This is a rough unformatted draught of the Essay:
Provide a detailed, critical analysis of a cultural text. James Norman
My chosen cultural text is a text called Aunt Marianne. It is a painting by the artist Gerhard Richter.
It is of interest to me for a number of reasons. Firstly, 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 then to be investigated. Through the ideas of semiotics and structuralism, I wish to extract the signified notions from these signifiers from within the text. I then wish 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 biographic works which were done by Richter during the time that Aunt Marienne was painted.
The image in fig1 is an image of an oil on canvas painting which measures 120cm. x 130cm.. The colours are in black and white monochrome. The original painting is on view in the Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kuntsammlungen, Dresden, Germany. It was painted in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1965. it is based on a photograph from the family album belonging to the painter. The original photograph was taken in 1932.
The image shows a very young looking women holding an infant swathed in blankets and sheets supported by a number of pillows against a black background. This is a portrait of Marianne Schonfeld and Gerhard Richter as a four month old baby. Marienne Schonfeld is Richter’s aunt. The monochrome painterly image blur quality to it. This has been termed as a photorealist style. 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. This genre of painting has a long pedigree going back to the earliest representations of Christian art. Marienne 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. These decisions are not only to do with the the nature of the painting but also factors such as the choice of the original photo, 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. 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 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 would argue that one of the motivational factors in self portrature 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 in 1932. This was the year before Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came to power in 1933 in Germany. Marianne went on to develop a mental illness which was thought to be a form of schizophrenia. In 1937 she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, The National Institute Arnsdorf, outside Dresden where she was compusolury sterilized under the 1933 law; “Law for the prevention of hereditary diseased offspring”. This was one of the earliest pieces of legislation brought in by the Nazis on coming to power. It is estimated that over 400000 individuals were compulsorily sterilized during the time of Nazi rule. This was a manifestation of the eugenics movement that was prevalent in Europe and American in the early decades of the twentieth century. It emanated from a socio-political extrapolation of Darwins view of evolution. This distorted view fitted neatly into the Third Reich’s racial policies. Marianne was eventually deliberately murdered by starvation in the Institute Gross Scheidnitz. She was was one of five thousand patients to be killed at this Institute under the Nazi medical profession.
The biographic details of the artist himself is of interest to the analysis. Richter had spent his formative years under the Nazi regime followed by communist rule in divided East Germany. He escaped to the capitalist West Germany from Dresden in 1962; settling in Dusseldorf in 1962. 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. 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. 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. The picture could therefore 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. He says in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2005 when questioned about his past said that “ ..... facts do not interest me”. In the biography on his own web site he describes his aunts demise as “a regrettable end to her life”.
A key text to add to the analysis comes from a Jurgen Schrieber who is an investigative journalist in Germany. His book which was published in 2003 is called “Richter, A painter from Germany; a drama of a family”. He discovered that Richter’s father in law from his first marriage was a Prof. Heinrich Enfinger. He was an SS. gynaecologist and was in charge of forcible medical sterilizations in the Dresden area in the 1930s. He went on to be a respected gynaecologist after the war. His image 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 scene is in deliberately marked 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 threw up as many questions as it could answer. The introduction of external texts from varied sources and the intertextuality from Richter’s other paintings went some way to throw light on the Aunt Marianne text. How much Richter knew at the time about the full family involvement in Nazi eugenics remains an enigma.
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