Gerhard Richter: The Complete Story
Gerhard Richter is the German painter who made doubt a style. Born in Dresden in 1932, he escaped East Germany two months before the Wall, then spent sixty years proving that blurred photographs, grey monochromes and squeegeed colour can all be one honest project.
For decades he was called the most important living painter, and he has spent those decades questioning whether painting can be trusted at all. That tension is the work.
Gerhard Richter at a glance:
1932: born in Dresden; his aunt Marianne is later murdered in the Nazi euthanasia program, a history he will paint.
1961: crosses to the West months before the Berlin Wall goes up, leaving his East German murals to be painted over.
1972: represents Germany in Venice with 48 Portraits, gray heads of famous men painted like index cards.
2007: the Cologne Cathedral window goes up, 11,500 glass squares in 72 colors, partly ordered by chance.
2014: paints the four Birkenau canvases, then stops painting large works around 2020, in his late eighties.
Dresden, and a family inside history
Richter grew up under two dictatorships. His aunt Marianne, schizophrenic, was murdered in the Nazi euthanasia programme; his first father in law had been an SS doctor in that same system, a coincidence Richter only learned late.
He trained as a socialist mural painter in Dresden, saw documenta in the West in 1959, and in March 1961, months before the Wall closed, crossed over with his wife and two suitcases.
The blur
In Dusseldorf from 1962 he began painting from photographs, newspaper clippings and family snapshots, then dragging a dry brush across the wet image until it blurs. Uncle Rudi of 1965, his uncle smiling in Wehrmacht uniform, and Aunt Marianne the same year put his own family's history through that soft focus: the blur is not vagueness, it is the honest distance between us and the picture.
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October 18, 1977
In 1988 he painted the cycle everyone said postwar Germany could not paint: fifteen grey canvases on the deaths of the Baader-Meinhof prisoners, titled October 18, 1977. Blurred from police and press photographs, mourning without editorial, the cycle now hangs at MoMA and remains the most argued over German artwork since the war.
The myth: the chameleon without convictions
Because he paints photorealist candles, grey monochromes and vast squeegee abstractions in the same years, critics called him a stylistic opportunist.
Richter's answer has been consistent since the 1960s: every mode tests the same question, what an image can truthfully show. 3 million dollars, a record at the time for a living European painter.
The window
In 2007 Cologne Cathedral unveiled his south transept window: 11,500 hand blown glass squares in 72 colours, arranged by controlled randomness where nineteenth century saints had stood until the war.
The archbishop stayed away, muttering that it suited a mosque better; the public voted with its feet, and the window became the cathedral's modern signature.
His Birkenau paintings of 2014, abstractions built over photographs from the camp, closed the circle his family history opened.
Where to see Richter
The Gerhard Richter Archiv in Dresden, his reconciled home city, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne where he lives, MoMA for the October cycle, and the cathedral window, free, from the square in Cologne. Born in 1932, he announced an end to large scale painting in 2017 but has kept drawing.
48 Portraits, all men on purpose
For the 1972 Venice Biennale he painted 48 gray, encyclopedia-style heads: scientists, composers, writers, Einstein to Kafka, every one of them male.
He picked figures culture had already filed away and painted them like their own index cards. The row of famous men, how authority gets a face, was the subject.
The set now hangs in Cologne's Museum Ludwig, still radiating gray official calm.
Atlas, the quarry
Since the 1960s Richter has kept Atlas: boards of snapshots, newspaper clippings, color charts and sketches, now more than 800 panels.
Family photos sit beside crime scenes, clouds beside concentration camp images. It is the source bank for the paintings, and museums show it as a work in itself.
One continuous archive feeding every manner he ever worked in: Atlas is the best answer to anyone who calls the styles disconnected.
Birkenau, and the limits
In 2014, at 82, he confronted the subject he had circled for decades: four photographs taken in secret by prisoners at Birkenau in 1944.
He began copying the photographs onto canvas, found them unpaintable, and dragged gray, red and green across them with the squeegee until the images disappeared.
The four canvases hang with the source photographs beside them: painting admitting in public what it cannot do. He sent the cycle to Berlin's national collection.
The Gerhard Richter questions that keep coming up
What is he known for? Blurred photo paintings, the October cycle, grey monochromes and squeegee abstractions.
Why does he blur? To show the distance between image and truth: the blur is the honesty.
What is the Cologne window? His 2007 cathedral window of 11,500 randomised glass squares in 72 colours.
What is his record price? An Abstraktes Bild sold for 46.3 million dollars in 2015.
Is Richter still working? He stopped painting large canvases around 2020 but kept drawing. Born in 1932, he lives and keeps his archive in Cologne.
Did he destroy his own paintings? Dozens, especially early ones; what he cut up or burned stays deleted from his own catalogue raisonné. Photographs of some of the lost works survive in Atlas.
More secrets to unlock
Seven centuries of glass, handed to chance
The Cologne window's 72 colours were sampled from the cathedral's surviving medieval glass, then distributed partly by random number generator: seven centuries of stained glass logic handed to chance, by a man whose whole career argues that chance, honestly used, tells fewer lies than intention.
