Fine Art Student: James Norman (12018904).
Introduction to Visual Culture: Contextualising Practice [UA1A8P-20-1].
Year 2012-2013.
The Essay question: Present a detailed, critical analysis of a cultural text.
My chosen cultural text is called Aunt Marianne (Fig 1). It is a painting by Gerhard Richter.
It is of interest to me for a number of reasons. I am interested in what the text has to say about itself as an entity. Secondly, I am interested in the historic events and biographies which have enveloped the figures portrayed. Thirdly, I am interested in the dialogue between the author and the work and the questions which the dialogue poses. I wish to use the notions of semiotics, structuralism, post structuralism and the thoughts of Roland Barthes to demonstrate why this image is of interest to the viewer. The object is to be formally analyzed. The content of the image is to be further investigated using the ideas of semiotics and structuralism. I wish to extract the signified notions from the signifiers from within the text. I then intend to add external text to give the analysis a poststructuralist viewpoint. This will take the form of historic, biographical, autobiographical and sociological texts. Intertextuality will also play a part in expanding the analysis. This will take the form of referring to similar historic biographical works which were done by Richter during the time that Aunt Marianne was painted.
The image in fig.1 is an image of an oil on canvas painting which measures 120cm. x 130cm. (Godfrey and Serota, 2011). The colours are in black and white monochrome. It was painted in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1965 (Godfrey and Serota, 2011). It is based on a photograph from Richter’s family album (Harding, L. 2006. p.16). The original photograph was taken in 1932 (Harding, 2006. p16).
The image shows a very young looking women holding an infant swathed in blankets and sheets and supported by a number of pillows against a black background. This is a portrait of Marianne Schonfeld (Heiser, 2012) and Gerhard Richter as a four month old baby (Heiser, 2012). Marianne Schonfeld is Richter’s aunt (Heiser, 2012). There is a surface blur quality to the painting. The composition takes the form of a tri-angle in the same manner as a Madonna and child icon. This genre of art was, and still is, for Christian meditative purposes where the Virgin Mary together with infant Christ child are venerated (Williams, 2003, p.11). This genre of painting has a long pedigree going back to the earliest representations of Christian art (Williams, 2003, p.11). Marianne holds a far away glazed expression while the infant artist with his enlarged cranium looks out directly out to the viewer as if he has something of gravitas to announce.
It should be stated that all Richter’s artistic decisions are deliberate and intentional. They have not come about as a result of an uncontrolled accident. They include the nature of the paint, composition, choice of the original photo, and the date and place of production. These decisions can be viewed as signifiers in semiotic analysis. The choice of oil painting from a photograph reflects the tensions of the debate on the hierarchy of image which has taken place since the advent of Photography. The choice of oil and canvas signifies gravitas. Similarly the use of the blur which is one of Richter’s motifs in his works is also part of the dialogue between painting and photography. The triangular icon like structure signifies notions of a religious nature such as virginity, fertility and the gospel message. The positions and the relationships of the figures raise a number of questions. Infant Richter is the figure who engages with the viewer in a direct adult to adult manner (Berne,1961). Although held by his aunt he is at the same time detached and remote from her she appears to be connected to the mysterious dark background. Why has the author of this text decided to depict himself as a four month old in this quasi-religioso manner?
The analysis of the author in the author’s work poses a problem in semiotic theory. Roland Barthes (1977, p. 147) in his essay, Death of the Author says; ‘to give an author a text is to impose a limit to the text to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing analysis.’ Thus a purely structuralist approach would exclude the author from the analysis. Self presentation theory (Crozier and Greenhalgh, 1988, pp.28-29) would argue that one of the motivational factors in self portraiture is to make an artistic statement. Therefore there is a tension in this work that probes the limits of semiotic analysis. The addition of a post structuralist approach such as referencing other historic and biographic texts would provide a further dimension to the analysis.
