The main thing to point out is that the entire gerhard-richter.com website has been down for months, and there is no information about it. The website was always a project by/for/with collector/lawyer/facsimile object printer/eventual HENI founder Joe Hage. I’m sure there other people in Richterwelt–dealers, wives, kids, archivist/catalogue raisonné editors, studiovolk, foundations—with views about the website, and maybe even plans for it. In the mean time, there’s now a giant, website-shaped hole where exhaustive, open, authoritative information about the artist’s work, publications, exhibitions, and chronology used to be. [UPDATE: Somehow I missed Kenny Schachter’s April 14 column, where he mentions Hage taking the site offline in January, and pegs the whole thing to the introduction of David Zwirner to the mix. greg.org regrets being offline for even a day.]
[WEEKEND UPDATE: via Wayne Bremser‘s forensics, it looks like the website had a security breach sometime soon after Nov. 7 when I got Lobby Art images from it; Nov. 9 has a security notice, and the site’s been gone since.]
Which means when Marian Goodman’s Richter paintings turn up for sale at Christie’s, there’s no easy way to research which way this incredible 1995 squeegee painting, Poppy/Mohn [CR 830-1], is supposed to go. Because Christie’s shows it in vertical orientation, with dimensions of 200 x 140 cm. And the essay talks about the artist meticulously balancing “the horizontal thrust of his squeegee with the vertical pull of his spatula,” and attacking “the left side of the canvas with verve, exposing myriad underlayers of vibrant pigment.” Which is what it seems we see.
But then the verso is shown vertically, but not only has D-rings on the top and bottom [sic], it’s signed sideways. And that’s exactly how Marian hung it, rotated 90 degrees clockwise. With vertical thrusts and horizontal pulls? Does the way it was made determine the way it is hung? [By the time Corinna Belz filmed him in the studio, Richter was pushing, pulling, and squeegeeing in both directions.]
And literally all Christie’s has to say about it is in the caption for the photo from Marian’s house, where it’s described as being “(in an alternate orientation).”
Which is where the artist’s website would come in, to clear things up. And so however he signed it, and however it hung for thirty years, on the Internet Archive Richter had this painting catalogued as vertical. There is no universe where I’m going to call out either Goodman or Richter for this. But I do think the implications of a bi-orientated squeegee painting at the dawn of the mature squeegee painting era have been seriously under-considered. And I am certain I’m not the only one around here who’s curious.
Previously, related, from 2010: The Gerhard Richter Website Reveals All. Almost All.