Gerhard Richter, Individualism, and Belonging in West Germany

Gerhard Richter, Individualism,
and Belonging in West Germany
This book reevaluates the art of Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) in relation to his efforts to
achieve belonging in the face of West Germany’s increasing individualism between
the 1960s and the 1990s.
Richter fled East Germany in 1961 to escape the constraints of socialist
collectivism. His varied and extensive output in the West attests to his greater
freedom under capitalism, but also to his struggles with belonging in a highly
individualised society, a problem he was far from alone in facing. The dynamic of
increasing individualism has been closely examined by sociologists but has yet to be
employed as a framework for understanding broader trends in recent German art
history. Rather than critique this development from a socialist perspective or
experiment with new communal structures like a number of his colleagues, Richter
sought and found security in traditional modes of bourgeois collectivity, like the
family, religion, painting and the democratic capitalist state.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history as well as German
history, culture and politics.
Luke Smythe is Senior Lecturer in Art History & Theory at Monash University.
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Gerhard Richter,
Individualism, and Belonging
in West Germany
Luke Smythe
Cover image: Gerhard Richter, Schwefel [Sulphur], 1985, oil on canvas,
200 × 300 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
First published 2022
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Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Names: Smythe, Luke, 1980‐ author.
Title: Gerhard Richter, individualism, and belonging in West Germany / Luke Smythe.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022005235 (print) | LCCN 2022005236 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032209777 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032209784 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003266198 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Richter, Gerhard, 1932‐‐‐Criticism and interpretation. | Belonging
(Social psychology)‐‐Germany (West) | Artists‐‐Germany (West)‐‐Social conditions.
Classification: LCC ND588.R48 S69 2022 (print) | LCC ND588.R48 (ebook) |
DDC 759.3‐‐dc23/eng/20220517
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005235
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005236
ISBN: 978-1-032-20977-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-20978-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-26619-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266198
Typeset in Sabon
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
For Felix
Contents
List of Figures viii

Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
1 Deficits of Belonging 10
2 Legacies of Displacement 39
3 The Classical and the Informel 71
4 The Living Method 114
5 Elective Affiliation 151
Index 187
Figures
1.1 Gerhard Richter, Landschaft im Mondlicht [Landscape in

Moonlight], 1949, watercolour, dimensions unknown 13
1.2 Arkady Plastov, Collective Farm Festival, 1937, oil on canvas, 188
× 307 cm 15
1.3 Walter Womacka, Unser Neues Leben [Our New Life], 1958,
stone mosaic, 1200 × 600 cm, Haus der Massenorganisationen,
Eisenhüttenstadt 18
1.4 Gerhard Richter, Lebensfreude [Joy of Life], 1956, Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum, Dresden [covered over] 19
1.5 Gerhard Richter, Untitled—Worker Uprising, 1958, Socialist Unity
Party Headquarters, Dresden [destroyed] 22
1.6 Renato Guttuso, La battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio [The Battle
of Ammiraglio Bridge], 1951–52, oil on canvas, 318 × 520 cm 23
1.7 Gerhard Richter, Sitzende Frau [Sitting Woman], 1957 25
1.8 Renato Guttuso, Boogie-Woogie, 1953, oil on canvas,
169.5 × 205 cm 26
1.9 Gerhard Richter, Elbe #20, 1957, linocut ink on paper,
29.5 × 21 cm 27
1.10 Gerhard Richter, Untitled, 1959 30
2.3 Gerhard Richter, Fleck, 1961 44
2.4 Gerhard Richter, Materialbild [Material Picture], 1962 44
2.5 Gerhard Richter, Erschießung [Firing Squad], 1962, oil on canvas,
dimensions unknown 46
2.6 Winfred Gaul, Lincoln’s Dream, 1962, oil and enamel on canvas,
180 × 150 cm 48
2.7 Gerhard Richter, Faltbarer Trockner [Folding Clothes Dryer],
1962, oil on canvas, 99.3 × 78.6 cm 52
2.8 Gerhard Richter, Schloss Neuschwanstein [Neuschwanstein
Castle], 1963, oil on canvas, 190 × 150 cm 53
2.9 Gerhard Richter, Gartenarbeit I [Working in the Garden I], 1966,
oil on canvas, 130 × 150 cm 55
2.10 Gerhard Richter, Verwaltungsgebäude [Administrative Building],
1964, oil on canvas, 98 × 150 cm 56
Figures ix
2.11 Gerhard Richter, Flämische Krone [Flemish Crown], 1965, oil on
canvas, 100 × 150 cm 56
2.12 Karl Otto Götz, November III, 1953, mixed media on canvas,
80 × 100 cm 58
3.1 Eric Schaal, Gerhard Richter in his Studio, Fürstenwall, Düsseldorf,
1967 72
3.2 Gerhard Richter, Portrait Ema, 1965, oil on canvas, 105 × 95 cm 74
3.3 Gerhard Richter, Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) [Ema (Nude
Descending A Staircase)], 1966, oil on canvas, 200 × 130 cm 74
3.4 Gerhard Richter, 8 Röhren [8 Tubes], 1965/68, painted PVC tubes,
(i-iv) 168 × 11 × 11 cm, (v-viii) 185 × 11 × 11 cm 76
3.5 Gerhard Richter, 4 Glasscheiben [4 Panes of Glass], 1967, glass
and iron, 190 × 100 cm 76
3.6 Gerhard Richter, Fenstergitter [Window Grids], 1968, oil on
canvas, 200 × 300 cm 77
3.7 Jan Schoonhoven, R72-19, 1972, painted papier-mâché on wood,
53 × 43 cm 79
3.8 Gerhard Richter, Mao, 1968, collotype on lightweight card,
84 × 59.5 cm 81
3.9 Gerhard Richter, 12 Farben [12 Colours], 1966, oil on canvas,
150 × 110 cm 84
3.10 Gerhard Richter, Stadtbild M8 (grau) [Cityscape M8 (grey)], 1968,
3.11 Gerhard Richter, Stadtbild Paris [Cityscape Paris], 1968, oil on
canvas, 200 × 200 cm 85
3.12 Palermo, Ohne Titel (Stoffbild) [Untitled (Fabric Picture)], 1967,
cotton fabric on burlap, 200 × 200 cm 88
3.13 Robert Ryman, Classico V, 1968, acrylic on 12 sheets of paper,
237 × 225 cm 89
3.14 Gerhard Richter, Waldstück [Forest Piece], 1965, oil on canvas,
150 × 155 cm 90
3.15 Gerhard Richter, Kleine Landschaft am Meer [Small Landscape by
the Sea], 1969, oil on canvas, 71.5 × 105 cm 91
3.16 Gerhard Richter, Seestück (bewölkt) [Seascape (cloudy)], 1969,
3.17 Gerhard Richter, Rot-Blau-Gelb [Red-Blue-Yellow], 1972, oil on
canvas, 250 × 200 cm 93
3.18 Gerhard Richter, 4096 Farben [4096 Colours], 1974, lacquer on
canvas, 254 × 254 cm 94
3.19 Gilbert & George, Us in the Nature, 1970. Magazine sculpture,
Kunstmarkt Köln catalogue 96
3.20 Gerhard Richter, Kühn Portrait, 1971, oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm 96
3.21 Gilbert & George, The Paintings (With Us in the Nature) #5,
1970–71, oil on canvas, 230 × 680 cm 97
3.22 Gerhard Richter, Parkstück [Park Piece], 1970, oil on canvas,
250 × 375 cm 97
3.23 Gerhard Richter, Gilbert & George, 1975, oil on canvas,
80 × 100 cm 98
x Figures
4.1 Gerhard Richter, Konstruktion [Construction], 1976, oil on
canvas, 250 × 300 cm 115
4.2 Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (398-1) [Abstract Picture
(398-1)], 1976, oil on canvas, 65 × 60 cm 116
4.3 Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (419) [Abstract Picture (419)],
1977, oil on canvas, 225 × 200 cm 117
4.4 Gerhard Richter, Fallschirm [Parachute], 1977, oil on canvas,
60 × 45 cm 118
(432-2)], 1978, oil on canvas, 33 × 27 cm 119
(454-2)], 1980, oil on canvas, 50 × 70 cm 120
4.7 Gerhard Richter, Rana, 1981, oil on canvas, 120 × 175 cm 120
4.8 Helmut Middendorf, Sänger [Singer], 1981, acrylic on canvas,
175 × 220 cm 127
4.9 Gerhard Richter, Buche [Beech], 1987, oil on canvas, 82 × 112 cm 135
5.1 Gerhard Richter, Jugendbildnis [Youth Portrait], 1988, oil on
canvas, 67 × 62 cm 153
5.2 Gerhard Richter, Zelle [Cell], 1988, oil on canvas, 240 × 100 cm 154
1989, oil on canvas, 260 × 200 cm 155
1992, oil on canvas, 250 × 250 cm 156
5.5 Gerhard Richter, Fuji (839-42), 1996, oil on Alu Dibond,
29 × 37 cm 158
(862-2)], 1999, oil on canvas, 46 × 51 cm 158
5.7 Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1977, oil on canvas, 30 × 40 cm 159
5.8 Gerhard Richter, Atlas sheet 394, 1978 160
5.9 Gerhard Richter, I. G., 1993, oil on canvas, 72 × 102 cm 161
5.10 Gerhard Richter, S. mit Kind [S. with Child], 1995, oil on canvas,
52 × 62 cm 161
5.11 Gerhard Richter, Kleine Badende [Small Bather], 1994, oil on
canvas, 51 × 36 cm 163
5.12 Thomas Struth, Familie Richter 1, Köln [Richter Family 1,
Cologne], 2002, Chromogenic print, 135 × 193.4 cm 164
5.13 Gerhard Richter, Atlas sheet 652, 1988 166
5.14 Gerhard Richter, Schwarz, Rot, Gold [Black, Red, Gold], 1999,
glass covered with coloured enamel, 2050 × 300 cm, Deutscher
Bundestag, Berlin 167
5.15 Gerhard Richter, Kreuz [Cross], 1995, steel, surface treated with
hard wax oil, 19.5 × 19.5 × 1.5 cm 170
5.16 Gerhard Richter, Kölner Domfenster [Cologne Cathedral
Window], 2007, mouth-blown antique glass, 2300 × 900 cm 172
Acknowledgements
This book began life as a doctoral dissertation at Yale University, where I was
fortunate to have as my advisors Christine Mehring and David Joselit. Christine’s
support for the project has been unfailing, and her scholarship on post-war German
art has served me as a model of persuasiveness and insight. David’s warmth,
acuity and willingness to push me in my thinking were all sincerely appreciated.
