Duchamp and Richter's "The Woman Walking Down the Stairs"

Reading Gerhard Schlink's novel "Die Frau auf der Treppe" and following the storyline, I found Duchamp's "Nude, a Woman Descending a Staircase" (Fig. 1) and Richter's work of the same name (Fig. 2), as well as Duchamp's "Woman Descending a Staircase" (Fig. 2) and Richter's work of the same name (Fig. 2). (fig. 2).

The novel introduces the two "Women Descending Stairs" paintings through the mouth of the heroine, Irene, the original woman in the paintings: this work (the one in the novel) echoes Marcel Duchamp's "Nude - A Woman Descending Stairs". ". In Duchamp's Nude Woman Descending a Staircase, we see a Cubist-style figure made up of thighs, hips, arms, and torso that disintegrates at the moment of descending the staircase. With this work of his, he (the painter in the novel) wants to show that painters can still paint nude women as they once did, and that Duchamp's work does not signal the end of traditional oil painting.

Through the novel's description, we can be sure that Gerhard Schlink is using this painting of the woman descending the stairs by Richter as the main story line.

Of course, Licht, who went on to become the most expensive auctioneer of paintings, did not simply follow the classical method, he found his style and technique of painting: photo-realist painting (in the early stages of his creative work in the sixties, when Licht fled from East Germany to West Germany).

In the work, Richter added the treatment of out-of-focus and bokeh, with the woman walking on the staircase giving the out-of-focus and bokeh a plausible explanation. This treatment gives the image a surreal effect, and is also somewhere in the ever-changing experimentation between abstraction and figuration.

Unfortunately, Schlink's work was not as successful as his other work, The Reader.