HOMESTORIES: PERFORMING & VISUALISING THE FAMILIAL IN WEST GERMANY, 1961-1989 Volume I Alexandra Olivia Désirée Tait University College London (UCL) Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD, History of Art 2 I, Alexandra Olivia Désirée Tait confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 3 4 ABSTRACT This thesis explores how postwar German artists, including Gerhard Richter (b.1932), Georg Baselitz (b.1938), Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), and Isa Genzken (b.1948), have publicly mediated, performed and interrogated the familial gaze during the three decades dominated by the divisive Berlin Wall. It considers the ways in which their paintings, artist’s books, and more ephemeral paper-based and printed productions have reworked and reused ‘personal’ photographs in works that have been repeatedly dismissed as sentimental, kitsch or disregarded as ‘documents.’ My project not only resituates these ostensibly ‘private’ images – depicting the artists in and around the home, with partners, friends, collaborators, children, and other family members – but also positions them as significant contributions to the postwar German cultural engagement with the familial. I explore the cultural meanings of these liminal images on the threshold between the private and public, and aim to understand why and how these artists repeatedly return to the familial and domestic, and the place of these works in relation to the public consciousness of the family and home in West Germany. Situating Genzken, Polke, Baselitz and Richter’s familial portraits within the context of the legal, economic, cultural and social construction of the family, I outline the material conditions and contradictions of postwar identity construction in West Germany. I argue that these works can be understood as a kind of conceptual and theoretical model for rethinking the place of the familial and the personal within the discipline of art history. Fundamentally, this thesis asks: what is the critical potential of the familial? And crucially, can these works offer an ‘intimate’ way of looking and a model of relationality that leads out of the cul-de-sac of the biographical? 5 6 IMPACT STATEMENT The materials, arguments and research questions brought together in this thesis could bring about the following impact. It could potentially generate critical debates – both amongst specialists and a broader non-specialist public – about the social role of artists and the arts, particularly in regard to a nation’s engagement with its own history and (problematic) past. It could hopefully also generate new ways of thinking about familial images, and how we engage, both personally and as a society, with traditional and non-normative representations of couples and families. A curatorial project based on this dissertation’s research, including, but not limited to, an exhibition and catalogue, conference, panel discussion, and gallery talks, could engage non-academic audiences with important questions about conceptions of the familial and domestic. These could potentially generate a broader public debate about the increasing pressure to capitalise all social relations, including familial, often through photographs shared on social media. It would hopefully also encourage the preservation and promotion of more ephemeral works of art, and therefore inspire new ways of thinking about material and cultural heritage. 7 8 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am incredibly grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for funding this research project, and particularly to LAHP for encouraging an active, interdisciplinary environment through a network of doctoral students and research staff across a number of institutions. A Juliane & Franz Roh Fellowship at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (ZI) in Munich provided the opportunity to spend several critical months engaging with relatively unknown primary sources and material. I am particularly grateful to Ulrich Pfisterer and Iris Lauterbach for their warm welcome and support during my time at the ZI. This dissertation benefitted greatly from the critical comments and thoughtful suggestions by conference and workshop participants at the ZI, the ‘Reframing Family Photography’ conference organised by the Toronto Photography Seminar, and particularly the contributors to Capitalism and the Camera, especially Blake Stimson, Kevin Coleman and Daniel James. Christian Weikop offered invaluable feedback during my upgrade. This project was inspired by a research trip to the Gerhard Richter Archive shortly after I completed my MA. Dietmar Elger, Janice Bretz, and above all Kerstin Küster made that early visit, and every subsequent trip, incredibly productive, exciting, and an absolute pleasure. I am grateful to them for their insight, their encouragement, and the access they granted to unknown material. Dora Stiefelmeier from Galleria Pieroni and Ariane Beyn at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program provided crucial information 9 when my research resulted in several dead-ends. Against all