I thank Alexander Nemerov for his clarifying feedback on what is now the book’s
third chapter.
While researching in Germany and elsewhere, I received considerable support
from many institutions and individuals. Thanks are due, first and foremost, to
Gerhard Richter for agreeing to be interviewed on several occasions, and for
allowing me to view his private photo archive of his East German work. Richter’s
studio manager Konstanze Ell has been unfailingly helpful and patient in
responding to my queries over the years. During my visits to the Gerhard
Richter Archive in Dresden, Dietmar Elger, Kerstin Küster, and Bärbel Wöhlke
kindly made available a wide range of material for me to consult. They have since
provided me with images of Richter’s early work, and I thank Dietmar for
allowing me to reproduce these. Thanks are also due to Jay Curley, who has
supplied me with image files on more than one occasion, and to Hannah Klem, at
Marian Goodman Gallery, who gave me publications I would otherwise have
struggled to acquire. In Fulda, Franz Erhard Walther was kind enough to host
me for an afternoon and share with me his memories of Richter from the early
1960s. At crucial moments in the past several years, Romany Manuell and Anita
Dewi have both provided me with research support. So too, at prior stages in the
book’s development, have Christine Schorfheide, Benjamin Paul, and Maike Grün.
I thank Mark Godfrey, Rosemary Hawker, and Hilary Radner for inviting me
to speak about Richter at events that they have organised.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of both the Deutsche Akademische
Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Yale,
which allowed me to stay in Germany for extended periods. Without funding
from the faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash, the book could not
have been published.
xii Acknowledgements
At Routledge, I was fortunate that Isabella Vitti responded to my proposal for yet
another Richter publication with warmth and enthusiasm. The anonymous reviewers
of the manuscript offered thorough, constructive and supportive feedback. I thank
them for their candour and their willingness to share their expertise.
Finally, I thank my partner Jane for her love, support, and encouragement
throughout the past five years.
Introduction
In February 1961, Gerhard Richter made the fateful decision to leave East Germany
in search of greater freedom in the West. Frustrated by the lack of creative leeway he
was given as a socialist mural painter, he chose to flee the GDR and join the more
open art world of the Federal Republic. In so doing, he was opting to begin his life
again in a society that differed from his own in many ways but above all in one crucial
respect: unlike the East, whose politics, economics, and culture were anchored in
collectivistic values, Western society was pledged to individualism. In leaving the
GDR, therefore, he was seeking something more than artistic freedom. He was
making the more far-reaching decision to exchange collectivism for individualism as a
way of life. This book examines the impact of that choice on the art he produced in
the Federal Republic from his arrival until the early 2000s.
To date, Richter has been positioned as an artist with three primary concerns: doubt
with respect to our capacity to understand and represent reality,1 concern over
Germany’s failure to come to terms with World War Two and its legacies,2 and un-
certainty regarding painting’s social role in an era of photographic reproduction.3 To
these, the book adds a fourth and thus far unacknowledged preoccupation: anxiety re-
garding the challenge of reconciling freedom with belonging in the West’s individualised
society. For much of the period the book surveys, Richter struggled with the pressures
and seductions of his ‘liberated’ life under capitalism. Although freer in some respects
than he had been under socialism, he found collective security, and thus belonging, more
difficult to come by. It took him several decades to resolve this dilemma, a process that
shaped his art profoundly. From his decision, shortly after his arrival to paint blurred
copies of photographs and the splitting of his practice into a range of different styles later
in the decade, to his migration toward abstraction in the early 1970s and his unexpected
turn toward religion in the 1990s after a lifetime of professed atheism, no phase of his
career was untouched by his wish for belonging.
Understanding how this desire shaped Richter’s art is useful for two reasons. Not
only does it shed light on the origins and personal significance of many of his most
important works, and thus contribute to a fuller understanding of their development,
but it also shows those works to be artistically significant responses to a key social
dynamic of recent decades: the growing individualism of life in the Federal Republic,
as it transitioned from the Cold War to the neoliberal era.
****
Richter’s artistic leanings were sufficiently individualistic to prompt him to leave the
GDR, but he was ultimately drawn to the West for social reasons. Had he wished to, he
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266198-1
2 Introduction
could have stayed in Dresden and made work on his own terms in private, as other artists
did at the time and he himself had been doing for several years. He hoped to garner
public recognition for the work he made in private, however, and by the early 1960s had
concluded that this would be impossible under socialism. In stark contrast, the Western
art world offered him the chance ‘to paint the way it suits me’ (as he later put it) and be
rewarded for it.4 It thus not only held the promise of greater freedom, but also offered
him the prospect of belonging—to a community that shared his creative values and
interests, could support him in his efforts to develop his practice and would give him the
chance to be acknowledged for work he had produced on his own terms.
This was not the only area of his life in which belonging was a concern. Problems in
his parents’ marriage during his childhood in the 1930s and the upheavals of the war
had instilled in him a need as an adult for a stable and loving home life that would
make up for the lack of familial happiness he had experienced as a child. In his new
home of Düsseldorf, he hoped to meet this need by starting a family of his own with
his wife Ema, who emigrated with him. The legacies of the war and the Holocaust
and his disheartening experience of socialism had deprived him of a national com-
munity in which he could feel at home. In Düsseldorf, he hoped to feel more com-
fortable among his new compatriots.
Fitting in was important for Richter in all three of these contexts, but the freedoms
and obligations of Western individualism would make this difficult. It was not that
collectivity was non-existent under capitalism, or that belonging was impossible to
achieve. Rather, it was the way belonging functioned in the West that Richter
struggled to adapt to. As in any communal context, it was a matter of fitting in and
feeling at-home among others with whom he could identify. And as in any communal
context fitting in required trade-offs between autonomy and adherence to collective
norms for the sake of obtaining benefits, like resources, recognition, and security,
which he could not obtain in isolation. It was a trade-off that functioned differently in
the West than it had in the East, however. There, the state had imposed its collectivist
ideology on all aspects of his life, in a top-down, authoritarian manner. In the West,
there were pressures to conform, but he was freer to cultivate his own allegiances.
