Waldhaus (P18)

The Waldhaus Sils is a Belle Époque hotel in the Upper Engadine valley that has drawn writers, artists, and intellectuals since the late nineteenth century. Sils Maria, the village where it stands, is the place in which Nietzsche spent seven summers and arrived at some of his most significant ideas; the landscape of the valley carries that accumulated cultural weight without advertising it. Richter's engagement with the Engadine connects to a long history of artists drawn to its particular quality of light and altitude.

The print shows that landscape at its most verdant – overcast, the tree cover filling the frame in layered greens, the mountains behind dissolved by cloud and by Richter's blur into soft grey-mauve forms. The hotel itself is almost incidental: a white corner of the building at the lower right, easily overlooked. Richter does not frame the Waldhaus as a subject or monument; he frames the view from within the place, the hotel present only at the edge of the image's awareness. It is a work about inhabiting a landscape rather than documenting one. As an unsigned publication print in an edition of 200, Waldhaus (P18) is among the more broadly distributed works in Richter's printed output, but the image is no less carefully composed for that.