“I’ve never found anything to be lacking in a blurry canvas. Quite the contrary: you can see many more things in it than in a sharply focused image.” Gerhard Richter
In Düsenjäger, Richter reveals some of that excitement in the pink, and in the visible sense of velocity. With its blush of colour, Düsenjäger avoids the constraints of the grisaille that characterised many of Richter’s earliest Photo Paintings. The blurring efect that Richter ofen brings to these pictures, highlighting their artifce, is here used to vivid efect, with the combed brushwork adding a sense of dynamism to Düsenjäger that is only heightened by the composition, with the nose of the plane escaping the picture surface, hinting at a hastily-taken photographic source. This gives a sense of a frozen moment of speed, action, activity. Richter’s own vision of the jet is complicated by the counterpoint of his own ambiguous feelings about and experiences of war. Afer all, he had grown up near Dresden, viewing the Second World War through the eyes of a child. “I thought it was great,” he has said. “I envied the soldiers who were allowed to take part in the war. I was fascinated, like all kids, or all boys. I wandered through the trenches. Then the Russian planes came, the ones that had shot up the convoys. I thought it was all marvellous. I envied the soldiers sleeping in the barn. It took a soldier to bring me to my senses. You snotty little brat, you should get a right spanking. That gave me a fright. That gave me something to think about.” (Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004, in Gerhard Richter. Text. Writings, Interviews and Letters. 1961-2007, London, 2009, p. 466)
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Düsenjäger, and the other 1963 painting of a warplane, Bomber, both tap into that heady and complex combination of excitement and terror. “It’s a mixed feeling, and it’s no good suppressing the fascination,” Richter has stated (Interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990, loc. cit., 2009, pp. 253-54). He expanded on this idea, explaining that these pictures were not intended as anti-war, although they are sometimes being read as such: “Pictures like that don’t do anything to combat war. They only show one tiny aspect of the subject of war–maybe only my own childish feelings of fear and fascination with war and with weapons of that kind’ (Richter quoted in Hans-Ulrich Obrist, ed., Gerhard Richter: The Daily Practice of Painting. Writings and Interviews 1962-1993, London, 1995, p. 212). While the subject matter appears heavy in Bomber or indeed in Düsenjäger, Richter insists that it was selected as part of the programme of provocative detachment that he, Polke and Lueg were exploring at that time as they garnered attention with their German declension of Pop: “We [artists infuenced by Pop Art] refused to take anything seriously. That was important for survival. We were unable to see the statement in the work, neither the audience nor me. We rejected it, it didn’t exist.” (Richter, quoted in Robert Storr, ‘Interview with Gerhard Richter’, exh. cat, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, New York, 2002, p. 289) In a sense, Richter’s Düsenjäger can be seen as a cynical and
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