There were obvious benefits to this liberty, but it was not without its drawbacks. In
the West’s less prescriptive and more differentiated social environment he was faced
with a broader range of options for collective affiliation and was obliged to a greater
extent than previously to be the arbiter of his own norms and values. He was also
forced to become more accepting of uncertainty and risk, due to the looser, more
provisional nature of Western relationships, and the more dynamic nature of capit-
alism. The book argues that it was not until the late 1970s that he completed this
adjustment, and not until the mid-1990s that he achieved belonging in all three areas
of his life in which he sought it.
Aspects of this process and its impact on his art have been remarked on by the artist
himself and examined by a number of commentators. His family pictures (see
Figure 2.9), for example, have been widely discussed, most notably by Christine
Mehring, Paul Moorhouse, and Dietmar Elger.5 He made the first of these Foto-Bilder
[Photo Pictures] in the 1960s, in response to the distance that he felt from a number of
his relatives. Others depicted families that were not his own in idyllic circumstances.
Onto these scenarios, he projected his desire for domestic contentment. Decades later, in
the mid-1990s, he produced a series entitled S. mit Kind [S. with Child] (1995)
(see Figure 5.10), depicting his third wife Sabine Moritz with their infant son Moritz. In
Introduction 3
this cycle, he celebrated his belated attainment of the familial ideal he had long cherished
but had failed to attain in his previous relationships. His many war-related paintings
have also been extensively examined, above all by Robert Storr, Susanne Küper, and
Benjamin Buchloh.6 Their discussions of works like Onkel Rudi [Uncle Rudi] (1965), the
Stadtbilder [Cityscapes] (1968–70) (see Figure 3.11), and, later, related images make
evident the sense of disconnection from his national culture that the conflict and its
aftermath had instilled in him. Disconnection of another sort was a tacit theme of many
works he painted in the late sixties and early seventies when the tides of art world fashion
turned against him and he felt like an outsider among his peers. Elger and Mehring have
examined these works extensively in relation to the fading of his friendships with fellow
artists Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg, and his efforts to keep pace with emerging art
movements that threatened to consign painting to history.7
These authors have made evident just how important belonging was for Richter
during the period the book surveys, especially in the 1960s. But, as yet, there has been
no comprehensive overview of how this concern shaped his art. The book takes on
this task. Working from familiar sources like Elger’s biography and Richter’s col-
lected interviews and writings, as well as new and less extensively examined sources
like the author’s own interviews with the artist, Richter’s correspondence, and a host
of reviews and essays that have seldom, if ever, been consulted by historians, it de-
monstrates not only that Richter’s search for belonging was more painful, protracted
and impactful on his work than has hitherto been suspected, but also that advancing
individualism was, in large part, responsible for his troubles.
This dynamic was first discerned in the early 1980s by sociologists attempting to grasp
the causes and implications of the seismic social changes of the 1960s. As in other de-
veloped nations at that time, the Federal Republic had been reshaped by liberalising
social developments and had witnessed the emergence of a radical counterculture, which
had challenged most established forms of social and political authority. Drawing on
studies conducted since the mid-1970s, Helmut Klages, Ulrich Beck, and others con-
cluded that these changes were the expression, as Beck termed it, of an
Individualisierungsschub—a push for individualisation.8 As surveys from the late 1970s
revealed, West Germans who had come of age following the war valued free choice and
independence to a greater extent than their parents and grandparents. Conversely, they
were less committed to collectivistic values like duty and responsibility, which pre-
suppose relationships of mutual dependence and obligation.9 This intergenerational
discrepancy suggested that a Wertewandlung [values shift] had taken place within the
country. As this change had unfolded, it had eroded the communal authority of tradi-
tional bourgeois forms of collectivity, like the family, the church, and the paternalistic
state, and sown the seeds of a more pluralistic and permissive society.10 In the wake of
the Wertewandlung, West Germans received new lifestyle and self-expressive freedoms
and culture became more differentiated. This differentiation was accompanied, however,
by a loosening of social ties and a decline in the ability of collectivity to offer individuals a
strong sense of security and guidance.
Initially, this shadow aspect of the postwar push for greater personal freedom was
outshone by the emancipatory gains it had delivered. By the early 1980s, however, its
downside potential was coming into view as a second Individualisierungsschub oc-
curred within the country, prompted this time by the pressure of market forces.11 As
the postwar boom years receded into history and national prosperity began to ebb,
the material security that had allowed the postwar generation to take advantage of its
4 Introduction
new freedoms eroded. Efforts to revive the economy prompted labour market reforms
and a reduction in social welfare spending. In the wake of these developments, which
marked the initial stirrings of the neoliberal era, West Germans were increasingly
thrown back on their own resources with fewer means of collective support at their
disposal. Those with an independent spirit and financial or educational privileges fared
better in this more self-reliant climate than those who lacked these advantages. For the
former, the benefits of postwar individualism remained more readily available: they
retained a broader range of life choices and a greater capacity to exercise them. For
the latter, individualism was increasingly synonymous with insecurity and restricted
opportunities. By the time of the Wende, these conditions showed no signs of abating.
Economic insecurity had intensified and new values surveys pointed to a growing social
tension: the individualistic values of the Wertewandlung remained in force, but for the
first time since the 1970s Germans now expressed greater support for the traditional
communal institutions the developments of the 1960s had weakened.12 This reversion
was ascribed to an increased wish for the stability these institutions had historically
provided.13 The capacity of postwar individualism to liberate or disempower de-
pending on one’s circumstances had by this stage become apparent, above all, to many
incoming East Germans, who like Richter in the 1960s, were having to adapt to a new
life without the social and economic support systems of socialism.14
The art world was not a focus of research into advancing individualism, yet in
hindsight, it is evident that it too felt the impact of the Individualisierungsschübe and
the Wertewandlung in ways that have yet to be investigated. By positioning Richter’s
work in relation to that of other artists he crossed paths with in the late 1960s and the
early 1980s, who were also responding to these developments, and considering its
affinities to major art trends of the 1990s, which took aim at the excesses of neo-
liberal individualism, the book begins this task as well. From these assessments, a new
account of his art’s significance emerges.
More conservative than his colleagues, Richter focused not on critiquing society or
attempting to foster new social arrangements, but rather on adapting to the status
quo with which, despite misgivings, he identified. He was thus more closely attuned
than other artists to the concerns of many Germans outside the art world, who like
him were attempting to strike a balance between freedom and security within the
confines of current social arrangements. The book argues that his work of the 1960s
and early 1970s attests to the challenges of this scenario. His subsequent work be-
speaks its opportunities, of which he was eventually able to take maximum ad-
vantage. His oeuvre thus endures as an ambivalent monument to the mixed blessings
that advancing individualism has delivered since the 1960s, through successive waves
of social and economic liberalisation.
****
The need to secure this last claim explains the book’s commitment to a blend of
biographical and sociological art history. Via the first approach, it seeks to recover
how Richter’s search for belonging shaped his art. Via the second approach, it looks
to demonstrate how that search, and thus the work, in turn, was conditioned by the
Wertewandlung and the Individualisierungsschübe, as these played out in his im-
mediate environment.
The risks of coarsely applying either method are familiar. In one direction lies ‘art-
history as a history of the proper name’ (as Rosalind Krauss has described it), which
Introduction 5
15
ties the meaning of an artist’s work too narrowly to events in their personal life.
Not only might the personal dimension of their practice be of little public interest but
too insistently foregrounding it may relegate more salient factors to the margins. In
the opposite direction lie the dangers of vulgar social art history, as described by T. J.
Clark, which traffics in loose analogies between artistic forms and social structures,
while leaving unexplained the ‘network of real, complex relations’ that connect
works to their social environment.16 It is only by tracing out this network that such
analogies can be validated and art’s actual social meanings be established.
An integral actor in this network is, of course, the artist, whose agency, and thus their
biography will, when it is credibly reconstructed, reveal the shifting terms of their en-
counter with the social as these are mediated by their art. The book deploys biography in
tandem with sociology for this purpose. By demonstrating how Richter’s search for
belonging, as he understood and experienced it, was impacted by transformations in the
structure of West German society, which were too abstract and protracted for him or
those around him to have recognised, it makes plain how his personal experience has
broader relevance. Accounting for how that experience made its presence felt within his
art, thereby establishes the art’s own broader pertinence.
