polity west germanyconcept:era contemporary
Ema (Nude on a Staircase)
Oil on canvas (1966) by Gerhard Richter. Depicts his wife Ema descending a staircase, painted from a photograph with Richter's characteristic blurring. Directly references Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), but replaces Cubist analysis of movement with photographic blur and figurative clarity. A signature work of Richter's photo-painting (Fotomalerei) approach.
Scholarly Significance
Richter's Ema (Nude on a Staircase, 1966) is his iconic photorealist painting — a deliberate dialogue with Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, painted from a photo of his wife.
Notes
- ·Subject is Marianne (Ema) Eufinger, Richter's first wife.
- ·Painted from a photograph in 1966, the same year Richter and Polke staged provocations at the Düsseldorf art scene.
- ·The blurring — created by dragging a dry brush across wet paint — was Richter's signature technique for rendering photographs in paint.
- ·The dialogue with Duchamp is intentional: where Duchamp's nude is cubistically fragmented and analytical, Richter's is photographically continuous but optically distorted.
- ·The painting engages with the status of the painted female nude, the photograph as cultural artifact, and the question of what painting can do that photography cannot.
- ·Museum Ludwig acquired the work; it is one of the anchor paintings of their postwar collection.