In 1956, the celebrations marking the 750th anniversary of the city of Dresden enabled the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum to renovate and redesign a number of its rooms, some of which still bore the traces of wartime damage. It was on that occasion that the Museum and the Academy of Fine Arts decided that Gerhard Richter should execute a mural in the south foyer stairwell as his diploma project. The painting entitled Lebensfreude [Joie de Vivre] covered the entire wall, i.e. an area of some 60 square metres.

For his monumental mural, Richter recreated a summer idyll that captured the hope of a happy and peaceful future in the young socialist society. By the same token, the adumbrated landscapes and figural scenes also referenced motifs from the imagery of European art history, something with which he would have been most familiar due to his studies. Take for instance the young couple featured on the far left-hand side, reminiscent of traditional depictions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The bathing scene in the centre, now partially uncovered once again, clearly refers to Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. The back of the male nude depicted in this scene is indicative, with its delicate technique, of the solid training that Richter would have enjoyed at the Dresden Academy. Below the bathing scene, he placed a group of four dancers that bear similarities to Henri Matisse’s paintings La Danse and Le Bonheur de Vivre [The Joy of Life]. The group of three youths seated in the grass can also be seen as citing another art-historical work – in this instance, Richter is clearly referencing Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe [The Luncheon on the Grass]. The parents with the child in the top right are evocative of Christian depictions of the Holy Family, transposed here to the present with the motifs of a tractor and a factory chimney. And the dove no longer refers to the Holy Ghost, but to Pablo Picasso’s ‘dove of peace’, for which the artist received the World Peace Prize in 1955 (see the detailed essays by Kerstin Küster and Sandra Mühlenberend in the publication Gerhard Richter „Lebensfreude“, 1956. Teilfreilegung eines verschwundenen Wandbildes, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum 2025).

In the magazine Farbe und Raum [Colour and Space] from 1956, Richter described how he opted for a decorative interior design that incorporated the colour scheme of the other wall and ceiling surfaces in the foyer. In the article, Richter also explained his approach. His design draft was transferred onto the wall using a grid of squares, all to scale. The horizontal and vertical lines used to divide the wall into various sections are still visible to this day. This method allowed Richter to rework the design while painting:

From a technical point of view, the partial uncovering of the mural posed all manner of challenges for the conservation team. In 1979, a grey-tinted alkyd resin had been applied directly to the unprotected layer of paint as an adhesive for the latex layers that were subsequently affixed. Numerous other coats of paint followed over the decades.