Response to Gerhard Richter Portraits

National Portrait Gallery
April 2009


All of Richter’s portraits of ‘great nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural figures’ [in 48 Tafeln] are of white males. What women, what men who would not describe themselves as ‘white’, might be included? The following is our attempt to balance Richter’s selection, but based on his criteria for selection (excepting his explicit exclusion of women). [Actually, now I’ve read the thing myself, he doesn’t actively exclude women – he just doesn’t select any. So this puts his non-selection of ‘politicians, artists, religious figures ore representatives of business and commerce’ into a different perspective, following on from our conversation earlier. Maybe it would be interesting to include such figures – certainly ones who had unique impact on culture, and there are many. – In that case the list of ‘white men’ would also need to be expanded. But keeping to his initial ‘criteria’ or ‘perspective’, these would be as follows. Either way, it’s an interesting exercise.]

Criteria:
· must be ‘active’ ca 1850-1970
· fields of achievement confined to literature, science, philosophy, music

Non-male and non-‘white’ counterbalance list
[numbering at present is random, just for having a count]

1
Marie Curie radioactivity
2
Rosalind Franklin DNA
3
Mary Douglas anthropologist
4
Virginia Woolf writer
5
Emily Dickinson poet
6
Simone de Beauvoir writer/philosopher
7
Duke Ellington composer/musician
8
Scott Joplin composer/musician
9
Lightning Hopkins (!) composer/musician
10
Frederick Douglass writer/philosopher
11
Karen Blixen writer