Pop Goes Adorno: Aesthetic Theory and Gerhard Richter

One the key tenets of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is that a good artwork is divided against itself – paradoxically focused inward on material questions of form and tradition, as well as looking outward, with the work fundamentally imprinted by its sociopolitical moment. Considering the 1960s origin of Adorno’s text, this paper will position Pop art, specifically the work of Gerhard Richter, as an unnamed presence in Aesthetic Theory. While Adorno never professed an interest in Richter, the painter’s works can illuminate and contextualize Adorno’s theories and assert their continued relevance.

Richter’s work from the 1960s can provide some examples that fulfill Adorno’s strict definition of a successful work of art. For instance, Richter’s photo-paintings, with their largely banal imagery derived from popular picture magazines, both reject and reconfigure Socialist Realist figuration and Informel abstraction – negating each negation, as it were. Adorno’s admiration for the literary output of Samuel Beckett throughout Aesthetic Theory could equally apply to a Richter’s photo-painting: for instance, “the determinate negation of [the play’s] content becomes its formal principle and the negation of content all together.” This understanding of Richter will lead to a discussion of Aesthetic Theory as precisely a theory that can inspire and reinvigorate an art historical practice that is deeply committed to understanding the specifics of the work of art’s duality: how its material properties and relation to tradition both underpin and negate the social, economic, and political circumstances of its production.