The sheer scope of Richter’s output and the number of charged historical scenarios
through which he has lived since his birth in the 1930s means that the full terms of his
encounter with both social and art history are unusually complex. So great is this
complexity, in fact, that for reasons of practicality and economy, the book makes no
attempt to exhaustively account for them in the manner that, as Clark rightly ad-
vocates, is the gold standard for art’s social history.17 Richter’s best-known pre-
occupations (with German history, painting’s prospects, and the limits of human
knowledge and understanding) are placed in dialogue with his search for belonging,
as are his lesser concerns, to some extent. The search itself, however, is at all points
foregrounded and given prominence over other motivations. The work’s over-
determination by other factors is by no means denied, but the weighting and prior-
itising of each factor’s impact on his work is a task that the author has deferred, in
large part, because precisely reconstructing Richter’s motives is presently, and may
always remain, infeasible.
Two further limitations of the book must also be acknowledged at the outset.
Biographical information is scarce regarding many areas of Richter’s life, and his own
voice is by far the most dominant in accounts of it that have thus far been produced.
Alternative perspectives would be welcome, but at present are in extremely short
supply. Insights about his work from the women in his life would be particularly
helpful in this regard, as would the views and opinions of friends and colleagues, who
declined to be interviewed for this project. With luck, future researchers will benefit
from their contributions.
In light of the limited scholarship available on the subject and the make-up of
Richter’s artistic network, which consisted overwhelmingly of his white, male col-
leagues, the book’s account of the West German art world’s response to advancing
individualism is neither as detailed nor as richly differentiated as it might have been.
Information on the experience of female artists and German artists with non-
European ancestry would substantially enrich the broader narrative that the book
puts in place. It would also enable Richter’s work and experience to be more thor-
oughly contextualised. The author hopes that the outline it does provide will point
the way to further research in this area, and not only in the context of Germany.
6 Introduction
Other nations also became more individualistic between the 1960s and the 1990s,
albeit on locally inflected terms.18 The book’s appraisal of the West German situation
is therefore offered as but one initial case study for assessing this dynamic’s more far-
reaching art-historical impact.
****
The five chapters that follow chronicle Richter’s search for belonging from his ado-
lescence in the 1940s until the early 2000s, concentrating on the thirty-year period he
spent in West Germany (1961–1991). Divided at major points of inflection in this
protracted process, they look initially at his years in Dresden, when his need for
belonging in several areas of his life was first registered in his art (chapter one), then
successively at this need’s impact on his early Western work to 1965 (chapter two),
the splitting of his practice into a range of styles in the late 1960s and early 1970s
(chapter three), the narrowing of his output in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when
he developed the series now known as the Abstrakte Bilder (chapter four), and his
works addressing family, religion, and the reunited Germany from the 1990s and the
early 2000s (chapter five). At each stage in this process, his work and experience are
benchmarked against his colleagues and compatriots.
Notes
1 The texts that approach Richter’s work from this perspective are legion. Among the most
extensive and worthwhile are I. Michael Danoff, “Heterogeneity: An Introduction to the
Work of Gerhard Richter,” in Gerhard Richter: Paintings (New York: Thames & Hudson,
1988); Gertrud Koch, “The Richter-Scale of Blur,” October 62 (Autumn, 1992): 133–142,
https://doi.org/10.2307/778707; and Armin Zweite, “Die Silikat-Bilder von Gerhard
Richter und andere Mikrostrukturen,” in Gerhard Richter: Silikat (Berlin: Kulturstiftung
der Länder; Düsseldorf: K20–K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2007). So too are
the more concise treatments provided by Thorsten Scheer, “Gerhard Richter and Art &
Language: Conceptual Aspects of Postmodernism,” Artefactum 42 (1992): 52–53; and
Eduard Beaucamp, “Maler des Zweifels. Taktiker der Kunst: Gerhard Richter wird
sechzig,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 8, 1992.
2 The most searching and significant explorations of Richter’s engagement with the war and
its legacies have been conducted by Benjamin Buchloh, Robert Storr, Susanne Küper and
Paul Jaskot. Buchloh’s many texts on this subject notably include: “Documents of Culture,
Documents of Barbarism,” in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (New York:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020), 22–41; and “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: the Anomic
Archive,” in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Jean-François Chevrier, Armin Zweite and Rainer
Rochlitz, Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas
(Barcelona: Consorci del Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2000), 11–30. Storr’s
principal discussions appear in: Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977 (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 2000); and September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter (London:
Tate Gallery Publishing, 2010), 58–60. Susanne Küper was the first to link Richter’s Foto-
Bilder to the war. (See Susanne Küper, “Gerhard Richter: Capitalist Realism and his
Painting from Photographs, 1962–1966,” in German Art from Beckmann to Richter:
Images of a Divided Country, ed. Eckhart Gillen [Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997],
233). Also important, in part for the broader art historical and social context it provides, is
Paul Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right
(Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 47–81.
3 Among the myriad publications on this subject, see: Manfred Schneckenburger, “Gerhard
Richter, oder ein Weg weiterzumalen,” in Gerhard Richter: Bilder aus den Jahren 1962–1974
(Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1974); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting
after the Subject of History (Ph.D. thesis, Graduate Center, CUNY, 1994), ProQuest
Introduction 7
(304113144); and Robert Storr, “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting” (2002), rep-
rinted in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 2003).
4 Richter, annotated typescript “Biografische Daten,” Galerie Schmela Papers, Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles, Box 10 Folder 1, quoted (and translated) in Christine
Mehring, “East or West, Home is Best: Friends, Family and Design in Richter’s Early
Years,” in Gerhard Richter: Panorama. A Survey, eds. Nicholas Serota and Mark Godfrey
(London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 42.
5 Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, trans. Elizabeth M. Solaro (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), 133, 137, 140; Mehring, “East or West,” 32–35; and
Paul Moorhouse, “Devotional Pictures,” in Paul Moorhouse, Gerhard Richter Portraits:
Painting Appearances (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 57–69.
6 Storr, September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter, 58–60; Buchloh, “Documents of
Culture, Documents of Barbarism,” and “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: the Anomic Archive”;
and Küper, “Gerhard Richter: Capitalist Realism and his Painting from Photographs,
1962–1966,” 233.
7 Elger, A Life in Painting, 54–59, 62–67, 79–82; Christine Mehring, “Richter’s Collaborations,
Richter’s Turn, 1955–1971,” in Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951–1972, eds. Christine
Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent, Jon Seydl (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Research
Institute, 2010), 90–124.
8 Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1986), 122.
9 Helmut Klages, Wertorientierungen im Wandel: Rü ckblick, Gegenwartsanalyse, Prognosen
(Frankfurt; New York: Campus Verlag, 1984), 18. See also the qualitative, interview-based
research of Martin Osterland and Dorothee Wierling, which came to similar conclusions:
Martin Osterland, “Lebensbilanzen und Lebensperspektiven von Industriearbeitern,” in
Soziologie des Lebenslaufs, ed. Martin Kohli (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand
Verlag, 1978), 272–290; and Dorothee Wierling, “Generations and Generational Conflict
in East and West Germany,” in The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-war German History, ed.
Christoph Klessmann (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 81.
10 The phrase ‘values shift’ [German: Wertewandel] was first used by Roland Inglehart to
describe what he described as a ‘silent revolution’ in social attitudes that had occurred in
Western countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (Roland Inglehart, The Silent
Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics [Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1977].) Thereafter it was taken up by West German sociolo-
gists, who focussed on social change in their own country, and has since entered common
academic usage. In contrast to Inglehart, who argued for a shift from ‘material’ to ‘post-
material’ values throughout the West at large, Klages contended that a generational change
from ‘duty and acceptance values’ to ‘autonomy and self-development values’ had taken
place. Since the former are collectivistic and the latter individualistic, this shift was also
taken as evidence of increasing individualism. (For overviews of the literature on what is
now called the ‘individualisation thesis,’ see Helmut Klages, “Werte und Wertewandel,” in
Handwörterbuch zur Gesellschaft Deutschlands, eds. Bernhard Schäfers, Wolfgang Zapf
[Leske and Budrich: Opladen, 2001], 726–738; and Andreas Rödder, “Wertewandel im
Geteilten und Vereinten Deutschland,” Historisches Jahrbuch 130 (2010): 421–433.)
