied: “I think it is quite simply unthinkable to invent such pictures. That’s just not possible nowadays. Painters used to train for years on end, to the point where they could to some extent invent nudes. That ability no longer exists. It’s gone” (Richter 1995: 187).

This merely restates the general point. In particular, however, the fact that paintings borrow qualities from photographs enables them to carry the air of simply presenting, simply reporting, events. Clearly, the events depicted were among the most emotionally charged of recent German (indeed, European) history. Hence, it is difficult for the painter to achieve any distance: for the painting not to be seen as propaganda for one side or another. Photographs – particularly news photographs, on which the paintings were based – aspire to objectivity: to reporting without editorializing. The fact that Richter’s paintings borrow some of these key features from photographs

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