Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)

Born in 1932 in Dresden, Germany, Gerhard Richter saw his country convulsed by Nazism, then witnessed the division of Germany into two separate, ideologically opposed states. Richter remained in Dresden throughout the 1950s, studying and teaching painting and winning recognition for his work. In 1959 he visited Kassel, Germany, to view the important Documenta exhibition, held every five years to showcase the most advanced forms of contemporary art. There he saw the work of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana, two artists whose aggressive modes of making art forever changed Richter's view. This experience convinced him to move to West Germany (shortly before the Berlin Wall went up) to be part of the more advanced environment of the Kunstakademie ("art academy") in Dusseldorf.

In early 1960s Dusseldorf, Richter encountered many artists who would go on to form the German postwar avant-garde, including artist-activist Joseph Beuys and photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. Richter also met Sigmar Polke, another figure who would change the course of contemporary art, and formed with him a response to the American pop art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Richter's earliest mature work dates from this time, when he took his own snapshots and images from newspapers and magazines and transferred them to canvas (his famous photopaintings) and paper. Richter did this not in the celebratory way of Warhol or the comical mode of Lichtenstein, but in a more quizzical manner that emphasized the constructed memory-like character of photographs. Richter's work with photography and its relationship to "realism" has been extensive, yet he has also been attentive to abstraction. While not as overt as the photopaintings, Richter's abstractions do have models of their own: paintings such as those in the Dallas Museum of Art's contemporary galleries by Jackson Pollock (1950.87, 1972.18), Willem de Kooning (2002.14), and Franz Kline (1968.18). In these iconic works the hand of the artist declares with its works and its vigorous brushstrokes a gesture meant to correspond to an inner life. Richter used a far more removed process to create this type of abstract painting. When comparing a de Kooning to a Richter, one notices that Richter's brushstrokes appear mechanical rather than hand painted; in fact, Richter employs numerous broad flat tools such as squeegees and boards to spread his paint across the surface.

Richter's exercise seems to ask whether an authentic gesture is possible if it can be so easily simulated. He extends this question by creating small paintings that resemble prints in their multiple production. ln consciously creating-and for the most part exhibiting-his abstract paintings alongside his photopaintings, Richter suggests that all visual information is, in some sense, an abstraction removed from its original source, and that realism and abstraction are elastic terms.

Richter's steel spheres (1999.261, 1999.266, 1999.267), deal with imagery and reflection quite literally. In these objects, a vision of the world is presented in brilliant reflective surfaces. They bend the contours of space and form in a beguilingly simple manner akin to, but distinct from, the investigations of form found in minimalist art of the 1960s. In Richter's books we find similar treatments of a range of visual experience. From the details of an abstract painting made possible by a camera, Richter has drawn out literally dozens of miniature abstract paintings in a sequence. The idea of the sequence and the index is central to conceptual art, and in these works and his color charts Richter's connections with conceptualism are most evident.

Richter has recently begun reproducing many of his famous photopaintings in print form, such as Betty (1999.265). Artists have made prints of their paintings for centuries, but for Richter, the object is not so much to reproduce an image for its own sake but to translate it into yet another form that raises further questions about how we see and process visual information.

Continuing Dallas's interest in Richter's art, the Dallas Museum of Art and two of its most important patrons joined in acquiring one of Richter's great "city pictures," City Picture Mü (Stadtbild Mü) (1968). A haunting example of Richter's masterful use of painting to render ambiguous images of political and aesthetic import, City Picture Mü (Stadtbild Mü) confronts its viewers with a challenge central to all of Richter's art: what do we see when we look at pictures?

Charles Wylie, "Gerhard Richter," in Dallas Museum of Art, 100 Years , ed. Dorothy M. Kosinski (Dallas, TX: Dallas Museum of Art, 2003), Pamphlet number 83.

See A/V digital recording list- Feb 2000 lecture

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