The Essay

My essay compared two paintings consisting of squares. Ellsworth Kelly's "Colours for a large wall" was painted in 1951, after he'd done some collages arranging colours by chance. (He got interested in using chance through knowing Jean Arp, a Dadaist for whom chance was a means of liberation from so-called rationality and "a fundamental law of the organic realm".) Kelly's painting started as squares of coloured paper and he replicated the finished design in carefully-matched oil paint, each colour on a separate canvas.Gerhard Richter's "4900 colours: version II" was shown at the Serpentine Gallery in London last autumn. I saw that show and quite enjoyed the bright colours in that pleasant gallery space, but did get a "so what?" feeling. Patchworkers were hmmph-ing and tutting at the unharmoniousness of each of the "pictures", and wondering why such a thing was shown in an art gallery.

Like them, I didn't know about Richter's long history of painting squares, starting with the Colour Charts in 1966. He found some paint chips and thought "oh how beautiful" and, being the kind of guy who takes subject matter from found objects, like magazine photographs, painted his own version -- the exact colours and layout, but very large. Over the years he added more colours till he got to 1024 in 1974. Part of his "project" was to show that any colour could be combined with any other.

In 2007 Richter was commissioned to do the window for Cologne cathedral (it had been destroyed in WWII) and was having no success with doing something figurative and was about to give up the commission when he happened to put a tracing of the window over one of his colour charts - a eureka moment. Also he used a computer program that could randomise choices, and made not just the window (with the 72 colours of glass in the medieval stained-glass palette) but the 4900 colours painting that was shown in the museum next door when the window was unveiled.

The painting is gloss paint (very, very smooth) on aluminium composite panels, and measures 6.8m x 6.8m (each square is 9.7cm, probably derived from what was needed for the window). He's used 25 colours, graded as regularly as possible from light to dark in order to repeat the chromatic spectrum in such a way that no one colour dominates.

It's put together in panels of 5x5 squares, and for Version II, shown at the Serpentine, was divided into 49, so that each separate item was made up of four of these panels. Their positions in the gallery were decided, and then a dice was used to decide which painting went where, and which way up it went.
Richter is arguably Germany's most written-about and top-selling artist. He's always maintained a distance from the subject matter of the painting, using ready-made images to avoid ready-made artistic identity - which has been viewed as "an articulation of a thoroughgoing aesthetic nihilism" - and it's also said that he simultaneously uses strategies of coherence and confusion. Make what you will of that!