11 On the successive ‘waves’ of postwar individualisation in West Germany and the impact of
the second wave of the 1980s on working life, see Gitta Scheller, Die Wende als
Individualisierungsschub? Umfang, Richtung und Verlauf des Individualisierungsprozesses
in Ostdeutschland (Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften), 65.
12 Helmut Klages, “Wertewandel in Deutschland in den 90er Jahren,” in Wertewandel.
Herausforderung für die Unternehmenspolitik in den 90er Jahren, ed. Lutz von Rosenstiel
(Stuttgart: Schäffer-Poeschel Verlag, 1993), 6–7.
13 These findings are assessed and summarised in Stefan Hradil, “Vom Wandel des
Wertewandels—Die Individualisierung und eine ihrer Gegenbewegungen,” in Sozialer
Wandel und gesellschaftliche Dauerbeobachtung, eds. Wolfgang Glatzer, Roland Habich
and Karl Ulrich Mayer (Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 2002), 31–47.
8 Introduction
14 The extent and nature of individualising trends in the former GDR in the 1990s and early
2000s have been assessed comprehensively by Gitta Scheller. As Scheller has observed, in-
dividualisation unfolded somewhat differently in the new Bundesländer [German states], due
to the contrasting histories of the two Germanys. Its effects were similarly ambivalent, how-
ever. (See Scheller, Die Wende als Individualisierungsschub? 177–179, 257–260, 298–299.)
15 Rosalind Krauss, “In the Name of Picasso,” October 16 (Spring, 1981): 7, https://doi.org/
10.2307/778371.
16 T. J. Clark, “On the Social History of Art,” in Modernism and Modernity: A Critical
Anthology, eds. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (London; New York: Routledge,
1982), 252.
17 Clark, “On the Social History of Art,” 251.
18 For useful studies of individualisation trends in countries outside West Germany, see Henri
C. Santos, Michael E. W. Varnum and Igor Grossmann, “Global Increases in
Individualism,” Psychological Science 28, no. 9 (2017): 1228–1239, https://doi.org/10.
1177/0956797617700622; Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann
Swidler and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in
American life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Anthony Elliot and
Charles C. Lemert, The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalisation
(London; New York: Routledge, 2006).
Bibliography
Beaucamp, Eduard. “Maler des Zweifels. Taktiker der Kunst: Gerhard Richter wird sechzig.”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 8, 1992.
Beck, Ulrich. Risikogesellschaft. Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1986.
Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton.
Habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008.
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History. Ph.D. dis-
sertation, Graduate Center, CUNY, 1994. ProQuest (304113144).
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: the Anomic Archive.” In Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, Jean-François Chevrier, Armin Zweite and Rainer Rochlitz. Photography and
Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas, 11–30. Barcelona: Consorci
del Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2000.
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Documents of Culture, Documents of Barbarism.” In Gerhard
Richter: Painting After All, 22–41. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020.
Clark, T. J. “On the Social History of Art.” In Modernism and Modernity: A Critical
Anthology, edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, 249–258. London; New York:
Routledge, 1982.
Danoff, I. Michael, “Heterogeneity: An Introduction to the Work of Gerhard Richter.” In
Gerhard Richter: Paintings, 9–14. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988.
Elger, Dietmar. Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting. Translated by Elizabeth M. Solaro.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
Elliot, Anthony and Charles C. Lemert. The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of
Globalisation. London; New York: Routledge, 2006.
Hradil, Stefan. “Vom Wandel des Wertewandels—Die Individualisierung und eine ihrer
Gegenbewegungen.” In Sozialer Wandel und gesellschaftliche Dauerbeobachtung. Edited by
Wolfgang Glatzer, Roland Habich and Karl Ulrich Mayer, 31–47. Opladen: Leske and
Budrich, 2002.
Inglehart, Roland. The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among
Western Publics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Introduction 9
Jaskot, Paul. The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right, 47–81.
Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
Klages, Helmut. Wertorientierungen im Wandel: Rü ckblick, Gegenwartsanalyse, Prognosen.
Frankfurt; New York: Campus Verlag, 1984.
Klages, Helmut. “Wertewandel in Deutschland in den 90er Jahren.” In Wertewandel.
Herausforderung für die Unternehmenspolitik in den 90er Jahren. Edited by Lutz von
Rosenstiel, 2–15. Stuttgart: Schäffer-Poeschel Verlag, 1993.
Klages, Helmut. “Werte und Wertewandel.” In Handwörterbuch zur Gesellschaft Deutschlands,
edited by Bernhard Schäfers, Wolfgang Zapf, 726–738. Leske and Budrich: Opladen, 2001.
Koch, Gertrud. “The Richter-Scale of Blur.” October 62 (Autumn, 1992): 133–142. 10.2307/
778707.
Krauss, Rosalind. “In the Name of Picasso.” October 16 (Spring, 1981): 5–22. 10.2307/778371.
Küper, Susanne. “Gerhard Richter: Capitalist Realism and his Painting from Photographs,
1962–1966.” In German Art from Beckmann to Richter: Images of a Divided Country.
Edited by Eckhart Gillen, 233–236. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1997.
Mehring, Christine. “Richter’s Collaborations, Richter’s Turn, 1955–1971.” In Gerhard
Richter: Early Work, 1951-1972. Edited by Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent, Jon
Seydl, 90–124. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Research Institute, 2010.
Mehring, Christine. “East or West, Home is Best: Friends, Family and Design in Richter’s Early
Years.” In Gerhard Richter: Panorama. A Survey. Edited by Nicholas Serota and Mark
Godfrey, 29–43. London: Tate Publishing, 2011.
Moorhouse, Paul. “Devotional Pictures.” In Paul Moorhouse, Gerhard Richter Portraits:
Painting Appearances, 57–69. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Osterland, Martin. “Lebensbilanzen und Lebensperspektiven von Industriearbeitern.” In
Soziologie des Lebenslaufs. Edited by Martin Kohli, 272–290. Darmstadt/Neuwied: Hermann
Luchterhand Verlag, 1978.
Rödder, Andreas. “Wertewandel im Geteilten und Vereinten Deutschland.” Historisches
Jahrbuch 130 (2010): 421–433.
Santos, Henri C., Michael E. W. Varnum and Igor Grossmann. “Global Increases in
Individualism.” Psychological Science 28, no. 9 (2017): 1228–1239. 10.1177/095679761
7700622.
Scheer, Thorsten. “Gerhard Richter and Art & Language: Conceptual Aspects of Postmodernism.”
Artefactum 42 (1992): 52–53.
Scheller, Gitta. Die Wende als Individualisierungsschub? Umfang, Richtung und Verlauf des
Individualisierungsprozesses in Ostdeutschland. Wiesbaden, Germany: VS Verlag für
Sozialwissenschaften, 2005.
Schneckenburger, Manfred. “Gerhard Richter, oder ein Weg weiterzumalen.” In Gerhard
Richter: Bilder aus den Jahren 1962–1974. Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1974.
Storr, Robert, Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000.
Storr, Robert, “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting” (2002), reprinted in Robert Storr,
Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003.
Storr, Robert, September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. London: Tate Gallery
Publishing, 2010.
Wierling, Dorothee. “Generations and Generational Conflict in East and West Germany.” In
The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-war German History. Edited by Christoph Klessmann,
69–90. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Zweite, Armin. “Die Silikat-Bilder von Gerhard Richter und andere Mikrostrukturen.” In
Gerhard Richter: Silikat, 6–63. Berlin: Kulturstiftung der Länder; Düsseldorf: K20–K21
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2007.
