itself in many ways sponsored the antithetical readings that indulged the reader‟s subjectivity. New Criticism (an AngloAmerican school of literary criticism), from the 1940s to the 1970s, relied on a form of formalism that bracketed subjects given over to unitary disciplines (for example, history and politics), a process that in turn contaminated art criticism. Suffice to say the reaction came in the 1970s and 1980s in the irruptive form of the return of the repressed (contingency and the abject subject). This New Historicism in turn, and since, has sponsored a New Formalism.15 Yet all along the way there have been dissident readings of images and texts (anti-modernisms). The Dadaists and the Surrealists are only the most prominent. The psychoanalytical model has been in play since Freud and tookmore evasive and unsettled."23 Straddling "the divide between conceptual and perceptual art – art as analytical method and art as the material expression of intuitions and emotions,"24 Richter‟s perpetual peregrinations between fields of forces in art (representation) and nature (the real) consist of a dialectical crossing back and forth between the frontier that marks the penumbral zone in two contiguous but distinct categories of mimesis – the ideological (which is essentially the anthropomorphic) and the figurative (which is, oddly, the realm of the copy and the realm of purely formal agencies given to representational systems). It is this latter formal agency – in figuration – that returns in the most telling ways in the series that leads to and away from landscape. On the one hand, there are