Gerhard Richter 1932-
By Zachary Vincent
Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988, oil on canvas, 102 cm by 72 cm, St Louis Art Museum
Born in Dresden, Germany, on 9 February 1932, Gerhard Richter has come to be known as one of Germany’s most successful contemporary artists. A glance at the amazing art and life the great visual artist tells a story of complex origins, a restless search for inspiration, and a view of the world balanced squarely between a theoretical approach to beauty and a concrete approach to family and love.
Richter’s Early life was defined by radical change. Born at a time of growing fascism in Germany, Richter experienced first hand instances of the state intervening in the private life of its citizens. As a school teacher, Richter’s father was forced to join the National Socialist party, which would haunt him and eventually ruin his career. A number of Richter’s family died, either on the battlefield or as a result of Nazi euthanasia programs for ‘undesirables. Later, with communist control established over East Germany, Richter’s first professional artistic studies were defined by a strict adherence to Socialist Realism. While he received a classical artistic education and became a successful mural painter for the state, Richter was denied the ability to study any art since Impressionism for fear of ‘bourgeois decadence’.
As a state artist, Richter was able to travel to West Germany several times, where he encountered art and culture freed from state control. After a great deal of planning, Richter was able to escape with his wife to the West, where he began studying art at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Engaging with the Fluxus and Pop Art movements shaped Richter’s artistic style for the rest of his life, though he never spoke ill of his East German art education, feeling that it helped make him the artist he became despite its limitations. In Düsseldorf, Richter became involved with a group of artists including Sigmar Polke, Konrad Fischer, and Blinky Palermo. The friendships with these students would continue long after Richter’s year studying at the Art Academy.
In the mid-1960s, after graduating from the Academy, Richter became successful very quickly. While his art was often popularly attached to the ‘Capitalist Realism’ movement, Richter considered himself more of a Pop artist. It was at this point that he began to incorporate a newfound interest in photography into his art. Alternating between painting photorealistic images with his signature ‘blurred’ effect and creating overpainted photographs, Richter began selling his work and being featured in exhibitions across Western Europe. Sometimes taking inspiration from mundane images like laundry ads and sometimes engaging with heavier concepts like the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Richter shifted from theme to theme rapidly, always searching for inspiration. The duality which would come to be most prominent in Richter’s work throughout the rest of the twentieth century was that between his abstract works and his photorealism. While not always the case, Richter seems to have turned to photorealism when he explored themes directly impacting his daily life, prominently his family. The immensely successful Betty is a 1988 oil painting depicting Richter’s daughter looking towards one of her father’s abstract works . The piece is representative of many of Richter’s more personal paintings, others depicting Richter’s wives (he was married three times), other children, and important places to the family.
Very different from Betty is Richter’s 2007 design for the South transept Cologne Cathedral Window in stained glass. Referencing other popular abstract works by Richter, the Window uses thousands of different colours, arranged geometrically, for an astonishingly modern take on a medieval tradition. For Richter, abstraction has been akin to “breathing, to walking”, something he has never tired of. From paint to sculpture to stained glass, Richter has sought endlessly to seek out beauty in a non-expressive way. Gerhard Richter’s art can be challenging to identify at times due to his vast experimentation with mediums and styles. Misty romantic landscapes, emotional reflections on the 11th September attacks, countless abstract experimentations in grey glass, and snapshots of his own family demonstrate the breadth of Richter’s artistic imagination. Something which binds all his work together, though, is his determination to make art which feels important and which speaks to the modern world in an honest, deliberate way. At 91 years old, and likely for a long time, Gerhard Richter still speaks through art.
Bibliography
“Biography.” Gerhard Richter. https://gerhard-richter.com/en/biography. [Date Accessed: 2 February 2023].
Elger, Dietmar. Gerhard Richter, A Life in Painting, trans. by Elizabeth M. Solaro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
“Gerhard Richter: Panorama.” Tate. 11 October, 2011. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gerhard-richter-1841/gerhard-richter-panorama. [Date Accessed: 2 February 2023].