Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting

Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. Always fascinated with the limits and uncertainties of representation, he has since then produced landscapes, abstractions, glass and mirror constructions, prints, sculptures, and installations.

Though Richter has been known in the United States for quite some time, the highly successful retrospective of his work at the MoMA in 2002 catapulted him to unprecedented fame. Enter noted curator Dietmar Elger, who here presents the first biography of this contemporary artist. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, this fascinating book offers unprecedented insight into his life and work. Elger explores Richter’s childhood in Nazi Germany; his years as a student and mural painter in communist East Germany; his time in the West during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests, political strife, and violence tore the Federal Republic of Germany apart; and his rise to international acclaim during the 1980s and beyond.

Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse and the seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated and sometimes confounded critics. But the extensive interviews on which this book is based disclose a Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before. The result is a book that will be the foundational portrait of this artist for years to come.

Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. Always fascinated with the limits and uncertainties of representation, he has since then produced landscapes, abstractions, glass and mirror constructions, prints, sculptures, and installations.

Though Richter has been known in the United States for quite some time, the highly successful retrospective of his work at the MoMA in 2002 catapulted him to unprecedented fame. Enter noted curator Dietmar Elger, who here presents the first biography of this contemporary artist. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, this fascinating book offers unprecedented insight into his life and work. Elger explores Richter’s childhood in Nazi Germany; his years as a student and mural painter in communist East Germany; his time in the West during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests, political strife, and violence tore the Federal Republic of Germany apart; and his rise to international acclaim during the 1980s and beyond.

Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse and the seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated and sometimes confounded critics. But the extensive interviews on which this book isbased disclose a Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before. The result is a book that will be the foundational portrait of this artist for years to come.

Publishers Weekly

This biography of painter Gerhard Richter presents a portrait of an artist who has famously resisted associations between his personal life and his five-decades-long artistic oeuvre. But Elger glosses over so many important incidents in Richter's life that the link between his art and his life remains elusive. In an otherwise astute but dense text, Elger traces Richter's artistic evolution: an introverted teenager living in postwar East Germany, who did poorly in high school art classes; influenced by the abstract art of Jackson Pollock and Wilhelm Nay; the culmination Richter's 2002 stained glass windows for the Cologne Cathedral. Elger persuasively identifies Richter's life work as an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of abstraction and as an investigation into “the complexity of reality” and the contradictions within objectivity and human perception. Elger's analysis is largely based on interviews with Richter published in The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962–1993. But he does not spend much time on Richter's private life; a “personal crisis” in the mid-'70s is only briefly mentioned, and while Elger's expression is generally elegant, the translation is flawed; the sentence structure is sometimes belabored. 78 color and 103 b&w illus. (Feb.)

Dietmar Elger is the director of the Gerhard Richter Archive and chief curator at the Galerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. He is the former curator for painting and sculpture at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover. Between 1984 and 1985 he was the secretary in Gerhard Richter’s studio. He has organized numerous exhibitions on modern and contemporary art and has written and edited their accompanying catalogs.