Biological Chance and Landscape Painting

This chapter focuses on the influence of biological chance on Richter’s landscape production, specifically when it comes to the small snapshots of landscape first smeared in oil paint in the mid-1980s, known as the overpainted photographs. Under the Third Reich, the German landscape had been turned into a nationalist trope in the service of the regime. This chapter argues that Richter’s use of chance in analogy with arbitrary natural processes at the height of the German Historikerstreit (1986–89), the controversy over the interpretation of the Nazi past, disrupts existing historical connotations associated with the German landscape, and foregrounds a new politics of landscape painting. It concludes on an analogy between Richter’s appropriation of biological chance and John Cage’s chance-led compositional processes, arguing for their joint political significance.