Blog #3: Daniel Richter: Paintings Then and Now
Now it’s here, the big book! And the Deutschlandfunk Kultur judges euphorically respond: “obsessed with details,” “close to the artist,” and as highest praise: “intellectually independent.” It took four years to finish the book. The phone call that started it all has become legendary. The story even made an appearance in Pepe Danquart’s artist film. How Daniel Richter called me out of the blue one gray February day to ask if I could do a book about him. Successful stories can begin so succinctly. A small anecdote develops into a colorful series of pictures of events, through which one can look back on the genesis of the book.
The book launch at Villa Grisebach in Berlin on September 13, 2023 is still fresh in my mind: after a few scuffles for reserved chairs, most of the guests have found a seat, a few people stand, everyone is cheerful. All around, the artist has hung a total of forty-one mainly small paintings, many of which have never been exhibited before. In front on the table the thick, new book. Behind it, the three of us: Daniel Richter in the middle, to his right Johanna Adorján, who holds the microphone firmly in her hand and leads the conversation about the new book with great nonchalance, wit and humor, and me. Johanna tells how and why it came about. What the collaboration was like. What she sees as the great thing about the structure and design of the book. Suddenly Daniel and I are back at work, looking at the pictures on the walls. What do you see in this strange picture? Why is it green and blue? Has it been painted? Why such a photorealistic portrait of a woman. Is it pop? Who of us actually works or writes with what music? Daniel: with hiphop and this and that. You, Eva, definitely with Bach, or no, definitely with Monteverdi. Eva: no, mostly without, maybe Bach at most. Yes, we could agree on that. Both feel understood. And the audience laughs.
The blurb is pretty much the last and perhaps the most tedious thing in the whole production of a book. How many characters of description can the content be reduced to? It says so simply: “in five well-founded chapters, Eva Meyer-Hermann tells of the genesis and impact of the works,” and “the book offers a comprehensive insight for the first time.” The thousand or so pages of corrections in German and English have long since been meticulously and repeatedly worked through; hours and hours have passed with checks on issues large and small, from commas and quotation marks to translation cliffs that are difficult to navigate around. And yet mistakes remain, inevitably catching on the moment others open the book fresh off the press. Oh, how embarrassing. Nam June Paik once said “When too perfect, Lieber Gott böse.”
There is hardly a person with whom my penchant for obsessive detail and my love of documenting as accurately as possible is so well received as with the book’s graphic designer, Yvonne Quirmbach, with whom I have worked on major projects time and again for more than twenty-five years. Even while I am thinking about ideas for a structure, about the objectives for the publication and its specific questions, Yvonne is also involved with her ideas, so that a design can develop that is at the same time a reflection of my work and the discussions with the artist. An art historical book is more than just a collection of pages with text and reproduced artworks, it should always be a collection of sources and a reference work as well. The essence of the book about Daniel Richter lies not only in the long narrative, but also in the precise research on past exhibitions, the paintings exhibited there, a meaningful selection of literature published so far, as well as a visual environment of numerous reference illustrations. The great idea of having the chronological factual material follow each chapter, embedding it in reservoirs of deepest black like raw material pulled out of dark corners, is one of the great design ideas of the book. The additional decision to develop the graphics entirely out of black and white is also a clever response to the color-rich and competition-averse universe of Daniel Richter’s images.
How does such a cosmos present itself to me as a researcher and author? Where to start? How to select? Where to take the information from? Of course, over the years I’ve always looked at exhibitions. Then studio visits and conversations in the turpentine rush in front of unfinished and finished paintings. The accompanying dog is directly so befuddled by the exhalations of the fresh oil paint that he does not want to enter the elevator up to the painting floor for a single more treat in the world. Fortunately, all the paintings have been well documented over the years. Two large stacks with printouts of all the large oil paintings lie on the table. We pre-sort for the book, “in”, “out”, “still unclear.” The artist starts to talk, reveals anecdotes about the creation, personal assessments, what was good, successful, or bad, or, in his opinion, an aberration. It’s all so interesting, that’s why from the very beginning, during all our conversations in the studio, the tape runs along. For hours. Transcribing, sifting, and systematizing the audio recordings require even more patience than evaluating the literature. Sometimes one feels like a marathon runner, or better: a dancer, who can’t get out of the ballet hall with the monotonously repeating exercises. Where is the stage? Where the book? And then, seemingly suddenly, when everything has been worked through, there it is, the book! And it feels like a big leap onto the stage. That doesn’t happen without prior training.
The round dance, one almost wants to say spiral, punctuated with memories of individual moments of the last four years, begins to close. Here and there, as in the film, scenes of collaboration and dialogue emerge. This is how I understand my work as a curator for artists. An intensive, year-long work with many conversations lies behind us. Phases of rapprochement, even of appropriation, and then again moments of distance and drawing of boundaries. After all, the point is to bring the times and results of the collaboration to another level, namely that of the public. For this, it is not enough to simply reproduce the original sound. Information must be broken down into its own language and re-sorted. It must be prepared in the same way so that it can radiate an energy that spills over to the audience for reading and for looking.
