Richter, Gerhard

Gerhard Richter: Atlas

At 864 pages, this monumental and comprehensive publication maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of the late twentieth century. Conceived and closely edited by Gerhard Richter himself, Atlas cuts straight to the heart of the artist's work, collecting more than 5,000 photographs, drawings and sketches that he has compiled or created since the moment of his creative breakthrough in 1962. The images closely parallel, year by year, the subjects of Richter's paintings, revealing the orderly but open-ended analysis that has been so central to his art. Offering invaluable insight into Richter's working process, this encyclopedic new edition, which completely revises and updates the rare, out-of-print 1997 edition and includes 147 additional plates, features 780 multi-image panels, each reproduced full page and in full color. Having left East Germany in 1961, where he had already established a reputation as a Realist Painter, Gerhard Richter went on to attend the Dusseldorf Academy, striking out on radical new path and changing the history of painting as he looked to photography for a way to release painting from the political and symbolic burdens of Socialist Realism and Abstract Expressionism. From pictures of family and friends to images from the mass media, Richter's photographs-sometimes found, sometimes original-have provided the basis for many of his paintings, often re-emerging in a luminous, monochromatic palette, and falling ambiguously between documentary and historical painting.

Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting

The beautiful catalog Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting accompanies the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of this prolific and important German artist. Richter's many artistic achievements vacillate between pure abstraction and a kind of realism. His realistic paintings, based primarily on personal photographs and images from newspapers, range in subject matter from the banal, like rolls of toilet paper, to the extremely potent, such as famous Nazi "doctor" Werner Hyde. The paintings have in common an emotional remove; the re-creating of photographic images points us toward our own possible emotional detachment to the influx of images in the world. A blurred chair, Jackie Kennedy, burning candles, family portraits--Richter lays them all out before us as if to say, Here, they are all the same. The insightful text by MoMA curator Robert Storr provides an in-depth look at Richter's life in postwar Germany, tracing the influences and environment that made his work possible. The book includes a revealing interview with the artist and a detailed chronology of his life and work, plus 138 color illustrations and 165 duotones. --J.P. Cohen

Ranging from photo-based pictures to gestural abstraction, Gerhard Richter's diverse body of work calls into question many widely held attitudes about the inherent importance of stylistic consistency, the inaturali evolution of individual artistic sensibility, the spontaneous component of creativity, and the relationship of technological means and mass media imagery to traditional studio methods and formats. Unlike many of his peers, he has explored these issues through the medium of painting, challenging it to meet the demands posed by new forms of conceptual art. In every level of his varied output--from his austere photo-based realism of the early 60s, to his brightly colored gestural abstractions of the early 80s, to his startling cycle of black-and-white paintings of the Baader-Meinhof group--Richter has assumed a critical distance from vanguardists and conservatives alike regarding what painting should be. The result has been among the most convincing renewal of painting's vitality to be found in late 20th- and early 21st-century art. With an extensive and insightful critical essay by curator Robert Storr, a recent interview with the artist, a chronology, an exhibition history, and nearly 300 color and duotone reproductions, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting marks a significant contribution to the understanding of contemporary art in general, and Gerhard Richter in particular.

Gerhard Richter

The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962-1993

Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, is one of the foremost painters of his generation. A great deal has been written about the bewildering heterogeneity of his work over the past 30 years. His seemingly willful and defiant movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation and his seemingly inconsistent methods of applying paint to canvas are consistent, if nothing else, with Richter himself -- the master of the paradoxical statement. Although he has emphasized that he is first a painter and has never been a theorist, he has, throughout his career issued provocative, contentious, and memorable statements.

Over seven years in preparation, this book makes available a selection of Richter's texts from all periods of his career, many translated for the first time. There are public statements about specific exhibitions, private reflections drawn from personal correspondence, answers to questions posed by critics, and excerpts from journals discussing the intentions, subjects, methods, and sources of his works from various periods. The writings are accompanied by 87 biographical illustrations of paintings from the artist's personal collection.

Published in association with the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London

Gerhard Richter: Portraits

This first comprehensive overview of the place of the portrait in Gerhard Richteris oeuvre assembles portrait paintings, photographs, watercolors, drawings and prints from the 1960s to the present--everything from classics like the strikingly honey-haired Betty to previously unknown works discovered in the course of research for this project. Icons such as Ema (Nude on a Staircase), Uncle Rudi, Mister Heyde, 48 Portraits, Self-Portrait, Family at the Sea, Small Bathers, Reader and Moritz, settle once and for all that Richteris emotional pull towards his material (iThe subject matter is so important to me that I invest much time and effort in my search for it, so much that I just have to paint it.i) not only doesnit hinder him from producing classics, but rather encourages it. Stefan Gronertis essay follows the development of the portrait in the artistis work, starting with the blurred black-and-white pictures of the 1960s and moving on to the colorful panels of recent years, while Hubertus Butin devotes his essay to Richteris portrait photography of the 1960s. Portraits demonstrates that Richter pursues the theme of the portrait in not only all of the media in which he works, but in every genre as well.

Gerhard Richter: Red, Yellow, Blue

This book explores Gerhard Richter's mesmerizing abstract paintings from a particularly fertile period of one of the most important living artists.

