The first full-scale monographic study in English of one of the most
important artists of the second half of the twentieth century.
In this first full-scale monograph in English on the German painter
Gerhard Richter, the distinguished art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
maps the unfolding of Richter's ever more complex and contradictory
lifework. A painter in an age that disdains painting, a German
confronting the impossibility of representing the historical trauma
inflicted by his country upon the world between 1933 and 1945, a
European artist in dialogue with his American counterparts, Richter (b.
1932) is shown by Buchloh to be a unique and singular artist, outside
and beyond every other formation contemporaneous with his own
development and evolution.
What emerges from Buchloh's detailed analysis of Richter's key works is
a far more complex set of painterly strategies than has been previously
assumed, strategies that have inverted and relativized all the
principles of the modernist and even the postmodernist painterly
aesthetic. In a series of essays that proceeds chronologically, Buchloh
begins with Elbe (1957), seeing it as a foundational moment in
Richter's confrontation with Socialist Realism, and goes on to consider
such works as October 18, 1977 (1988), the series of representational
photo-based paintings of Baader-Meinhof members; Richter's glass works;
and the late group of Birkenau Paintings (2014). Richly illustrated in
color, dense with insights that represent half a lifetime of engagement
with Richter's work, this book will stand as the definitive, essential
examination of a major contemporary artist.
