Image/Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022, courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive Dresden
Gerhard Richter's First Colour Chart
In 1966, with his Colour Chart works, Gerhard Richter succeeded in radically expanding his early oeuvre. It will not be for the last t.mes that, through new motifs, Richter questioned his painterly concept and tests out a new stylistic idiom. In October that year, when asked about the initial impulse of the creation of his Colour Charts, he remembered “At the start of January I went to a paint shop (in Dusseldorf) to purchase something, here I saw the usual colour sample cards that everyone is familiar with, with crossed out colour hues from a collects ion. Suddenly I had to admit to myself, ‘You cannot do this any better! These are already perfect pictures.’” Above all though, Richter recognised in the colour sample cards a pictorial quality, like the quality that he had seen four years earlier in newspapers, magazines and private family albums. For Richter, these motifs were ready-made pictures that served as perfect templates for his painting. Now, the sample cards from the paint shop presented a dramatic first step into the direction of abstraction.
Gerhard Richter’s 1971-74 Large Scale Colour Charts in Museum collects ions
Gerhard Richter, born in 1932 in Dresden, painted in 1966, 19 Colour Charts in total, and attributed to these the numbers 135-1 to 144/1-10 in his catalogue raisonne. Amongst these belong three large format paintings with differing grey tones (143-1 to 143-3). Since 1970 he revisited the theme of the colour charts several more t.mes s, expanding this to include up to 1024 different colour tones within one composition. In contrast to this, he used merely four different colours in his 2008 series, Quattro Colori. In October 1966 Gerhard Richter opened an exhibition at Friedrich & Dahlem in Munich where he presented only examples of works from his new series of Colour Charts. Not even two years earlier, he had held here his first ever solo exhibition with paintings based on photographic source images. That exhibition had included several, now well known, paintings such as Fußgänger (6), Tote (9), Bomber (13), Stukas (18-1) or Ferrari (22), which today are all in international museum collects ions. For those visitors of the exhibition who had also been present at the first exhibition at Friedrich & Dahlem, this second exhibition only one and a half years later, must have come as quite a shock. When asked in 1981 about the contemporary reaction, Gerhard Richter vividly and distinctly remembered “the few insiders found it great, Konrad Fischer or gallerist Heiner Friedrich and a few collects ors, they also understood. And others simply didn’t, they said ‘what is this nonsense. He is able to paint such lovely photographic paintings.’ But those had also not been that well regarded at the t.mes . To some extent one could have expected this from me, to do something so absurd, as the photorealistic paintings were also so inartistic. For most people these were also not particularly interesting.” Whereas Richter’s gallerist in Munich was so fascinated and enthusiastic about these paintings that he was adamant to open his new gallery in New York with these Colour Chart paintings.
Image/Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022, courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden
Gerhard Richter attributed the catalogue number 136 to 192 Farben from 1966. Therefore the Colour Chart follows both the smaller and less intensive pictures Zehn Farben and Zwölf Farben numbered 135-1 and 135-2 respectively. This order however does not at all correspond to the evolution of the works. In fact, 192 Farben is the first Colour Chart painted by Richter and therefore this work is the first work with which he introduces this new pictorial concept into his painterly practice. With this knowledge of the chronology, 192 Farben manifests itself as an exceptionally rare and challenging painting by the artist. Richter did in no way carefully approach his new group of works. Instead of using small canvases to test out the new concept he immediately started in a large format on a surface measuring 200 x 150 cm and applied 192 different and subjectively selected colour tones, separated on a quadratic grid by white bands. It was with this same confidence that later in 1976 Richter began his most comprehensive group of works, the Abstract Paintings with the monumental Konstruktion (389) which measures 250 x 300 cm.
No other Colour Chart from 1966 is composed of as many different colour tones as the first painting 192 Farben. This painting therefore manifests itself as an exceptionally confident and uncompromising artistic gesture. Richter is unquestioningly positive about the quality and significance of 192 Farben. In no other Colour Chart from 1966 is the concept of this group of works as convincingly apparent. Why did Gerhard Richter then not leave this work in the chronological order of its creation in its rightful first place and therewith also prioritising its significance within this group of works? De facto it was Richter’s specific intention to remove any indication of the evolution within the 1966 Colour Chart, which could have led from the first charts executed in oil, to those later works finished in lacquer. 192 Farben formed the basis from which Gerhard Richter tried to free his work from the narrative of photographic motifs, and these in turn serve as the model for his later abstract work. With this painting he rejects the traditional idea of composition in favour of a non-hierarchical surface structure. The squares are separated equally across the canvas and the colours follow a random arrangement. In 1966, 192 Farben presented the artist with a decisive way in which pictures can be possible without being restricted by the confines of painterly expressiveness or artistic subjectivity. Later, Richter radicalised this painterly concept, by further withdrawing his artistic identity from the process of painting. He replaced his oil colour seen in 192 Farben and in which gestural strokes can still be recognised, with industrial lacquers. In the 1970s he eventually began to increase the number of the applied colours to up to 1024 differing shades, systematically mixing and randomly selecting their order on the pictorial plain. After Richter finally recognised in 1973 that “every colour matches wonderfully to each random other” he even stopped applying the white bands between the colour fields the following year.