Startling colors, soft grays, undulating lines and large canvases are the hallmark of Richter's abstract period. Like all of Richter's painting, these works defy categorization, reflecting the artist's own journey towards understanding the world around him, a journey he invites his viewers to share with him. Three of his seminal works of this period: Red, Yellow, and Blue, are given particular attention and are presented here in luxurious foldout spreads. An illustrated essay by Robert Storr, perhaps the foremost authority on Richter, provides illuminating background to the artist's rich and complex oeuvre. Art critic Helmut Friedel interviews the artist and offers his own perspective on Richter's converging interests in painting and photography.

Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977

Destined to rank among the most eloquent and thorough examinations of a major suite of paintings, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 combines a lean, persuasively argued text with an elegantly sober design suited to the subject matter. Richter's 15 black-and-white paintings commemorate the day two leaders of the radical German Baader-Meinhof group, disillusioned men and women in their 30s and early 40s whose loyalty to the dogma of the Red Army Faction had led them to commit numerous terrorist acts, were found dead in their prison cells. Gudrun Ensslin appeared to have hung herself. Andreas Baader had been fatally shot. Jan-Carl Raspe was near death from a bullet wound. Two other members of the group had died in prison earlier in the '70s: Holger Meins after a hunger strike; Ulrike Menihof, by hanging. On the Left, there was widespread suspicion the dead had been murdered. Photographs of the Baader-Meinhof members were ubiquitous in newspapers of the day; their images were as familiar to Germans as machine gun-toting Patty "Tania" Hearst was to Americans. Using photographs as models, Richter painted the dead with a subtle technique--a blurring of certain details and an elegiac use of gray--that calls into question the murkiness of historical "knowledge" and emphasizes the uneasy mixture of compassion and horror evoked by the group's fate.

Yet, even though Richter waited until 1988 to paint the series, he was denounced either for glorifying a bunch of killers or for using his international fame to exploit the Left. Author Robert Storr, a curator at MoMA, which now owns the series, answers these arguments by looking systematically at postwar German politics, the tradition of history painting, and the dilemmas and decisions of a leading contemporary painter. --Cathy Curtis

On October 18, 1977, three young German radicals, members of the militant Baader-Meinhof group, were found dead in a Stuttgart prison; they were pronounced suicides, but many people suspected they had been murdered. Gerhard Richter, a German painter, and one of the most exceptional and highly regarded artists of the second half of the 20th century, created, 11 years after this traumatic event, a series of 15 paintings known as October 18, 1977. It is among the most challenging works of the artist's career, and one of the 20th century's most famous works on a political theme, still highly debated and unsettling to this day. Accompanied by an extensive and sensitive group of texts by Robert Storr, who recently curated the highly acclaimed Richter retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gerhard Richter: Zufall

This volume documents Gerhard Richter's 65-foot-tall, abstract, stained-glass window for Germany's historic Cologne Cathedral, the original of which was destroyed by bombs in World War II, and thereafter replaced with clear glass. Composed of more than 11,000 four-inch squares, or "pixels," in 72 colors, the window is based on Richter's 1974 painting, 4096 Colors, a grid of monochromatic squares 64 tall and 64 wide (for a total of 4096 squares) which was organized and designed according to a mathematical formula that systematically mixed red, yellow, blue and gray. Photographs of the work are accompanied by three essays which integrate this important work into the context of Richter's oeuvre, and shed light on the principle of randomness on which it is based. Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden and escaped to West Germany in 1961. He has lived and worked in Cologne, where he was made an honorary citizen last year, since the early 1980s.

Gerhard Richter: Paintings from Private Collections

Curator Robert Storr has said of the iconic, inscrutable German painter Gerhard Richter, "He's not playing hard to get, he's doing something that is hard to get.'' The difficulty arises from a Conceptualist oeuvre that style-jumps from Photorealism to large, abstract compositions. Martha Schwendener has summed up Richter's contribution by stating, "Seeing Gerhard's abstraction and Photorealism together, you realize that this dual body of work is the perfect expression of what it means to paint today--and what a contemporary master might be." Whatever the style, Richter's subject is always painting itself. Because it features more than 80 works from important private collections, including the artist's own, this monograph provides a unique contextualization of the artist's incredibly influential career, which, spanning more than 40 years, mirrors not only the history of postwar Germany, but also the medium of painting.

Gerhard Richter: Doubt And Belief In Painting

Robert] Storr's is one of the sharpest minds in American art museums. --The New York Review of Books, [Gerhard Richter is] Europe's most challenging modern painter. --Michael KimmelmanGerhard Richter is widely recognized as one of the most significant painters working today, and he is certainly among the most influential. He has worked in a wide range of manners since the early 1960s, producing abstractions, landscapes, images derived from the mass media and photographs, and more. Seen together, these works call into question such widely held assumptions as the importance of stylistic consistency, individual artistic sensibility, and spontaneous creativity. They also explore the impact of technology and media imagery on the traditional methods and formats of painting. The Museum of Modern Art has published two important books on Richter, both written by Robert Storr: one covering 40 years of his painting, and published to accompany the museumis large Richter retrospective in spring 2002, and one focusing on a single crucial series, October 18, 1977, which Richter painted in 1988. This new publication brings together the essays, an interview and bibliography from both of those books in a single volume--an ideal service for the student who wants both texts at hand at a relatively low price.