Title of Artwork: “Man Shot Down No.669 1”
Artwork by Gerhard Richter
Year Created 1988
Summary of Man Shot Down No.669 1
Man Shot Down The series 18. Oktober 1977 includes fifteen canvases, including mine. The series depicts Baader-Meinhof, a terrorist organisation, and the harrowing events of the German Autumn (events in Germany in late 1977 associated with actions of terrorists from Red Army Faction and further police persecution of adherents of left ideology). Many crimes committed by the Baader-Meinhof, including kidnapping and murder, led to the group’s leaders being imprisoned and convicted. They kidnapped businessman Hanns Martin Schleyer and commandeered a German airliner in Somalia in order to try and negotiate their own release. After a successful operation on October 17, 1977, the state regained control of the plane. Convicted leaders were found dead in their cells the next morning, and a fourth was stabbed to death. In spite of the official findings, many people believe that the prisoners were murdered. Schleyer was beheaded by his captors after the news of their demise had spread through the media.
All About Man Shot Down No.669 1
First, Richter gathered all relevant images from police reports and the German press, which he then used to develop a concept for the show. Every painting in this series was built around these sketches. Andreas Baader, a co-founder of the Baader-Meinhof, was found shot in the head in his cell, and this image depicts him as such. It was from this starting point that Richter created the ‘blur effect’ with layers of grey, which obscured many details. Art critics have compared Baader’s pose in Man Shot Down I to depictions of the Pieta and Jacques Louis David’s The Death of Marat, which depict the dead body (1793).
When he painted about the Vietnam War, Richter was not trying to make a political point. Using a painterly approach to convey the elusiveness of the events depicted, Richter shows that there are no answers to be found. Death, suffering, and grief are all major themes in the series. Richter understood the gravity of the situation, which included the atrocities committed by the terrorists, as well as the institutional failures that resulted in the radicalization of these young people and their subsequent deaths, which were horrific in and of themselves. To address the events ten years later, Richter touches on concepts of collective memory and the public’s ability to remember or forget recent historical events.
It was Richter’s goal to keep the entire series in one place and to present it to the general public as one whole piece. The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City bought the entire series in 1995. Many Germans were outraged by the purchase, believing that the artworks should have remained in their native country instead of being sold. Some questioned the effectiveness of Richter’s series on non-German audiences because it dealt with an event that had a profound effect on the people of West Germany. Richter, on the other hand, saw this as an opportunity to remove the paintings from the context of the local political debate. It was possible to transform the paintings into non-specific artworks that addressed universal themes of human suffering and mourning by opening them up to a wider audience.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
