Gerhard Richter - S. with Child Having recently learned about how Gerhard Richter handles his medium, I realize how protracted and personal this must have been in the making. I sense the floor dropping out from under me in this work. And it works. Yes, it's a Madonna and Child, but no, it's not, it's S. with, not and, her child. First he takes a snapshot and, leaving nothing to chance, traces its outlines onto his ground and then the work begins in earnest. An important feature is how he split the snapshot into wide, evenly spaced striations so a cross-texture of rough wooden planks seems to cut through the picture-plane. The upper left takes this wood of the horizontal "fencing" and allows it to be a staging area for his colors and textures. His palette self-referentially laps over into the scene--the unformed and as yet uncombined pigment the medium from which he will weave the image of a beloved mother and child. The palette affords a view of his own inner life, laid bare, on display alongside that of his wife's Bonnard-like intimacy. Their snapshot, his materials, converge into art. I feel like the label "in process" hangs over this piece. His far younger second wife, the second generation of his infant son, a second layer running across the piece by the cross-planking, weather-warped and deteriorating, as though the snapshot of "S." had been left on a billboard in wind and weather. The fudged, undried buon affresco countenance of S. a foil to what snapshots are meant to do, preserve. Biographically, she brings to him renewed conjugal unity, their child staving off his barren years, yet accelerating their approach by making the artist a father and partner of more than a companion--the adults now fellow parents. The process detaches you from the immediacy of a family album. The suckling child on S's breast rendered by Gerhard Richter into a mist-beaded contemplation of how we fade away in the flesh--at the same time the religious ikon quickening our human soul with its eternal image of maternal and religious nourishment. The weathered effect of his prepared canvas gives the scene a fragile honesty, as delicate as the English Patient's book of life.
