Are you a burden to the state? This lady was!
KEY WORDS: Historic, Socio political, Structuralist, Topical.
This is an image of an oil on canvas painting by Gerhard Richter called Aunt Marianne measuring 120cm x 130cm. It can be seen at the Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany. It was painted in 1965 based on a 1932 photo taken in Germany from the artist’s family album. It depicts the artist as a four month old infant swathed in blankets and sheets being held by his aunt, Marienne Schonfelder who was fourteen at the time. The image is painted in a figurative manner using monochrome hues with a blurring technique resembling a photo effect This haunting image needs further historic contextualization to appreciate its full impact. The aunt suffered from mental health problems, probably from a form of schizophrenia. She was admitted to a mental institution in 1937 where she was compulsorily sterilized under the The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseased Offspring. In 1945 she was murdered by starvation as part of the Third Reich’s euthanasia program.
Armed with this information and indexical signs, the image gains further power. This image together with a picture of his Uncle Rudi dressed in SS Officer uniform is one of a series which confronts the artist with his family’s Nazi associations. It was painted in 1965 at a time of increasing material wealth in West Germany. The recent Nazi past was a taboo subject in West Germany at the time; many of the key orchestrators of the new found prosperity had been participants in the Nazi machine. Richter was a recent defector from the communist east Germany. This gave him a detachment of view on West German capitalist society. The use of iconic family portraiture subverted by his photorealist painting technique demonstrates this. If the signified messages to his 1965 West German audience were to do with taboo subjects of their recent past; what are the signified messages in the image 47 years later. Does the image have the same resonance?
MY ARGUMENT is that many of the signified issues in the picture are being played out in today’s society. The goings on at Winterbourne View and at Dignitas are examples of how the mentally ill, those with learning difficulties and those with chronic illness are cared for in the UK in 2012.
Methods of analysis included: Structuralist, Formal, Paradigmatic, Semniotic and intertextual approaches
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