4 096 Farben (359), 1974, was the final work in the third series of colour chart paintings that Gerhard Richter made in the 1960s and 1970s. It was such a definitive statement that the artist stopped this strand of works for 25 years, only returning to the idea of colour charts when developing a proposal for the Reichstag in 1998 (see Atlas, panel 651) and when commissioned to make the south transept window for Cologne’s cathedral, a project coüdmpleted in 2007. 4096 Farben is one of Richter’s most powerful achievements of the 1970s, but although there is plenty of information about how and why Richter came to make it, its meanings and implications are still elusive and much debated.
The origins of the work go back to the mid 1960s when Richter made a series of around 18 color chart paintings using readymade colours. Richter had been collecting colour charts from housepainter supply shops in Düsseldorf such as Sonnen-Herzog.[1] These commercial samples gave him a way of thinking about colour that was entirely at odds with the ideas of other artists from Wassily Kandinsky to Josef Albers, and his new ideas were most clearly articulated in 128 Farben (136), 1966, where the readymade colours were arranged randomly in a grid, each occupying a square with white borders between them. Gone were ideas about balance, color chords, and harmonies. Instead, Richter acknowledged that the only legitimate way to approach color was to admit that it was just another commercial product alongside all the other consumable things he painted at the time: designer tables, folding dryers, fast cars, Mediterranean holidays. And just as his choice of these subjects in his grey photopaintings was random, so too was his dispersal of colors across the grid of 128 Farben. Richter did not know this at the time, but other artists were also emphasising the links between color and post-war consumer culture, for instance Alighiero Boetti, who in 1968 covered small panels in colors whose trade names and numbers were spelled out in cork letters. Both Richter and Boetti probably knew Marcel Duchamp’s last painting Tu’m, 1918, which features a line of overlapping lozenges based on samples in an oil paint catalogue. Tu’m is widely acknowledged as the first canvas to articulate an understanding of color as a readymade, commercial product, rather than as a component of painting to be mixed and arranged by the expressive, intuitive painter. That Richter was thinking about Duchamp when he made 128 Farben is pretty clear: he had also recently painted Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) (134), 1966 in dialogue with Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 (1912) and would soon begin work on 4 Glasscheiben (160), 1967. (These works were shown together in a room in Panorama, the retrospective I co-curated with Nicholas Serota in 2012).
By the beginning of the 1970s, the reason to make color chart paintings had changed, and the way Richter made them also shifted. Richter was becoming more aware of international debates around contemporary art, and by 1969, he would have known that young curators like Harald Szeemann were looking away from painting when making their statements about what work was most exciting and important. When Attitudes Become Form gathered many artists Richter knew and admired, but no straightforward painters. This must have been worrying for an artist who felt he was ambitious and who wanted to be part of an ongoing conversation about progressive contemporary art. At this time, and thanks largely to his gallerists and friends Heiner Friedrich and Konrad Fischer, Richter was also more exposed to new directions in American art – Donald Judd’s outsourcing of production to assistants and external fabricators, Mel Bochner’s and Sol LeWitt’s explorations of seriality and mathematical principles of combination (ideas evident in the work of Hanne Darboven who had spent time in America in the mid-60s), Robert Ryman’s new ideas around materiality and facture. Art historians have shown that Richter was not aware of Ellsworth Kelly’s colour chart paintings of the early 1950s at this point, but Richter knew how ideas around chance were central to the writings and scores of Kelly’s friend John Cage. All this is to say that in the early 1970s, one way to defend painting and to make sure it was seen in landmark international shows was to go back to colour charts, and to explore ideas of seriality, fabrication and chance arrangements in ways connected to all these figures’ work.
So it was that in 1971, Richter made four new colour chart paintings, 180 Farben (300-1 to 300-4). Unlike in the 1966 paintings, the colors here were derived from a mathematical process: Richter took the primaries and graded them with greys according to a strict system to produce 180 shades that were then randomly arranged over the grid. Three of these paintings were chosen for Harald Szeemann’s Documenta V in Kassel in the summer of 1972 where most of the artists that had been shown in Attitudes were also included. The following year, Richter undertook a new commission for the BMW building in Munich, and the scale of the commission required a move to a new studio on Brückenstrasse in Düsseldorf. It was in this expansive space that he embarked on a third series of color chart paintings in 1973 and 1974, of which 4096 Farben is the final statement. Just as with the 180 Farben, the new paintings debuted in the context of an exhibition looking at new directions in contemporary art not restricted to painting: a show at the Palais de Beaux Arts in Brussels in January 1974 that included Richter alongside On Kawara, Marcel Broodthaers, Gilbert & George, Victor Burgin, Richard Long, Carl Andre, and Daniel Buren.
Richter said in an interview of 1973 that ‘the number 180 [used in the 1971 paintings] seemed too arbitrary to me so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions’[2], and in a text written for the catalogue for this Brussels show, he laid out the system he had invented for the 1973-74 color charts.
"In order to represent all extant color shades in one painting, I worked out a system which – starting from the three primaries, plus grey – made possible a continual subdivision (differentiation) through equal gradations. 4 x 4 = 16 x 4 = 64 x 4 = 256 x 4 = 1024. The multiplier 4 was necessary because I wanted to keep the image size, the square size and the number of squares in a constant proportion to each other.’"
