Franz Gertsch (1930–2022)

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For this painting, too, Gertsch used a photograph from a magazine as his source, this time from Life magazine. It shows wounded American Marines being evacuated on a tank. The photograph, taken by photojournalist John Olson in 1968 during the Battle of Huế – one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War – became an icon of the anti-war movement. Looking back, Gertsch said:

'In the autumn of 1968, I painted my first naturalistic pictures based on photographs. I had realised that reality can now only be captured with a camera, because people have come to see photography as the ultimate way of representing reality.'

Here, Gertsch once again employed his blow-up technique. He photographed the magazine image, then projected the resulting slide, enlarged, onto a canvas.

'Another thing that set my work apart was that I chose the cheapest possible way of painting. We simply stretched bed sheets over frames, and I painted directly onto the fabric using ordinary emulsion paint, without applying a primer. From the outset, that distinguished me from the other Photorealists and their techniques. I believe it gave me greater artistic freedom than most of the American Photorealists. They were fixated on the subject matter, and chose motifs that they could simply "execute" with a spray gun.'

Photorealism emerged in the United States in the mid-1960s, with leading figures such as Chuck Close. In Europe, artists including Gerhard Richter and Franz Gertsch embraced this approach to painting. What they shared was the use of photographs as source material, usually in the form of slides. But while the American Photorealists were primarily concerned with demonstrating technical virtuosity, Gertsch used photography in his search for truth in painting. He later described his Vietnam painting as something of an exception.

'I wanted to make politically engaged art.'

But he soon realised …

'that politically engaged painting wasn’t for me.'