1 Deficits of Belonging
For much of his career in the West, Gerhard Richter’s East German background, and
prior to that his upbringing in Nazi Germany, was shrouded in obscurity. Having fled
the GDR in February 1961, a few months prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall,
Richter promptly built a wall of his own between the start of his career in the West
and his life until that point. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he said little about his
upbringing in Saxony and remained tight-lipped about his training as an artist in
Dresden in the 1950s.1 Noting only that he specialised in mural painting, he dis
missed the work he had produced in the GDR as irrelevant to his later output.2 Not
until the early 1980s did he permit publication of a few stray examples of his socialist
work, along with watercolours he had painted as a teenager. Only then did he begin
to answer questions about his life before he came to the West.3 Since this initial
disclosure, interest in his early years has intensified and he himself has grown more
open to discussing them.4 As a result of this growing candour and independent re
search by several authors, a clearer—though by no means comprehensive—picture of
his life before he left the GDR has been established.
As this picture has taken shape, a number of important continuities between the art
works he produced on either side of the Iron Curtain have become apparent. The ro
mantic leanings of his teenage watercolours, for example, can be seen to have anticipated
his later landscapes, many of which are modelled on romantic prototypes. The portfolio
of prints known as the Elbe series (discussed later in this chapter), which he created in the
late 1950s, also anticipates those later paintings. Upon arriving in the Federal Republic, he
began making works in two styles that were forbidden to him in Dresden: expressive
figuration and Informel abstraction. Until the early 2000s, these works, which Richter,
with few exceptions, had destroyed in the early 1960s, were scarcely known. To the
extent that they had ever been referred to, they were assumed to have been his earliest
engagements with these styles.5 As Robert Storr first noted, however, Richter’s photo
graphic archive of his East German paintings makes it clear that he was already drawn to
abstraction and expressionism in Dresden.6 The archive also reveals a surprising stylistic
expansiveness among his works of the 1950s. Having left the GDR due to constraints
placed on his practice by the socialist authorities, it was assumed that the art he had
created in the GDR was largely, if not wholly, homogenous. But as his photographs attest,
both his official, state-commissioned work and the unofficial, ‘free’ work he created in the
privacy of his studio were stylistically eclectic. Striking out in a number of directions, he
engaged in a continual process of testing, assimilating and rejecting influences from many
quarters, some forbidden and others officially sanctioned. In light of this revelation, the
presumption that he first became a stylistic nomad in the West can no longer be sustained.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266198-2
Deficits of Belonging 11
Thanks to research by Jay Curley, Richter’s decision in Düsseldorf to use photographs as
the basis for ambiguous paintings can also be related to his time in Dresden. As a socialist-
realist artist, he was obliged to paint propaganda images whose meanings were un
mistakable. His Western Foto-Bilder are, by contrast, open-ended and ambiguous. While
this indefinite deployment of photographs could be viewed as a straightforward rejection
of the false closure and objectivity of socialist painting, Curley has nuanced this assess
ment by showing that in the late 1950s Richter learned much about photographic am
biguity from his government’s manipulation of press images.7
There is, however, a further thread of continuity between the Western and pre-
Western phases of Richter’s career that has yet to be explored: his desire for be
longing. During the thirty years, he spent in Nazi Germany and the fledgling
Democratic Republic, Richter accrued deficits of belonging in three areas of his
life—his family, his national identity, and, above all, his career—which he would seek
to resolve in the West. This chapter looks at the emergence of those deficits, paying
particular attention to the latter, which prompted his eventual flight from Dresden.
To posit belonging as the major motivation for Richter’s Westward flight invites
consideration of what this condition is and how it functions. Despite extensive re
search in recent years, no settled answers have been reached to either of these
questions.8 There are, however, areas of consensus in the literature, which will guide
the discussions of belonging in this and later chapters. In keeping with common
usage, belonging is typically regarded as the state, or negotiated process, of fitting in
and feeling at home with others,9 though what each of these conditions amounts to
will vary between individuals and across the broad array of contexts within which
belonging may be sought.10 These range from the intimate proximity of family and
close friendships, to larger and less personal environments like the workplace and
religious congregations, to even more expansive and impersonal communities like the
nation, in which an individual’s sense of the collective, and thus of their position
within it becomes increasingly imaginary. Membership in any collective provides an
individual with resources to which they would not otherwise have access. These in
turn conduce toward a sense of reassurance and security. Belonging is distinct from
mere group membership, however, since it confers the added benefit of recognition:
the sense of being valued and acknowledged by members of a group or institution
with whose values, norms, and goals one identifies.11 When an individual fails to
identify with a collective of which they are a member, or feels under-recognised
within it, they will seek belonging elsewhere if the chance arises. This was the case for
Richter when he chose to leave the East German art world.
Ideally, the socialisation processes of childhood ensure that belonging arises
smoothly in the core communal contexts in which it will be needed in adulthood. A
child instilled with values and life goals that align with those of the people and in
stitutions it will later interact with is pre-calibrated to experience belonging in each of
these contexts. This condition will persist for as long as the contexts remain stable
and in harmony with each other.12 The ideal is never reached, of course, but it can be
approached. To the extent that it is approached, belonging is achieved and main
tained. Such was the instability of Richter’s upbringing and so conflicting were the
demands placed upon him as he transitioned from his bourgeois upbringing to his life
under socialism, that no smooth process of socialisation occurred for him. By the end
of the 1950s, his inability to identify with the prerogatives of the East German state
prompted his departure for the West.
Bourgeois cultural formation under National Socialism
Born as he was in Dresden in 1932, Richter’s life commenced just prior to the Nazi
assumption of power in 1933. As has been recounted by Richter himself, Robert
Storr, and Dietmar Elger, Richter’s family were modestly middle class.13 His father
Horst was a school teacher and his mother Hildegard, the major influence on his
childhood, was a bookseller. Horst’s profession obliged him to join the Nazi party
but according to Richter neither he nor Hildegard had much interest in politics.
Hildegard’s father had been a concert pianist, whose mismanagement of the family
brewery had led to its collapse. She herself valued cultural achievement highly, seeing
it not only as an end in its own right but also as a means of achieving social dis
tinction, a conviction she may have acquired to compensate for her family’s declining
fortunes throughout her childhood. In his later recollections, Richter would describe
her as an ‘elitist’ for whom being a ‘meaningful person’ meant becoming ‘a writer or
artist or intellectual.’14 By his teenage years, he was, with her encouragement, reading
the work of classical German authors like Nietzsche, Goethe, and Schiller. He also
took an interest in the works of contemporary writers like Thomas Mann, Lion
Feuchtwanger, Herman Hesse, and Stefan Zweig, who had been forced into exile by
the Nazis.15 Mann was a particular favourite, to the extent that, on fleeing the GDR
in 1961, Richter carried with him, as one of his few possessions, a set of the author’s
collected writings.16 Independent of his mother, who favoured music and literature,
he developed an interest in art, with painters like Albrecht Dürer, Diego Velázquez,
Rembrandt van Rijn, and Lovis Corinth, whose work he encountered in books his
parents owned, among his early interests.17
Between his literary intake and the emphasis his mother placed on culture as a path
to elevation, Richter’s conception of what it meant to be an artist could not have been
anything but romantic. To feel chosen for one’s vocation and destined for higher
things, to have the courage to be oneself and pursue one’s vision under challenging
circumstances, to risk suffering and a loss of respectability for eventual success (or
failure)—all of these were sentiments writ large throughout the literary canon he
absorbed in his youth and in the life stories of many of the authors he admired. As a
teenager, he tried his hand at poetry and, in emulation of two of his favourite writers,
recalls writing poems that were ‘very romantic, but bitter and nihilistic, like Nietzsche
and Hermann Hesse.’18 His earliest documented artworks, Landschaft im Mondlicht
[Landscape in Moonlight] (1949) (see Figure 1.1) and Selbstporträt [Self-Portrait]
(1949), were also romantic in conception. The former is reminiscent of the work of
any number of German romantic landscape painters, most notably Caspar David
Friedrich, who had been based in Dresden and would become a recurrent touchstone
for Richter in later decades. The dramatic shading of Richter’s features in his self-
portrait plunges one half of his face into darkness but leaves the other half startlingly
illuminated. In true romantic fashion, this image places the exploration and revela
tion of the self at the heart of the creative process.
