Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter: The Painter Who Distrusts Painting

Gerhard Richter has spent more than sixty years making paintings built on the premise that painting cannot be fully trusted to show the truth — and has become, by most measures, the most commercially successful and critically respected living painter on earth doing it. His 1988 cycle *October 18, 1977*, fifteen grey, deliberately blurred canvases reconstructing newspaper and police photographs of dead Red Army Faction members, makes the paradox explicit: paintings about the limits of images, made from images, that insist a difficult history be looked at rather than resolved.

A Family Marked by the Nazi Years

Richter was born February 9, 1932, in Dresden, to Horst Richter, a teacher eventually forced to join the Nazi Party, and Hildegard Schönfelder. The family's later account of itself as "apolitical" sits uneasily against its actual losses: two of Hildegard's brothers died as soldiers, and her sister Marianne, who had schizophrenia, was starved to death in a psychiatric clinic under the Nazi euthanasia program. Richter himself was conscripted at ten into the Deutsches Jungvolk, the junior branch of the Hitler Youth. After the war, in Soviet-controlled East Germany, he apprenticed as a sign and advertising painter, and his 1950 application to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts was rejected as "too bourgeois" before he was finally admitted in 1951, studying under Karl von Appen, Heinz Lohmar and Will Grohmann. From 1957 to 1961 he worked as a master trainee producing state-sanctioned murals and paintings for East Germany, including *Arbeiterkampf* (Workers' Struggle) — work later painted over by the state for ideological reasons after he left.

Defection

In 1961, two months before the Berlin Wall went up, Richter and his first wife Marianne Eufinger escaped to West Germany. He enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz, alongside Sigmar Polke, and with Polke and Konrad Lueg helped invent "Kapitalistischer Realismus" — Capitalist Realism — an ironic answer to Socialist Realism that borrowed the flat visual shorthand of Western advertising rather than state propaganda, turning consumer imagery into subject matter the same way Pop Art was doing in America and Britain around the same moment.

Painting From Photographs

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Richter built a signature technique: painting in oil directly from black-and-white photographs — newspaper clippings, family snapshots, aerial views — then dragging a dry brush across the wet surface to blur the image just enough to feel photographic and painterly at once, evidence and its own erosion in the same mark. *Forty-eight Portraits* (1971–72) rendered canonical cultural figures like Mahler and Kafka this way; from 1966 he increasingly used his own photographs, producing repeated portraits of his daughter Betty and, later, his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken. Alongside the paintings he assembled *Atlas*, an ongoing archive begun in 1972 that has grown to roughly four thousand photographs and cuttings across some six hundred panels — not illustration for the paintings so much as the raw material of an entire visual mind laid out for inspection.

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Abstraction and the Squeegee

Beginning in 1969 with grey monochromes, Richter developed a parallel and eventually dominant body of abstract work. By 1976 he was titling paintings simply "Abstract Painting," saying he felt he was "letting a thing come, rather than creating it." From the mid-1980s he began working with a homemade squeegee — a wide blade dragged across large fields of wet paint in bands, pulling, scraping and layering color until the surface built up an illusion of depth entirely out of the visible traces of a tool rather than a brush. In the 1990s he began running the squeegee vertically, producing surfaces that resemble "a wall of planks," an effect built from accumulated, semi-controlled gesture rather than planned composition.

October 18, 1977, and Memory as Subject

The most historically charged of Richter's projects remains the *October 18, 1977* cycle, painted eleven years after Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in their Stuttgart prison cells — officially ruled suicides, widely suspected by sympathizers to be state killings. Working from newspaper, police and television imagery, Richter rendered the Red Army Faction members' arrests, cells, and funeral in slurred, murky grey tones that read almost like film stills slowed down. The work, made during a conservative period in German politics when the subject remained genuinely dangerous to touch, reflects what curators describe as "Richter's distrust of painting's ability to accurately represent the world" — using that very unreliability to argue the trauma should stay visible rather than be smoothed into either martyrdom or silence.

He returned to comparably difficult material in 2014 with the *Birkenau* paintings, based on the rare surviving Sonderkommando photographs taken inside Auschwitz-Birkenau, ultimately abstracted almost beyond recognition; in 2021 he donated the works permanently to the International Auschwitz Committee, along with a pavilion of his own design built to house them.

Glass, Color, and the Cologne Cathedral Window

Richter's formal experiments extended well past canvas. He began working with panes of glass in 1967, and in 2007 designed the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral — 113 square meters, 11,500 small colored squares arranged by a computer-driven randomizing process, an application of the same chance procedures he had used decades earlier in his *Color Chart* paintings. He waived his fee for the commission; donors covered the roughly €370,000 cost.

The Market and Richter's Own Skepticism

Richter's paintings have set repeated records for a living artist: *Abstraktes Bild (599)* sold for $44.52 million in February 2015, then the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist; by 2012, 545 of his works had individually sold for more than $100,000. Richter's own response to the numbers has been blunt: "It's just as absurd as the banking crisis. It's impossible to understand and it's daft!" Roughly 38 percent of his output now sits in museum collections rather than private hands, including about half of his large abstract paintings.

Why Gerhard Is Called a Genius

Richter's case rests on a genuinely unusual intellectual consistency: across photorealist portraits, blurred history paintings, chance-based color grids and squeegee abstractions, the same underlying question recurs — can an image, painted or photographed, actually be trusted to show what happened — and he has tested that question in nearly every medium and register available to a painter for six decades without settling on a single answer. Critics have called him "the greatest living painter" and "the Picasso of the 21st century," praise aimed specifically at that range and its coherence, not at any one virtuoso technique. The honest counter-case is that Richter's prices have, at times, run well ahead of any settled critical consensus about which parts of his enormous output will matter in a century — the abstract squeegee paintings in particular have drawn skepticism that their appeal is more decorative and market-friendly than conceptually rigorous, closer to elegant surface than to the hard historical reckoning of *October 18, 1977*. Richter himself seems to share some of that suspicion of his own market, which is, in its way, consistent with an artist whose entire project has been distrusting the image in front of him.

Legacy

Richter has topped Germany's Kunstkompass artist ranking for eighteen years running and shaped painters from Christopher Wool to Ellsworth Kelly; Sonic Youth used one of his candle paintings, without a fee, for the cover of *Daydream Nation* in 1988. The Gerhard Richter Art Foundation, established in 2020, now oversees the preservation and exhibition of a body of work built, from the start, on the conviction that no single image — his own included — should be taken entirely at its word.