Right: 192 Farben on view in Gerhard Richter: Panorama, Tate Modern, London. Image: © Tate Artwork: © Gerhard Richter
The Colour Charts belong to the most important and radical groups of works within Gerhard Richter’s extensive and complex oeuvre. Even decades later Richter would regard the works as a “wonderful stroke of luck”. 192 Farben is the outstanding masterpiece of these early and iconic works from 1966. Here, Richter formulates for the first t.mes the convincing and uncompromising painterly concept of his Colour Charts, which in 2007 came to a magnificent conclusion in Richter’s monumental glass window in Cologne Cathedral.
Image/Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022, courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden
In Context: 192 Farben, 1966
Belonging to Gerhard Richter’s series of Farbtafeln or Colour Charts, 192 Farben narrates a landmark moment in Richter's practice. Created in 1966, this painting is not only the very first in Richter's expansive Colour Chart series, it was also Richter's very first abstract painting. This work signals a conceptual breakthrough that would furnish the ensuing highly important series of Grey Paintings, Clouds and most consequentially the Abstrakte Bilder. As the first works to truly privilege chance as a defining aesthetic factor, the Colour Charts embody a highly important facet within Richter’s diverse and expansive oeuvre, and today are housed in a staggering number of museum collects ions, not least The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Museo d’Art Contemporaneo, Turin; The Kunstmuseum, Bonn; The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, and The Prada collects ion, Milan. As the first ever Colour Chart painting, and only work from the series to be painted in oils, 192 Farben has been included in over twenty exhibitions, including the career-defining Tate show Panorama in 2011, and earlier, formative exhibitions at institutions such as Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (1968) and Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (1971), as well as the major travelling exhibition Gerhard Richter. Bilder 1962 – 1985 at Städtische Kunstalle, Dusseldorf, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern and Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna. Acquired by Elisabeth and Gerhard Sohst from Konrad Fischer in 1981 - prior to which it had only been with the artist - this work has been on long-term load to the Hamburger Kunsthalle since the 1990s.
Image/Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022, courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden
When asked about the impetus for the series, Richter recalled: “In early January I went into a paint shop […] and there I saw the usual sample cards with the full array of shades in a collects ion, the sort of thing we’re all familiar with. Suddenly I couldn’t help telling myself: ‘You can’t do a better job than that! Those are perfect pictures’” (Gerhard Richter quoted in: Wolfgang Christlieb, “Galerie Friedrich und Dahlem,” in Abendzeitung, 22-23 October 1966, p. 6). Modelled on sample cards produced by the German paint company Ducolux, Richter produced the first body of Colour Chart paintings. Consisting of nineteen works, this series received mixed reactions for their radical departure from the monochrome Photo Paintings which Richter had been producing previously. With the exception of Ema (Nude on a Staircase), the Colour Charts were the first non black and white paintings, neither were they based on photographs from magazines or photo albums. 192 Farben therefore marks a radical departure from his previous works by limiting the representative function of the image and instead turning to the fundamental elements of a picture – colour and structure – freed from any narrative function.
Image/Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022 (30012018)
Titled according to the number of colours in the composition, 192 Farben consists of 192 cellular swatches of colour, spontaneously mixed and arranged so that no colour is exactly identical. Ranging from deep Prussian blue to subdued ochre, and pastel lilac to solid black, the expansive field of colours are arranged in twelve columns against a white ground, creating a dazzling chromatic grid. Of the nineteen works in this first group of Colour Charts, the present work was the first and only example in this series ever to be painted in oil; the remaining eighteen were painted with the industrial lacquer paints manufactured by Ducolux. Whilst those executed in lacquer have a glossy finish that entirely conceal traces of the artist’s hand, the surface of 192 Farben exhibits nuanced marks, embedded brush hairs, faint outlines in pencil and irregularities that reveal Richter's precise hand via a gridded field of carefully applied horizontal brushstrokes. Despite being the first of the Colour Charts, Richter placed the present work between other much smaller paintings from this year in his catalogue raisonne to conceal a change from oil to industrial paint.
Yale University Art Galery, New Haven, CT
Image: © Boltin Picture Library/Bridgeman Images
Artwork: © Association Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2022
With the present work and fellow examples from the 1966 series, Richter randomly allocated individual shades of colour for each square in his paintings' grid. This spontaneous facture was later developed into a systematic and methodological process; as Richter described, “the first colour charts were unsystematic… In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions” (Gerhard Richter quoted in “Interview with Irmeline Lebeer,” in Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Eds., Gerhard Richter: Text, London 2009, p. 82). Richter would choose a number and multiply it in order to obtain the number of rows and columns for his grid, then each individual colour - based on mixtures of the three primary colours, with the addition of black and white - was drawn from a bucket and randomly distributed. When asked about the outcome of such a rigorous, systematic exercise, Richter replied, “each colour adapts marvelously to whichever other colour is used." (Gerhard Richter quoted in Ibid, p. 83) From this, Richter would come to eventually eliminate the white bars between the blocks of colour, which had been getting progressively thinner as the series matured.
