The idea of the readymade was, of course, introduced into art history in the early-twentieth century with Duchamp’s practice of designating as works of art commonplace, mass produced objects such as a bottle rack, a snow shovel, and, most notoriously, a urinal (Fountain, 1917).  At a talk he gave at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1961, Duchamp outlined briefly some of the ideas that lay behind the readymade.  First, the choice of an object to be designated a readymade was, Duchamp said, “never dictated by aesthetic delectation.”  “This choice,” he went on to say, was instead “based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . in fact, complete anesthesia.”  Equally important, Duchamp continued, was the readymade’s “lack of uniqueness.”  In his essay entitled “Painting: The Task of Mourning,” reprinted in his book Painting as Model (1990), Yve-Alain Bois argues that Duchamp’s “readymades were not only a negation of painting and a demonstration of the always-already mechanical nature of painting.  They also demonstrated that within our culture the work of art is a fetish that must abolish all pretense to use value.”  

Richter’s reputation rests primarily on the paintings that, like Toilet Roll, uncannily resemble their photographic sources.   His comments on photography suggest that Richter’s turn to painting from photographs stems from his understanding of the photograph as a kind of readymade.  Striking a rather Duchampian note, a notebook entry from 1964 reads: “Painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic and inartistic thing that anyone could do.” “The fascination of a photograph,” he adds a page later, “is not in its eccentric composition but in what it has to say: its information content.”  That same year, he writes again, “That is why I like the ‘non-composed’ photograph.  It does not try to do anything but report on a fact.”  Richter seems to intuit what Duchamp later stressed as one of the key ingredients of the readymade: “just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect.”  In her influential essay “Notes on the Index” (1976) [reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986)], Rosalind Krauss elaborates on the parallels between the photograph and the readymade, arguing that both are “about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or selection.”  Richter’s repeated insistence that he likes photographs because they have “no style, no composition, no judgment” would seem to suggest that his interest in photography devolves on an idea of the photograph as readymade, on photography’s ability to isolate an object with a minimum of manipulation, modification, or alteration.  Richter appears to regard the camera in a way similar to that of contemporaries such as Warhol, Ed Ruscha, or Douglas Huebler—as a dumb recording device.  

Lesende provocatively engages photography, the readymade, and painting--both abstract and Old Master.  Richter’s source photograph brings an element of contingency to the painting, as the “sitter” is turned away from the camera, absorbed in her reading.  Because Richter eliminates almost all detail from the painting, the figure is removed from any kind of context.  Pushing the painting in the direction of abstraction, Richter focuses on the fields of black, brown, and red that play off the white of the reader’s page, blonde hair, and whiteness of her neck.  In an entry from his notebooks from the mid-sixties, Richter jotted down: “The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.”  Richter’s famous “blurring” of the painting surface brushes up against photography’s abstractions at the same time that it evokes Old Master paining, specifically Vermeer of Delft.   In his book on Richter, Elger notes that Lesende’s “sister” work, Lesende (CR: 804), a similar painting with Sabine reading in profile (currently in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), “is a clear attempt to bring Jan Vermeer’s A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window (ca. 1659) into the twentieth century.”  That Richter’s model reads Der Spiegel, a mass produced magazine, brings yet another layer to a deceptively simple painting, superimposing representational systems: painting on photography, and mass media on painting.  Although the perspectival system of Renaissance painting treated the picture plane as a window through which to see the world receding into the distance, there is an equally strong historical discourse that posits the picture plane as a mirror “held .  .  . up to nature.” The impeccably smooth, glass-like finish of the painting combined with the allusion to mirrors in the title of the journal the model reads suggest humorously Richter’s turn away from the idea of painting as a window. The painting mirrors the surface of the reader’s reality much as the magazine promises to mirror the world for her.

Richter’s glass constructions at the High are stunningly simple in execution.  11 Panes (2003) consists of just what the title indicates, 11 panes of glass lightly glazed, stacked one upon another.  Mounted on the wall like a painting, the hazy, mirror-like surface of the panes reflects the spectator’s image back at him or her.  This not-quite-transparent-not-quite opaque quality of the panes makes them, as Richter said of his earlier colored mirrors which the panes resemble, “a kind of cross between a monochrome painting and a mirror.”  The panes throw spectators’ airy, blurring reflections back at them, making the viewer appear almost like one of Richter’s photo-paintings.  

As Richter suggests, these large glass constructions are related to the most radically abstract painterly tradition of the monochrome.  While Richter’s photo-based paintings have always engaged ideas of abstraction, he did not begin to make strictly abstract paintings until about the early seventies.   When he did so, art critics found themselves pressed to reconcile these abstractions with Richter’s photo-based paintings.  In a notebook entry from 1982, Richter writes, “Everything made since Duchamp has been readymade, even when hand-painted,” ostensibly alluding to Duchamp’s observation that since the widespread adoption of tubes of paint, all painting is to some degree readymade.   Might we view Richter’s abstracts, then, through the lens of the readymade?  If we accept that Richter views photographs as readymades, then we might say of his abstract paintings what Bois said of Robert Ryman’s paintings—that they get ”closer and closer to the condition of the photograph or readymade.”  Richter himself suggests as much.  In a 1972 interview with Rolf Schön, Richter says:   “It [the photograph] had no style, no composition, no judgment. . . And if I disregard the assumption that a photograph is a piece of paper exposed to light, then I am practicing photography by other means: I’m not producing paintings that remind you of a photograph but producing photographs.  And, seen in this way, those of my paintings that have no photographic source (the abstracts, etc.) are also photographs.”