A Note on Gerhard Richter's "October 18, 1977"

Abstract

The group of paintings entitled October 18, 1977 that Gerhard Richter completed in the late fall of 1988 immediately confronts its viewers with the question of the very possibility of representing history, both in contemporary painting and in modernism in general. Despite their apparent continuity with Richter's early photopaintings,I these paintings in fact constitute the first attempt in Richter's oeuvre to address historically specific public experience. The two earlier series of paintings that one could most easily identify as the precedent for the new series would be the Eight Student Nurses (1966) and the 48 Portraits (1971-72). As depictions of recent murder victims,2 on the one hand, and as presentations of figures of public history, on the other, however, a comparison with these two groups instantly clarifies their distance and their difference from the paintings October 18, 1977. Richter's recent decision to represent current public history, that is, simultaneously to violate the prohibition against representing historical subjects in modern painting and to break the taboo against remembering this particular episode of recent German history the activities of the Baader-Meinhof Group and the murder of its members in Stammheim Prison distinguish these paintings from all earlier works by Richter. That this group of paintings was first exhibited in a building by Mies van