There were certainly aspects of Richter’s upbringing that warranted the bitterness
and anger of his poems. A notable source of stress was his parents’ marriage, which
was, as he recalls, an unhappy one. Throughout his childhood, Hildegard was con
temptuous of Horst, whom she felt had failed to rise sufficiently far in life to give the
family the elevated standing she felt it should possess. She disparaged and belittled
him, showed no respect for his religious faith, and intimated to Richter that he might
Figure 1.1 Gerhard Richter, Landschaft im Mondlicht [Landscape in Moonlight], 1949,

watercolour, dimensions unknown. © Gerhard Richter 2020 (12112020),
courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden.
not have been his real father, something he would discover to be true decades later.19
She also encouraged Richter to look upon her brother Rudi, a more outgoing and
vigorous personality, as a preferable role model.20 Throughout the 1930s, Horst
struggled to find work and when he did secure a teaching position, it was far from the
cosmopolitan environment of Dresden, where Hildegard preferred to live, in the small
town of Reichenau 100 kilometres East of the city. With the outbreak of the war,
Horst was conscripted, and from 1939 until 1946 was absent from Richter’s life.
When he returned to the family after spending several years as a prisoner of war, he
was not greeted warmly and he and Richter would never have a strong relationship.
By this stage, the family were living in the village of Waltersdorf, to which
Hildegard had moved with Richter and his sister Gisela in 1943. Although smaller
and more remote than Reichenau, Waltersdorf did have its advantages. Not only was
the Nazi presence less intensive there, but it also allowed them to escape the Dresden
bombing in 1945. But for the adolescent Richter, it was the sense of isolation the
move brought with it that most forcefully affected him, an experience that seems to
have contributed to the emergence of his artistic interests. Unable to speak the local
dialect, he struggled to fit in, and, as he noted to Coosje van Bruggen in the 1980s
‘was alone a great deal and drew a lot.’21 Since the move to Waltersdorf occurred in
1943 and Richter dates his first earnest artistic efforts to 1946,22 his experience of
isolation must have lingered and thereforelasted longer than a brief phase of ad
justment to the family’s new location. Among the works he made in Waltersdorf was
a watercolour of people dancing. The work has not survived, but Richter explained to
Robert Storr in 1996 that it related to a dance he had attended at a local youth club:
‘We had moved to a new village, and automatically I was an outsider. I couldn’t
speak the dialect and so on. I was at a club, watching the others dance, and I was
jealous and bitter and annoyed.’23 Although in time he found his feet in the village,
becoming politically active and joining a theatre group, his initial sense of being an
outsider , desiring to be on the inside but unable to achieve this, anticipated much of
his future work.24
Richter left home in 1948 to begin his career, a year prior to the founding of the
German Democratic Republic by the occupying Soviet forces. He would thus live the
first phase of his adulthood under socialism, albeit a socialism that was still under
construction and only gradually consolidating. As this consolidation gathered pace,
he would find his bourgeois cultural inclinations increasingly difficult to reconcile
with the values imposed upon him by the East German authorities. Having inter
nalised a view of creativity as an individualistic undertaking, premised on the ex
ploration and expression of the self, he would now have to contend with an emerging
artistic culture that was ranged in opposition to these principles.
Socialist education at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts

After trying his hand at several unsatisfying jobs, in August 1950 Richter applied to
study at Dresden’s Hochschule für Bildende Künste [Academy of Fine Arts], a storied
institution that had long been one of Germany’s leading art schools and had reopened
its doors in 1947. To this end, he submitted a portfolio of drawings and water
colours, among which were works in the vein of Landschaft im Mondlicht. His ap
plication, however, was rejected on two counts: Not only was his family deemed
excessively bourgeois, but the paintings in his portfolio did not align thematically or
stylistically with the prerogatives of the academy’s emerging socialist curriculum.25
At the heart of this curriculum was a commitment to the Soviet-developed style of
socialist realism, which had emerged under Stalin in the 1930s and was exported to
other Eastern Bloc nations following the war. The Soviet authorities had taken as
their preferred artistic model a form of idealising realism, which was rooted in tra
ditional modes of figure painting and could be used in propagandising fashion to
advance the state’s objectives. Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet official who first pro
claimed support for the style as an official state policy, laid out its major traits and
objectives in a speech to a meeting of Soviet writers he had convened in 1934.26 In
this address, he exhorted authors ‘to depict reality in its revolutionary development’
and make work that could assist in the ‘ideological remoulding and education of the
toiling people in the spirit of socialism.’ This didactic and politically-oriented work
should focus on scenes of everyday life and depict these in an optimistic manner. At
all times, it should support the aims of the Party, the nation and the proletariat.
Beyond these stipulations, Zhdanov made no stylistic or aesthetic prescriptions, either
in literature or any other art form. In the years that followed his address, however,
the key attributes of socialist realist painting were established.
Formally, the style blended features of early 19th-century academic painting, like
strong drafting, idealisation of the human figure, and straightforward narrative leg
ibility, with the looser paint handling and focus on contemporary subjects typical of
mid- to late 19th century forms of Realism. Representational styles that had followed
on from Realism were seen as expressions of bourgeois decadence and thus rejected as
inimical to socialism. Deemed too individualistic in their depiction of the world and
too focused on the class interests of the bourgeoisie, styles like Impressionism and
Expressionism were held to be of little use in the development of a workers’ state. So
too was abstraction, which was censured even more emphatically. With its emer
gence, modernism was held to have slipped further into decadence. Artists had now
forsaken society completely so as to concentrate exclusively on self-expression and an
elitist exploration of form for form’s sake. It was to counter this historical dynamic,
the Soviet authorities contended, that they had reaffirmed the value of naturalism by
throwing their support behind a standardised, realistic style that suppressed signs of
personal expression and presented simple narrative scenarios, which celebrated the
Party’s and the people’s achievements.27
An emblematic instance of Soviet-style socialist realism is Arkady Plastov’s
Collective Farm Festival (1937) (see Figure 1.2). Painted five years after the disastrous
famine brought on by Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture, the work depicts a
gathering at a kolkhoz [collective farm] that bears no trace of the program’s ill effects.
Assembled under Stalin’s beaming image and a banner reading ‘Life has gotten better,
life has gotten happier,’ the villagers enjoy the fruits of their shared labour, which
spill out toward the viewer from the painting’s foreground. Behind the celebrations,
women bring out food-laden platters from a building far superior to any the villagers
would have known before the coming of socialism. Like all socialist realist images,
Plastov’s scene is not intended as a literal depiction, but rather as an allegory of the
Figure 1.2 Arkady Plastov, Collective Farm Festival, 1937, oil on canvas, 188 × 307 cm. Public
domain.
revolution’s progress in rural areas. The event that it presents is thus to be regarded as
an ideal type, rather than a concrete occurrence. Instead of being seen as individuals,
Plastov’s figures should be understood as model agricultural workers, whose actions
are worthy of emulation by the painting’s viewers. As socialist realist painters came to
recognise, affect was as important as cognition for fostering this kind of response.28
Plastov, therefore, bathed his scene in festive warmth in a bid to enlist the painting’s
viewers as vicarious participants in his festival.
In the late 1940s, Russian authorities began infiltrating East German cultural orga
nisations in an effort to impose this kind of painting on the new state. Alongside these
activities, pro-Soviet authors published essays extolling socialist realism and condemning
the work of local artists who were attempting to resuscitate modernism following its
suppression under Fascism. A heated exchange ensued between proponents of realism
and modernism, known as the ‘Realismus–Formalismus Streit’ [realism-formalism con
troversy] in which Soviet-aligned commentators came out strongly in favour of realism
and won the government’s backing. When the GDR was founded in 1949, support for
socialist realism became an official policy of the ruling Sozialistische Einheitspartei
Deutschlands [Socialist Unity Party of Germany] (SED). Independent artists’ organisa
tions were liquidated, and control of the arts sector was handed over to the Kulturbund
zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands [Cultural Association for the Renewal of
Germany], or ‘Kulturbund,’ a Party organ responsible for allocating public commissions
and administering arts institutions.29 From this point forward, any artist hoping to win
commissions and thus have a viable career would have to join the Kulturbund and abide
by its stipulations. In a 1952 decree, the East German leader Walter Ulbricht declared
that art’s chief purpose in the new nation would be to document and assist with the
formation of a collectivised socialist economy. In service of these objectives, artists would
report on the activities of the so-called ‘New Man’ [sic] of socialism (a well-established
trope of Soviet aesthetics),30 whose efforts to construct the new nation would be cele
brated via ‘Typenbilder’—emblematic portraits of East German citizens fulfilling the
ambitions of the state.31
Quite how this task would be achieved stylistically became a matter of considerable
debate. The SED’s initial inclination was to slavishly imitate Soviet-style socialist
realism, but this ambition was soon tempered in the face of widespread resistance.
