With its characteristically blurred surface and elegant subtlety of monochrome grey hues, Portrait Laszlo from 1966 is a stunning paradigm of Gerhard Richter's Photo Paintings. Defiling the traditional process of portraiture by painting from a photograph instead of real life, Richter sought to imbue his canvases with the objectivity and legitimacy generally associated with the photographic medium. As he explained: “A portrait must not express anything of the sitter’s ‘soul’, essence or character. For this reason, among others, it is far better to paint a portrait from a photograph, because no one can ever paint a specific person” (Gerhard Richter quoted: Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, Chicago 2009, p. 74). Indeed, the present work’s tonal topography and technical distinction epitomise the artist’s overarching ambition to present the viewer with a new perspective of reality, highlighting his ongoing investigation into human perception and the validity of the painted image.

A precursor to Richter’s 48 Portraits, a series of forty-eight oil paintings completed for the German Pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale, the present work depicts the bust of the Hungarian-Swiss art collects or, psychoanalyst and author Carl Laszlo. Laszlo was a respected art dealer whose own collects ion ranged from sixteenth-century European Art to East Asian Antiquity, and Contemporary Art. Among his circle of friends were the Pop luminaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, whose works also formed a part of his collects ion. Dressed in formal attire replete with a collar, Laszlo's silhouette is drawn into the realm of abstraction yet perfectly recognisable as the acclaimed dealer and writer. In a similar vein, sitters included in the Richter’s career defining 48 Portraits were at the height of society; those prominent in the fields of literature, science, philosophy and music such as Albert Einstein, Ilich Tchaikovsky, Oscar Wilde, and Franz Kafka, amongst others. Richter has said of the series: “I am interested in the speechless language of these pictures. Heads, even if they are full of literature and philosophy, become quite unliterary. Literature is invalidated; the personalities become anonymous. That's what is important to me here.” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Ibid, p. 63).

Between 1962 and 1968 Richter persued a portrait practice based exclusively on media-derived and family photographs, seeking to explore the ambiguity that exists between the alleged objectivity of a photograph and the inherent artifice of painting. To this end, Richter imbued his paintings with the impartial and factual documentation inherent to photography, in order to convey an image free from predisposed interpretation or meaning and a painting free from individual artistic expression. With a paradigmatic blurring of contours and drained of any colour, the portraits exemplify Richter’s deliberate choice of a monochrome palette, which he attributed to the objective subtlety of the colour grey. According to Richter, “grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape” (Gerhard Richter cited in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art (and travelling), Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, 2003, p. 62). Through its tonal contrasts and lustrous streaks of silvery pigment, the technical framework of Portrait Laszlo invests the medium of photography with a breath-taking sense of animation, leaving its subject blurred and slightly out of focus. As such, the surface of Richter’s image is uniquely soft, bearing almost no evidence as to the mark-making of the painter and thus removing the artist from the final output.

Re-purposing photographs as visual aids in the late 1950s, Richter’s tendency to turn towards the medium of photography is deeply rooted in his younger years. The artist reveals, “For a t.mes I worked as a photographic library assistant: the masses of photographs that passed through the bath of developer every day may well have caused a lasting trauma” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Ibid, pp. 56-57). However it was only during the 1960s that photographic imagery became a literal, direct source for his paintings. In a 1966 interview with Dieter Hulsmanns and Fridolin Reske – the same year the present work was executed – Richter claimed, “A photograph… is simply the best picture that I can imagine. It is perfect; it does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous and unconditional. It has no style. The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Ibid pp. 56-57).

Trained under the heavy ideology and aesthetic dogma of Socialist Realism, Richter radically changed the nature of his practice after his emigration to West Germany in 1961, a stylistic metamorphosis that would have a profound effect upon the history of contemporary painting. Along with notable figures such as Sigmar Polke, Richter became a proponent of Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalist Realism), which used popular imagery as a sardonic critique of how ideology could be visually presented as reality on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As such, in the seemingly fleeting, passing moment rendered on the surface of Portrait Laszlo, we see Richter freeing himself from the figurative constraints of Socialist Realism, finding his stride in the threshold between the illusory and the concrete. Both spatially ambiguous and deeply evanescent Portrait Laszlo thus touches upon the most profound cornerstone of Richter’s oeuvre, which has consistently and magnificently scrutinised the potential of the painted image in the photographic age.