September
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| A Gerhard Richter print from 2009., Courtesy of Gerhard Richter and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris |
Disappearing Before Our Eyes
German painter Gerhard Richter tackles
the hardest subject: that which no longer exists.
Making art about 9/11 is the ultimate challenge for any artist. How do you take such an utterly iconic image and push it beyond cliché? How do you say anything at all about the attack without veering into either bellowing banality or genteel understatement? In his painting titled simply September, Gerhard Richter, possibly the last of the great painters, may have found answers.
Robert Storr, author of a new book on this one artwork from the Museum of Modern Art, points out that Richter resisted enlarging his canvas to the scope of the event—the clichéd move in grand history paintings—but instead found more meaning in a domestic, even democratic size. September is close to the size and shape of a flat-screen TV, “matching the proportions of the vessel through which we learned the terrible news,” says Storr.
But Richter, now 79, has said that even with the scale right, when he originally tried to paint the burning towers, in 2005, he couldn’t stomach the results. Working in his classic photo-realist style, he found that the towers’ glowing flames registered as garish and attractive: “That couldn’t work,” he said. But rather than give up, Richter took his failed painting, scraped off most of its surface detail, and smeared an abstract veil of gray on top of what was left. “He applied the techniques of unpainting to his subject, but since the subject is the erasure of a building, it’s the perfect metaphor,” Storr says.
Richter gives us a way to view the carnage: the image is so imprinted on our psyches that we recognize it even, or especially, in a painting that is close to obliterated. But he also uses paint to push back against our urge to gawk, against the pornography of violence and catastrophe.
No bit of canvas could ever contain the scale and scope and meaning of the moment. When the world’s greatest living painter can’t do justice to his theme, can only render it as blurred and almost unseeable, you get a sense of its enormity. The impossibility of condensing such a subject into art, or into any final summation, is the true, great subject of September.
Addendum
When I first saw this painting it took my breath away in its sweeping panorama of destruction evaporating away into nothingness. There were just no words to describe the horror, the waste, the agony. And in many ways this painting can be a metaphor for our lives when we find them blown up by sickness, death, injury, trauma, personal events, and the like. It's as if a life has ceased to exist once having stood tall to everything and everyone around it. And though this blog is dedicated to helping Christians find a bedrock to their faith during this time of religious uncertainty, it is also dedicated to helping those individuals seeking answers to faith's questions.
For without questions we cannot discover God's purpose for ourselves, our reality, our meaning when all around us seems terrifying and desperate. Rather than becoming unpainted in our lives with all the colours washed out from the canvas of our minutes and hours and days and years of our lives, we may begin to reclaim those years of faithless-living back through Jesus and his Spirit. For now is the time for Jesus to become the master painter of our lives in our re-awakened discoveries of what true life can become as he re-applies his paints and colours to a once unimagined life lived without purpose, love and meaning.
Eternity begins now through God's love and redemption, and the lostness and emptiness once so much a part of our being can be scraped away with faith's assurance hitherto unknown in the depths of our spiritual being. No more will sin's hatreds, discontents, emptiness, and brokenness drive one's days and nights; rather, through spiritual re-birth into the life of Jesus as our Savior-Redeemer can love, purpose, meaning be re-discovered in a lost and empty world fled its Creator-God. Be at peace then ye who seek God. For God seeks you and invites you to enter into his life, his destiny, his purpose for you.
Come, says the Spirit, come to the table of plenty set in the valley of the shadow of death. For life begins now. Faith begins now. Come ye, and enter in.
- skinhead
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