odds, Laura Llewellyn at the Getty procured essential reproductions. This dissertation would not have been possible without my supervisor, Sarah E. James. She continuously pushed me to rethink, re-examine and revise my ideas, research questions, and conclusions. I am immensely grateful for her detailed feedback, kind support, and her wisdom. Briony Fer, Mechthild Fend, and Rose Marie San Juan also offered important support and advice during my time in the department. After supervising my MA on a series of Richter’s ‘late’ familial images, Tim Clark was and continues to be a thought-provoking source of inspiration and encouragement. Friends at and outside of UCL, especially Nina, Dominique, Olympia and Anna-Maria, have offered comfort, consolation, and lots of laughter. Without Joost’s kindness and love, I would have never started or completed this project. My final thanks are reserved for Mama, for her generosity, her daily support, her devotion, her sacrifices, and for instilling in me a profound appreciation for expansive conceptions of ‘home’ and ‘family.’ This dissertation is dedicated to her. 10 11 CONTENTS Volume I Introduction 14 Chapter 1 Domesticating the Artist-Hero: polke/richter richter/polke (1966) 57 Chapter 2 Georg Baselitz’s Bedroom(s) 120 Chapter 3 Künstlerehepaar: I(sa).G(enzken).G(erhard).R(ichter) 196 Conclusion 259 Bibliography 267 Volume II List of Illustrations 294 Illustrations 308 12 13 INTRODUCTION A man in a grey suit with corresponding glasses, tie, and hair is standing behind a podium with two small microphones, holding up a printed image in his right hand. The printout – the mismatched white margin framing the scene indicates a hasty copy-paste from the internet – depicts a figure turned away from the viewer towards a dark grey background. The red floral design on the cardigan and pink shirt underneath suggests we might be looking at a young girl, her blonde hair tucked into a neat, low bun. The image is not particularly clear; yet the blur might be the result of a low-resolution reproduction rather than indicative of the original. The banner across the lectern from which the man in grey is speaking provides some context. The image appears to be a prop during a speech he is giving for the German Civil Service Federation (DBB Beamtenbund und Tarifunion). Chancellor Angela Merkel will speak from the same podium, against the same garish purple background, a few hours later. The Federation’s annual conference, under the theme – ‘Europa - Quo vadis?’ – is attempting, once again, to answer where Europe, specifically Germany, might be heading. It is a loaded question, even in January 2017, and one the country has been grappling with since the end of the Second World War. Thomas de Maizière, Germany’s Minister of the Interior and the man holding up the poster, appears to be offering Betty (1988), a work by Gerhard Richter depicting his daughter turning towards one of her father’s painted monochromes, as a possible answer (Fig. 1). Richter’s Betty shows the artist’s young daughter seated, twisting her torso away from the viewer, and perhaps more significantly, away from her father, looking across her right shoulder (Fig. 2). The energy of her movement is heightened by Richter’s blur; she won’t be able to support this position very long and will be turning 14 back at any moment. And yet of course Richter’s camera, and later his paintbrush, has captured her looking away. The painting is based on a photograph Richter took more than a decade before he painted the image. It is dated 1978 on panel 445 of Atlas, where Betty appears alongside photographs of apples, a bottle of wine, and the interior of a church, grouped together under the title ‘Various Motifs’ (Fig. 3). Many pages earlier, on panel 393 ‘Betty Richter’ (1975), the girl is wearing the same pink shirt in five of the eight photographs (Fig. 4). Across the page, Betty appears three more times, lying on the floor (Fig. 5). Two of the photographs served Richter as source images for two further paintings entitled Betty, both painted in 1977, which makes their dating to 1978 in Atlas rather unlikely (Fig. 6, Fig. 7). This disorienting temporality is significant. Photographs of Richter’s family – particularly of his children and his wives – appear throughout Atlas. They represent fleeting moments from Richter’s personal life and can be understood as evoking a similar sense of nostalgia as any family album might. Richter invites his viewers to look back, both with him and with Betty. Nevertheless, these photographs are very obviously not part of a family album, but rather appear amongst press and pornographic images, as well as sketches and collages, and continue to serve as sources for his paintings. Richter’s 1988 painting of his daughter has become one of his most well-known, and possibly also his most well- loved. It ranked second in a 2001 survey conducted by Frieze which asked artists, museum employees and gallerists: ‘If you could have any five artworks for your home, what would you choose?’1 1 As quoted in Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, translated by Elizabeth M.