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A PoStwAr reFleCtioN
In their postwar art, the now-famous German artists Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke saw through and ironically exaggerated the whole complex of problems linked to the term "Degenerate Art." In 1964, Richter dramatized the danger posed by images in a fictive interview with the then-famous art critic Anthony Thwaites, which was actually written by his friend Polke. In the "interview," Richter spoke of the unique quality of his pictures and of the fact that they could be used to kill and torture, thus ironically dramatizing the impact of art on the beholder. The connection between a stylized, magical "power of images," which the National Socialists actually feared (and, according to Richter, instrumentalized for the "final solution to the Jewish question"), and the discourse on "degeneration" was satirized in a sarcastic way otherwise familiar only from a Woody Allen film:
How many victims have your works accounted for?
I don't know, exactly. The exact statistics do exist of course-they run into the tens of thousands-but I can't concern myself with trivia. It was more interesting earlier on, when the big death camps in Eastern Europe were using my pictures. The inmates used to drop dead at first sight. Those were still the simple pictures, too. Anyone who survived the first show was killed off by a slightly better picture.
And your drawings?
I haven't done a lot. Buchenwald and Dachau had two each, and Bergen-Belsen had one. Those were mostly used for torture purposes....
So what happens next?
I don't paint any more. I can't, because I don't want to spread terror, alarm and anxiety everywhere, and depopulate the earth. But now it's come to the point where I only have to think my paintings out and tell someone about them, and the person rushes off in a state of panic, has a nervous breakdown, and becomes infertile. That is the worst effect. Though I can't say for sure, as yet, because- depending on who tells the story-I have already caused dumbness, hair loss (mainly in women) and paralysis of limbs.
Degeneration, euthanasia, mass murder: Gerhard Richter addressed these themes and their by no means necessary interdependence in his work of the 1960s. In the process, Richter returned dignity to the victims by...