September 25, 2007
On Gerhard Richter’s new cathedral window in Cologne
The invaluable website Sign and Sight has translated an article about Gerhard Richter’s new south transept window at the Cologne Cathedral. It is by Petra Kipphoff, was published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on September 13, and contains new-to-me information about Richter’s inspiration for the abstract design he eventually settled upon:
The cathedral architect's initial request came with the wish for a figurative motif. Not necessarily Joseph or the Virgin Mary, but maybe a modern martyr like Father Kolbe or Edith Stein. After a brief attempt Richter gave up the holy venture. In fact he would have returned the commission had he not accidentally, playfully, placed a template of the window's frame on a reproduction of one of his earlier colour field paintings. "I got a real shock," says Richter, "because it looked good, it was the only honest possibility."
There was more to it than meaning-resistant abstraction. The interplay of light and colour in the stained glass window also attracted Richter for its possibilities of new experience on old terrain. "The main problem of my painting is the light," he wrote back in 1964/65, by which he meant not the light of Impressionist plein-air painting but the instantaneous light of the photography that so often forms the basis for his paintings. From the early photos of family and friends to the sea and landscapes and the Baader-Meinhof cycle, light-generated photographs - preferably blurred and in the shades between grey and white - have provided the inspiration for Gerhard Richter's paintings. Only in the series of monochrome panels and the abstract works does light play no active role (here it is a matter of illumination rather than exposure). A stained-glass window, where the glass changes its coloration with the quality of the daylight, offers a new facet of this old theme that is the central issue.
Try this Flickr search for images of the window.