Gerhard Richter’s 1966 Colour Charts in Museum collects ions
Presenting colour as subject, 192 Farben delivers an intense analysis of the fundamental principles of artistic practice, namely that of paint and pigment. A scrutiny of paint as a conceptual subject of artistic exploration can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp and his proposition in a 1963 interview that paint, made by a manufacturer constitutes a ready-made. Hence the painter, using paints produced by a manufacturer was “readymade-aided” (Marcel Duchamp quoted in “Apropos of Readymades,” Art and Artists 1, No 4, July 1966, p. 47). This idea of paint as a ready-made is one of the paradigmatic ideas of twentieth-century art, representing a radical way of making colour independent and autonomous. The present work draws upon Duchamp’s Tu m’ of 1918 where the painted sample cards appear as motif, showing a foreshortened view of a series of various coloured rhombuses. According to Duchamp’s gallerist, they were copies of paint samples from an oil paint catalogue. In 1955, Robert Rauschenberg saw this painting by Duchamp and was inspired to create Rebus, where he collaged over one hundred monochrome paint strips from a book of paint samples. Around this t.mes , John Cage and his circle of painter friends such as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Rauschenberg had all developed strategies of abstraction which questioned the subjectivity of colour in painting. Richter’s Colour Charts follow this tradition, whilst also referencing Duchamp’s presentation of paints as ready-mades and colour without reference to expressive or symbolic value.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Image: © Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence
Artwork: © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2022
“Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.”
Modelled after paint sample cards, the Colour Charts follow a strict schematic grid structure. The random allocation of colour into the squares eliminates the hierarchy of both colour and compositional theory, focusing on the materiality of paint as the core subject. Traditional artistic colour systems establish a hierarchical and relational order of colours. For example, Isaac Newton’s colour wheel, the colour sphere of the Romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge, the highly influential colour wheel of the chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul, and the unfolded colour sphere of the Bauhaus master Johannes Itten, are all systems of colour from the history of art and science which define a normative order. Artists such as Josef Albers and his famous series, Homage to the Square, propagated a systematic analysis of the interaction between colours grounded in the Bauhaus tradition, in which colour perception is defined in relation to the proximity of other colours. Richter on the other hand, rejected the subjective sensations and psychological effects of colour, and hence the sequence of colours in 192 Farben display no correspondence to artistic or scientific systems. Instead, Richter was fascinated by the way commercial colour samples did exactly the opposite, where an arrangement of colour was not guided by aesthetic relationships or a particular colour theory. In this way, Richter’s Colour Charts share similar sent.mes nts to Ellsworth Kelly’s Colours Arranged by Chance from 1951-52, in which chance determined colour combinations. Establishing a dialectic between the confinement of the grid structure and aleatory structure of random chromatic distribution, Richter’s early Colour Charts maintained the aesthetics of Pop and Minimalist Art, whilst also proffering a radical pictorial form which reflected on the possibilities of contemporary abstraction.
Image: © Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022
The Colour Charts of 1966 mark the beginning of an intense period of experimentation which incorporated the development of series such as the Cityscapes, Mountainscapes, Clouds, Panes of Glass, Mirrors and the Grey Paintings. It is also with the Colour Charts that the artist begins to incorporate chance as a central element of his working process – where the colour arrangement of 192 Farben was determined by spontaneity within the system of a grid, his Cloud series, begun two years later, similarly explored the limitations of organisation and control. These aspects of coincidence and subconscious also prevail throughout Richter’s celebrated Abstrakte Bilder, some of which he called ‘free abstracts’, a name that aptly conveys his embrace of irregularity and chance: “This method of arbitrary choice, chance, inspiration and destruction may produce a specific type of picture, but it never produces a predetermined picture. Each picture has to evolve out of a painterly or visual logic: It has to emerge as if inevitably. And by not planning the outcome, I hope to achieve the same coherence and objectivity that a random slice of nature (or a readymade) always possesses. Of course, this is also a method of bringing in unconscious processes, as far as possible. I just want to get something more interesting out of it than those things that I can think out for myself” (Gerhard Richter in conversation with Sabine Schütz in: Gerhard Richter: Text, Writings, Interview and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, p. 256).
Cologne Cathedral, Cologne
Image: © Photo HENNING KAISER/AFP/Getty Images
Artwork: © Gerhard Richter 2022
192 Farben stands as a masterpiece of Richter’s celebrated 1960s output and ranks among the most important works within Richter's expansive and ground-breaking career. Situated between his monochrome Photo Paintings and his transition into full painterly abstraction, 192 Farben decisively pushed forward the progress of Richter's practice. Indeed, begun in 1966 with this very painting, Richter would continue making works in this series up until the late 2000s, a project that after 40 years of investigation, culminated with the prestigious commission to design Cologne Cathedral's south transept window in 2007. A painting of enduring importance, 192 Farben undoubtedly marked the arrival of arguably the most significant abstractionist of our t.mes
.