Richter here was addressing the paintings 1024 Farben (350-1 to 350-4), 1973. In these paintings (now in museums in Darmstadt, Ghent, Paris and Zurich) each different color occupies a rectangle separated from each other one by a white framework. For 4096 Farben, probably begun early in 1974, he made three crucial changes. Each color repeats four times, the painting was made on a square canvas rather than on a rectangular one, and the white grid was jettisoned – each color square abutted the next. What 4096 Farben shared with the 1024 Farben paintings was two features: the colors had been arranged across the grid randomly (for instance by assigning each a number, writing the numbers on slips, and pulling the slips out of a box before painting the next square) and the paintings were made with a team of assistants. Not only were the squares of paint unmodulated with no visible brushwork; they were applied by people hired by the artist, rather than Richter himself.
There are few paintings in Richter’s corpus whose genesis can be as clearly understood as 4096 Farben but as mentioned, that does not mean that its implications or cultural significance is agreed. One way to approach the painting is to see it as a magnificent celebration of color. Richter had said himself that when he looked at his 1973 color charts, he made ‘the observation that each color adapts marvelously to whichever other color is used.’[4] In 4096 Farben, the colors are even more proximate to each other, and so the sense of adaption is even more intense. Richter – it could be said – replaces all traditional approaches to color in the history of painting with a new conception, and he anticipates ideas of digital color that we celebrate today (for instance, I am typing on a MacBook Pro whose screen can apparently display millions of colors).
Another approach to the 1973-74 color charts, and 4096 Farben is to see them as intimations of infinite possibility and potential. As Richter noted in a letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann in February 1973, he had made ‘a few examples taken from an infinite range of potential mixtures and arrangements [which] stand for the endless possibilities that can never be realized – the boundless, the meaningless, in which I place so much hope.’[5] There were four rectangular 1024 Farben paintings but there could have been millions. ‘If I had painted all the possible permutations, light would have taken more than 400 billion years to travel from the first painting to the last’, Richter wrote in 1974.[6] There is only one 4096 Farben, but standing in front of it, because of the vast number of colors and their random dispersal, one is provoked to wonder – how many ways could the painting have been made differently? What if all the permutations of colors were realised? Just as in front of the painting, there is no place to rest one’s eyes, so these questions lead the mind racing towards infinity. These thoughts can be hugely exciting.
So 4096 Farben could be seen as a celebration of color and an intimation of an infinity of possible yet unmade similar paintings, but another, very different approach is possible. In his recently published monograph on Richter, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who got to know Richter exactly at this time when some of the color chart paintings were shown at Galerie Rudolf Zwirner in Cologne in 1974, has asked how to make sense of these works. For Buchloh, the paintings need to be understood in the wider context of what it meant to make abstraction in Germany in the post-war period, when the annihilation of the pre-war avant-gardes was powerfully felt, and where it was very clear how ill-fated were the utopian dreams of artists like Piet Mondrian, whose Composition with Grid IX, 1919, is undoubtedly another formal precursor to Richter’s Color charts. Buchloh is interested in the way different German artists registered the loss of the promise of the pre-war avant-gardes. In Richter’s circle, Blinky Palermo exchanged the oil paints that an artist in the 1920s might have used for shop-bought bolts of readymade dyed fabric, a shift that signalled a mournful admission of that the dreams of abstraction were no longer believable, while Sigmar Polke appeared to mock the utopian aspirations of abstraction in Moderne Kunst, 1968. Buchloh sees Richter as balancing these approaches in the 1973-74 Color charts: ‘In Richter’s 1024 Colors we encounter a difficult synthesis of abstraction’s continuous shifting between tragedy and travesty, between allegorical iteration and parodic repetition.’[7] The paintings could be seen as ‘tragic’ because they recall Mondrian’s grids only to underscore how impossible is his dream that abstraction can hold within it ‘the utopian promise of a social and political egalitarian culture of a future without hierarchical orders and power relationships.’[8] The painting could be seen as a ‘travesty’ because Richter replaces the idea of careful composition with one of randomness, as if admitting that the painter’s historical role (for instance, judging color arrangements) are irrelevant, and that now a mathematical system and some studio assistants can generate a canvas instead.
With 4096 Farben, Richter completed a body of work that, alongside his Grey monochromes, had taken up most of his energies in the first half of the 1970s.[9] New approaches were required to continue making abstract paintings, and new tools too. A couple of years after, with Konstruktion, 1976, a pathway was opened that led to the hundreds of Abstract Paintings he made with brushes and squeegees in the 1980s to the late 2010s. Ideas about color, about chance, about systems and serial production, and about abstraction’s dreams and disappointments remained within Richter’s thinking. Into the 2000s the painting continued to reverberate in his production, not just in the Cologne Cathedral commission, but in the serial subdivisions that Richter used to make the Strip paintings. Standing in front of 4096 Farben, the squares filling your visual field, and your eyes never able to rest in any one spot, the experience is so utterly complex and surprising that it is easy to see why this work remained so crucial to what Richter would do.
[1] Ann Temkin, ‘Gerhard Richter’ in Ann Temkin (ed.), Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008, p.90
[2] Interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 1973 in Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007 (D.A.P, 2009), p.82
[3] Text for catalogue of group exhibition, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1974, in Writings, p.91
[4] Op. cit., Writings, p.83
[5] From a Letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann, February 1973 in Writings, pp. 70-71
[6] Writings, p.91
[7] Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting After the Subject of History, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2022, p.208
[8] Ibid., 204
[9] 4096 Farben was actually not exhibited publicly until Richter’s first major North American retrospective in 1988 when it was seen in Toronto, Chicago, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. It was seen again in 2012 in ‘Panorama’ in London, Paris and Berlin; in London it was included in a room of Grey paintings from the 1970s.
