Richter, Gerhard

born Feb. 9, 1932, Dresden, Ger.

German painter.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Richter created paintings that were faithful enlargements of black-and-white photographs, often family snapshots and landscapes; he would continue this pursuit throughout his career. In the 1970s he also created monochromatic paintings, which explored the act of painting at its purest, while by the 1980s he experimented with an expressionistic, gestural style. Notably, Richter never allied himself to one movement

he has been alternatively described as a Pop artist, Minimalist, and postmodernist. Instead, he has consistently carried out a rigorous, personal exploration of the process of painting.

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▪ 2003

      German artist Gerhard Richter had long been an influential and respected figure in Europe, but his work and reputation was not as well known in the U.S.—that is, until a major retrospective of his work, representing 40 years of his output, opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, in February 2002. In Berlin “Gerhard Richter: Acht Grau” was on exhibit from October to January 2003 at the Deutsche Guggenheim.

      Richter was born in Dresden, Ger., on Feb. 9, 1932. His father and two uncles served in the German army during World War II, and Richter himself participated in the Hitler Youth; the national struggles of this period would deeply impact Richter personally and artistically. In 1952 he began four years of study at the Dresden Art Academy; in 1961 he managed to move from Soviet-occupied East Berlin to Düsseldorf, where he continued his art studies. His years in Düsseldorf coincided with the rise of Pop art, a style that had begun to eclipse Abstract Expressionism on the international scene. In 1962 Richter abandoned abstraction (though he would make abstract works again at later points in his career) in favour of representational paintings based on photographs and rendered in gray, black, and white. This brand of German Pop art—or “Capitalist Realism,” as it came to be called by Richter and fellow Düsseldorf artists Konrad Lueg and Sigmar Polke—was less buoyant, colourful, and cartoonish than American or British Pop art.

      Richter courted controversy when he took one of the most divisive events of postwar Germany as the subject of a series of works begun in 1988. His October 18, 1977 series consisted of 15 paintings based on forensic photographs of a group of German radicals who had died under mysterious circumstances in a Stuttgart prison. The works, which featured multiple images of corpses, were among the most complex and affecting of Richter's oeuvre.

      Richter was described as an artist-philosopher who confronted the nature of perception and the fundamental questions of representation in general. His innovation and originality resided in his contribution to painting—a medium that had been pronounced “dead” as many times as it had been stirred into “revival.” Never completely abandoning it, the artist consistently sought ways of keeping the medium relevant. His combination of various tropes of painting and photography created a kind of representational problem to be worked out: how and when does the eye sense the difference between a painted surface and the photographically recorded? His paintings were referred to as models of perception, and, indeed, Richter's work is as much about the act of looking and the apprehension of images as any other subject; in fact, perception might be his subject.

Meghan Dailey

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▪ German painter

born Feb. 9, 1932, Dresden, Ger.

      German painter known for his wildly diverse painting styles and subjects. His seeming lack of commitment to a single stylistic direction has often been read as an attack on the implicit ideologies embedded in the specific histories of painting. Such distaste for aesthetic dogma has been interpreted as a response to his early art training in communist East Germany.

      Born one year before Adolf Hitler came to power, Richter grew up under the shadow of Nazism and then within East Germany. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie in Dresden from 1952 to 1956 and thereafter became a successful social-realist painter. Granted permission to travel to the West, he was exposed to avant-garde art of the period. In 1961 he entered West Germany, and from 1961 to 1963 he attended the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. There he met Sigmar Polke (Polke, Sigmar), Konrad Lueg (later Konrad Fischer), and Blinky Palermo (an assumed name). Other fellow students embraced such styles as Tachism or Art Informel and such movements as Fluxus, which allowed much personal expression. Richter, however, preferred a more objective approach and, using a projector, began to paint photo-based paintings.

      Relying on scenes from newspapers, personal photographs, and magazines, Richter painted the victims of serial killers, portraits of famous European intellectuals, and German terrorists (the Red Army Faction, better known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang). His later work includes picturesque landscapes and portraits of his wife and baby, as well as a large body of gestural abstractions of every scale.

Additional Reading

Roald Nasgaard, Gerhard Richter Paintings (1988); Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews, 1962–1993, ed. by Hans-Ulrich Obrist (1995; originally published in German, 1993); Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter: 100 Pictures (1996; originally published in German, 1996); Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (2000), and Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (2002), an exhibition catalogue.

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