A Medievalist Encounters Richter

When we encounter contemporary abstract paintings, our minds of course search immediately for points of reference – for part of our time viewing it, an abstract painting becomes a Rorschach test. Yet some abstract painters, like Rothko, aimed for transcendental, transportative experience – an encounter that would lead the viewer to some kind of beyond. As a medievalist, I have always been confused about such paintings – did they represent the beyond? Evoke it? Or just create a tool or experience that could lead one to another place, completely outside of the picture? Were they icons, idols, or tools for imageless devotion? In certain strains of medieval theology, of course, beauty itself moved one closer to God. As Abbot Suger wrote of medieval abstract images, “the multicolor loveliness of the gems and windows has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation, transporting me from material to immaterial things, has persuaded me to examine the diversity of holy virtues, and then I seem to see myself existing on some level, as it were, beyond our earthly one, neither completely in the slime of earth nor completely in the purity of heaven.” It was the contemplation of beauty, itself, that brought one to God; the artwork was the middle space between earth and heaven.

Abbot Suger was one of the first things I thought of last year when I saw Gerhard Richter’s massive 1997 Abstraktes Bild (over 8×11 feet) in a retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. The painting stopped me in my tracks. There is no question that its beauty transported me, perhaps more than any other painting I’ve encountered. But as an atheist, pragmatist, and medievalist, I didn’t quite understand how the process was working. The smeared layers of Richter’s paint had created an effect that moved me – the colors, shimmer, and balance of the piece were meditative and inherently entrancing. But I also sensed that the painting’s structure and effect had something to say to this central question of what exactly a painting like this can do. I found myself thinking about the questions of reality versus appearance raised by medieval theologians, and originally by Aristotle and Plato. Of the question of whether ideal, perfect forms were buried within the forms of the created world (and the painting), yet just beyond our vision, or whether they existed entirely beyond and above it. Of whether we see the world though a glass darkly, or if the hazy image in the glass is in fact the abstraction that is the beyond.

In very concrete ways, this split between reality and appearance was materialized in Richter’s paint. Others have pointed out how his squeegee technique creates confusion about layering and space—at different moments, and in different works, different parts of the painting appear to be above or below others. They trick the eye. In the painting seen here, the shards of blue and white that are spread across the canvas (such as the largest one at the top and center) could either be leaves floating on the surface of a pond (placed, in effect, on top of the blurred magenta background), or they could be views into some kind of distant space – snow-capped mountains and evergreen trees that we see as through through cracks in the blurred pink window. They could be pieces of mirror floating on a watery surface, reflecting their surroundings more directly than the opaque moving water.

But one can play this game with any abstract painting—some could see what I see, but others would see something different. More interesting is the question of the blur itself, and the combination of the blur with those shards of apparent clarity. Looking at the painting, I kept stopping to try to understand what was happening in my mind. The smeared pink, magenta and white forms, drawing me in – were these the actual representation of the beyond? Some inaccessible, unrepresentable beauty that we call by different names? Or was it a haze, precisely obscuring a view of that beauty, which we could only catch glimpses of through the cracked views into the white and blue clarity beyond? Is an abstract materialization of paint and color like Richter’s a representation of perfection itself, or a meditative tool that strips away meaning and form so that the mind can create its own perfect forms?  Looking at the painting, I could never decide – it was alternately exhilarating and depressing. Richter was both God and his opposite. Sometimes I felt like he gave me a glimpse – a true representation of something beyond our world, while other times it felt like a metaphor for my inability to see anything except a blur. There is intense physical pleasure in looking at the blurred forms, as we try to decide what lies beneath them and how they came into being. But I never quite knew if the artist was showing me truth and beauty or showing me that it’s something I will never really encounter.