Here are some of the Marianne’s biographic details. She was aged fourteen when the original photograph was taken (Harding, 2006). This was the year before Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came to power in 1933 in Germany. (Shirer, 1964). Marianne went on to develop a form of schizophrenia (Green, 2009). In 1937 she was admitted to a Dresden psychiatric hospital, The National Institute Arnsdorf, where she was compulsorily sterilized (Green, 2009) under the 1933 law called “Law for the prevention of hereditary diseased offspring” (Schmidt, 2007). This was one of the earliest pieces of legislation brought in by the Nazis on coming to power (Schmidt, 2007). It is estimated that over 400,000 individuals were compulsorily sterilized during the time of Nazi rule (Schmidt, 2007). This was a manifestation of the eugenics movement that was prevalent in Europe and American in the early decades of the twentieth century (Brignell, 2007). It emanated from a socio-political extrapolation of Darwin’s theory of evolution (Brignell, 2010). This distorted view fitted neatly into the Third Reich’s racial policies (Schmidt, 2007). Marianne was eventually deliberately murdered by starvation in the Institute Gross Scheidnitz in 1945 (Green, 2009). She was one of five thousand patients killed at this Institute under the Nazi medical profession (Green, 2009).
The biographic details Richter is of interest to the analysis. He had spent his formative years under the Nazi regime followed by communist rule in divided East Germany (Godfrey and Serota, 2011). He escaped to the capitalist West Germany from Dresden in 1962 (Godfrey and Serota, 2011). This was three years before the picture was painted. This change of culture gave Richter a sense of objectivity on socio-polical issues of the West (Godfrey and Serota, 2011). One of these taboo subjects in the prosperous West Germany of the 1960s was its relationship with its recent Nazi past. Many of those who were orchestrating the prosperity of West Germany had connections with its Nazi past (Graham-Dixon, 2008). These historic themes feature in Richter’s other pictures done at the time. Most notable is the painting of Richter’s own uncle Rudi in SS uniform (fig 2). Thus the Marianne picture could be seen as signifying the author and West Germany confronting their Nazi past.
When consulting other texts to illuminate the analysis there is ambiguity about this straightforward conclusion. Richter himself is remarkably reticent, equivocal and elusive when he talks about his past and about these historically inspired images. When questioned about the Aunt Marianne picture by Der Spiegel in 2005 ‘ ..... factual information, names ,dates have never interested me much.’ (Elger and Obrist, 2009, p.500). In the biography on his own web site he describes his aunt’s demise as ‘a regrettable end to her life’ (Richter, 2012).
A key text to add to the analysis comes from Jurgen Schrieber who is a German investigative journalist (Harding, 2006). His book, published in 2003, is called; ‘Richter, A painter from Germany; a drama of a family.’ (Schreiber, 2005). He discovered that Richter’s father in law from his first marriage was a Prof. Heinrich Eufinger. He was an SS. gynaecologist and was in charge of forcible medical sterilizations in the Dresden area in the 1930s (Harding, 2006). He went on to be a respected gynaecologist after the war (Schreiber, 2005). His image (fig. 3) appears as a cheerful, smiling family man in another of Richter’s monochrome photorealist pictures called; Family at the Sea, painted in 1964. The over cheerful scene portrayed in this picture is in deliberately contrast to the man’s relationship with his extended family and to that of Germany’s recent history.
In conclusion the structural analysis of this image presents as many questions as it answer. The introduction of external texts from varied sources and the intertextuality from Richter’s other paintings added further insights to the analysis of the text. How much Richter knew at the time about the full family involvement in Nazi eugenics remains an enigma.
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Fig.2. Uncle Rudi 1965 Oil on Canvas 87 x 50cm.
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Fig.3. Family at the Seaside 1964 Oil on Canvas 150 x 200cm. |
Richter, G. (1964). Fun at the Seaside [Oil on Canvas]. At:Duisberg: Museum Kuppersmuhle fur Moderne Kunst [Online]. Available from:http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?start=20&num=10&hl=en&tbo=d&biw=996&bih=723&tbm=isch&tbnid=hPrkQKnzVgSeTM:&imgrefurl=http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/nov/30/gerhard-richter-national-gallery&docid=MoqHQREGGm-_oM&imgurl=http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/11/29/family_at_the_sea460.jpg&w=460&h=276&ei=bCrHULnbPLGV0QWw64DYDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=389&vpy=230&dur=7744&hovh=174&hovw=290&tx=137&ty=100&sig=104215748773511625314&sqi=2&page=2&tbnh=134&tbnw=215&ndsp=25&ved=1t:429,r:37,s:0,i:55 [Accessed: 11 December 2012].
Norwich, England: Canterbury Press .
