Colour charts
Andrew Lambirth
Gerhard Richter: 4900 Colours Serpentine Gallery, until 16 November Lucian Freud: Early Works, 1940–58 Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, 38 Bury Street, London SW1, until 12 December
At the Serpentine is an exhibition of little squares of colour, randomly arranged in grids. There are 49 paintings on show, each one composed of four panels consisting of 25 squares each. They are painted in enamel on something synthetic called Aludibond, on boards or plates attached directly to the wall. The colour combinations are selected by chance through a specially developed computer programme, and the initial idea for the work was sparked by the industrial colour charts produced by paint manufacturers. Gerhard Richter (born 1932) has been making paintings based on colour charts since 1966, and, after a lot of trying, he has finally sold the idea to a credulous world.
It seems that Richter himself has a high estimation of these pictures. He is quoted in the publicity material as claiming, ‘They are the only paintings which tell no story. Even abstract paintings are like photos of a nonexistent reality, of an unknown jungle. Here there is no illusion. They say nothing and evoke no association. They are simply there, pure visual subjects.’ What arrogant tosh. It’s the sort of comment clever artists think they can get away with nowadays because nobody knows any better in this sorry culture of ignorance. Richter pontificates as if he’d just invented geometric abstraction, when it’s all been done before over the past 100 years, time and time again. Yet people in the art world who should know better treat him as if he were some kind of guru. Admittedly he has done some vaguely interesting work with blurring and distorting in his more figurative paintings (oh, yes, this great master turns his hand to all sorts and types of art), but his chief distinction at the moment lies in being overrated.
On the press release he’s loudly trumpeted as ‘one of the world’s greatest living artists’, so of course there’s a lavish hardbacked catalogue to accompany the show. But I can’t find any justification in its pages for thinking so highly of Richter. The idea behind these boring pictures is an intellectual conceit exploited more effectively in literature many years ago by such innovative writers as Raymond Queneau in his One Hundred Million Million Poems (1961). And the visualisation is equally unoriginal. As the painter John Hoyland has pointed out, 4900 Colours looks like something by the Swiss Elementarist Richard Lohse (1902–88), just less inventive and a lot less interesting. Unlike Richter, Lohse is not particularly well-known in this country, though the commercial gallery Annely Juda shows his work from time to time.
If you still like Richter enough and want to support the Serpentine, you can buy one of a specially made edition of 80 paintings — though if each is unique why are they numbered in an edition like a multiple? They measure just less than eight inches square, and cost £12,000. Then you could take your own coloured board home with you, though I fail to see what excitement or uplift it could confer, other than a specious trophy value. The Serpentine work is very similar to a design Richter made for a stained-glass window in Cologne Cathedral, unveiled last year. I can see it working quite well as a window, but in a gallery it’s a complete waste of space.
Phrases like ‘aleatory iteration’ and ‘monotonous polychromy’ crowd the essays of the catalogue, rather like the shrieking of the parakeets in Kensington Gardens as they pursue each other through trees just beginning their seasonal colour change. I have to say I found more intellectual and emotional stimulation, and far greater aesthetic satisfaction in looking at the autumn trees than at Mr Richter’s colour charts.
For a complete contrast, I urge a visit to the exhibition of early works by Lucian Freud (born 1922). Here is indisputable evidence of an original poetic sensibility coming to grips with the problems of making a visual image with paint. One of the earliest paintings here, of a box of apples, was made when Freud was 17 and it betrays the influence of his teacher Cedric Morris in the vigorous paint-handling and modelling of the subject. But the real delight of the exhibition is to see Freud working on a small scale with fine brushes, condensing his emotional and retinal responses into paintings of a wonderful tautness. These highly detailed mesmeric renditions have an almost late medieval Flemish intensity. They are strange and compelling and rather beautiful.
Most of the sitters are not identified, as if their names are unimportant. (This too is reminiscent of the late medieval/ Renaissance habit of painting a person, rather than Sir Somebody Something, captured for a moment in paint on their journey from the cradle to the grave.) Half-titles, such as ‘Head of a Poet’, or ‘A Woman Painter’ seem designed to pique the viewer’s curiosity without satisfying it. I began to find this a bit annoying. I cannot accept that knowing who the subject is stops one looking closely at the paintwork or the clarity of line. Freud himself is quoted as saying ‘if you don’t know them, it can only be like a travel book’, which can be taken either to refer to himself or to the viewer. Whichever way, it is surely a diminishment of the enjoyment: if you’re travelling round a country (or a face), it helps to know what you’re looking at. And given the remarkable nature of Freud’s gallery of friends and connections, it seems something of an affectation not to name them. Just to confuse the issue, some are identified — Stephen Spender and Gerald Wilde, for instance. One a considerable public figure (whatever you think of his poetry), the other a little-known monocular abstract expressionist who once lived in a cave. High society and low life?
Catherine Lampert in her useful catalogue (£20 in paperback) discovers in one painting ‘a hint of a life of privilege brought to a precipice; the canvas showing through the thinly applied paint lends a very subtle measure of recoil.’ An interesting notion, but does this apply to any painting in which the canvas shows through the paint? I think not. So perhaps the recoil is in Freud himself. The fierce scrutiny to which he subjects his sitters has always seemed to me to border on distaste. However, identities and lineage are evidently important, as Lampert spends half-a-dozen pages explaining who these sitters are. So we may go round the show and find David Gascoyne in the thick-lipped ‘Head of a Poet’ (c.1945) or John Craxton in the fresh-faced though sunburnt ‘Portrait of a Man’ (1946) or Henrietta Moraes voluptuous in a blanket.
I used to think the virtuoso technique of black and white conte on Ingres paper employed in the drawing of Christian Bérard was remarkable, but seeing it here in the company of so many oil paintings of greater originality, it begins to look mechanical. Freud’s unusual gift of interlocking the naive and the sophisticated, the untutored and the knowing, gives these pictures an edge rarely encountered in modern British art. By their disquiet shall we know them. ❑
Previous page
