Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter
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Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn (1886 – 1978) was a Swedish physicist that was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1924 for his research and discoveries in the field of X-ray spectroscopy. He was a sought-after speaker and a foreign member of the Royal Society and as well as the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Furthermore, he was president of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics from 1934 to 1947.

Gerhard Richter painted 48 Portraits for the German pavilion of the 1972 Venice Biennale. He created 48 individual portraits of historical figures for the exhibition space of the pavilion: writers, scientists, composers and philosophers can be found, whereas politicians and artists are not represented. Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein and Oscar Wilde are among the most famous, alongside some less-known individuals.

The 48 Portraits depict solely white central European and American males, born between 1824 and 1904. Richter selected them from 270 portrait photographs that he had taken from encyclopaedias and lexicons and collected in his Atlas [Sheets: 30–41].

The paintings were directly based on the source images from Atlas. The choice of a standardised format (70 x 55 cm) and source images similar in form underline the uniformity of the paintings. The realisation in greyscale as well as the soft rendering of the faces that show only few wrinkles or unevenness, make the pictures appear as homogeneous entity.

48 Portraits have often been interpreted in relation to Richter's personal history and beliefs. However, the individuality of the depicted people seems to have limited significance because the artist homogenised their features during the process of painting. 'I am interested in the speechless language of these pictures. Heads, even if they are full of literature and philosophy, become quite unliterary. Literature is invalidated; the personalities become anonymous. That's what is important to me here.'1

The German pavilion at the Venice Biennale was reconstructed in 1938 and therefore reflects the architecture of National Socialist Germany. In the framework of this unadorned monumental architecture, the choice of the portrait genre evokes associations of portraits of political leaders. In opposition to this, Richter creates a multiplicity of portraits omitting the depictions of politicians. Hence the architecture and the work 48 Portraits could be seen as complementing one another.

The fact that no women were included in the series of portraits lead to speculations. In retrospect, Richter explained the circumstances as follows: 'And as I mentioned, you also have the psychological or subjective timeliness of the father problem. This affects all of society. I am not talking about myself because that would be rather uninteresting, but the absence of the father is a typical German problem. That is the reason for such agitation; that is why this work has such a disquieting effect.'2