Although the Party was successful in restricting artists to pro-socialist subjects and
was able to revive a classically-oriented curriculum at the nation’s art academies,
support for a more liberal and modernistic approach to realism than was permitted in
the Soviet Union remained strong among those in the GDR who had embraced
modernism prior to the war. Since many East German artists had been modernists as
well as communists in the 1930s and had seen their art suppressed as a consequence,
they had no reason to see modernism as antithetical to socialism. Instead, they were
more likely to conceive it as a bulwark against the retrograde classicism that the Nazi
regime had promoted in modernism’s stead. Since Soviet-style socialist realism was
itself anchored firmly in the classical tradition, albeit in less naked fashion, a clear
distinction between socialist and fascist forms of classicising naturalism remained
difficult to establish. Attempts to revive classicism on East German soil were conse
quently hindered by this fuzziness.32 In tacit recognition of this fact, artistic strictures
were relaxed in 1953 as part of a broader package of reforms enacted in the wake of
that year’s Workers’ Uprising, a popular protest against an increase in work quotas
that had threatened to unseat the government. Following this climatic shift, liberal
artistic factions began expanding the horizons of East German socialist realism by
lacing it with elements of modernism that were not seen in Soviet painting. They
would persist in this endeavour for the remainder of the decade, achieving a degree of
success but encountering resistance at every turn from Soviet-aligned conservatives.33
Richter made his application to the Academy at a time when the official policy of
depicting the New Man of socialism via Typenbilder had yet to be announced. The
school’s teaching staff, however, were already being pressured to promote socialist
realism and were developing their curriculum accordingly.34 Faced with works like
Landschaft im Mondlicht that had no basis in academic drafting, no evident socialist
subject-matter or even any human protagonists, all of which were mandatory features of
a socialist realist painting, the committee’s rejection of his application was inevitable.35
They recognised his talents, however, and instructed him to spend time working in a
state-run business before seeking readmission at a later date with a portfolio of more
suitable works. Richter duly found employment as a painter at a clothing factory in the
town of Zittau, not far from Reichenau, where he had lived since he had left his parents’
home. In tandem with this work, he prepared his new portfolio and reapplied to the
Academy the following year, this time with the help of his employer and confirmation of
his membership in the Kulturbund.36 Although the images in his second portfolio have
not survived, his carefully crafted admissions essay is preserved in the school’s files. As
Jeanne Nugent has recounted in her thorough examination of the essay, Richter used it to
condemn the excesses of formalism and extol the virtues of an optimistic form of realism
that gestured toward the bright and impending future of socialism. On the strength of
this demonstration of fidelity to the principles of socialist realism, he was admitted to
study in May 1951.37 This was his first major step toward becoming an artist, but it had
come at a significant price: conformity to a view of culture and its purposes that was
foreign to the outlook he had grown up with. Beyond providing him with technical skills,
his training would therefore be an exercise in cultural retraining, whose outcome at this
stage remained uncertain.
In the five years Richter spent at the Academy, he received a thorough grounding in
traditional drawing and painting methods and was exhorted to apply this instruction
in service of socialist ideology. The curriculum he followed combined technical study
with Marxist-oriented classes in political economy, history and art history, as well as
Russian language instruction.38 Its technical aspect was rooted in the academic
teaching methods that had been used at the school since its founding in the late 18th
century and revived after the war by the school’s new director Hans Grundig. Studio
assignments revolved around close study of the nude, supplemented by exercises
devoted to other traditional subjects, such as animals, still-life, and landscape. In
keeping with the Soviet approach to art history, styles from Impressionism onward
were excluded from study, and this despite the fact that both Grundig and his wife
Lea, who was also on the Academy’s faculty, had been committed Expressionists until
the late 1940s.39 Instead of modelling their work on such decadent, modernist
practices, students were pushed to follow the example of 19th-century Realism, as
practised by the Russian Peredvizhniki [Wanderers] group and German artists like
Adolf Menzel, Hans Thoma, and Wilhelm Leibl.40 On one hand, such work was
presented as an outgrowth of the classical tradition, reaching back to antiquity. On
the other hand, it was held to have paved the way for socialist realism, which, having
first been established by the Soviets, was now poised to flourish in the GDR. To fulfil
his own role in this process, Richter was exhorted to produce Typenbilder in the
manner of leading Soviet artists like Aleksandr Gerasimov.41 But while a number of
his documented drawings from this period attest to his capacity to work in a clas
sicising idiom, he chose to train as a mural painter, a decision that allowed him to
keep Soviet-style socialist realism at arm’s length and adopt a looser, more moder
nistic approach to his work. In opting for this specialisation, he exercised the small
degree of freedom he was given at the Academy to align himself with the liberal
factions of the East German art world, which were attempting to steer socialist
realism away from its Russian prototype.
Like other artists receiving state commissions in the GDR, muralists were pre
scribed the thematic content of their images, along with guidelines concerning desired
colour schemes, techniques, and compositional elements. But beyond these stipula
tions, they were allowed to work more freely than easel painters, due to the large
surface areas they were tasked with covering. Given license in this fashion to simplify
and schematise their imagery, they opted to infuse their works with elements of
modernism that tended in this direction.42 Emblematic of this approach was the art of
Walter Womacka, who studied briefly in Dresden in 1952–53 before moving to Berlin
and establishing himself as one of the nation’s leading muralists. His mosaic Unser
Neues Leben [Our New Life] (1958) (see Figure 1.3), produced for the Haus der
Massenorganisationen [House of Mass Organizations] in the socialist model city
Eisenhüttenstadt, depicts a series of figure groups engaged in scenes of collective la
bour and leisure embodying the principles of life in the GDR. Three scenes of manual
production on the work’s left are balanced by three scenes of healthful recreation on
its right. At the work’s centre, a representative array of East German citizens stands
ranged beneath the red flag of socialism. While Womacka’s rendition of his figures
using flat blocks of colour bounded by clean strokes of contouring is familiar from
mosaics dating back to antiquity, he employed additional devices whose pedigree is
Figure 1.3 Walter Womacka, Unser Neues Leben [Our New Life], 1958, stone mosaic, 1200 ×
600 cm, Haus der Massenorganisationen, Eisenhüttenstadt. Public domain.
modernist. Among these are the free-floating passages of colour that visually connect
the work’s scenarios, his sparing use of modelling and shading so as to flatten his
motifs, and his use of both positive and negative contouring to bind his flattened
figures to their backgrounds. But by the standards of Western modernism, which by
now offered numerous examples of works that dispensed entirely with modelling,
freed line from its delimiting function and eliminated figure-ground relations, his
deployment of such devices was constrained. Womacka’s allegiance to realism pre
cluded an engagement with these techniques, which would have undercut his work’s
legibility and exposed him to charges of formalism.
In Dresden, Richter was encouraged by his professor Heinz Lohmar to work in the
same progressive manner as muralists like Womacka. A former surrealist who had
been exiled under Fascism, Lohmar had returned to East Germany following the war.
At this point he, like the Grundigs, had reformed his practice in accordance with
conservative dictates. But his modernist sympathies persisted and in the liberalised
climate of the mid- and late-1950s, he urged his students to push their work in this
direction.43 The results of Richter’s study under Lohmar are apparent in his best-
known image from the GDR, his graduation mural known as Lebensfreude [Joy of
Life] (1956) (see Figure 1.4). Painted for Dresden’s newly opened Deutsches
Hygienemuseum [German Health Museum], he used this work to demonstrate his
readiness for further commissions, while making plain his affiliation with the pro
gressive wing of socialist realism.
Like Womacka’s mosaic, Lebensfreude contains a series of figure groupings that
model desired social activities, in this case, healthy forms of recreation. Arranged
from left to right in an implied chronological sequence, these groupings depict
Figure 1.4 Gerhard Richter, Lebensfreude [Joy of Life], 1956, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum,
Dresden [covered over]. © Gerhard Richter 2020 (12112020), courtesy Gerhard
Richter Archive, Dresden.
episodes in the life of a young couple, commencing with their courtship and leisure-
time activities with friends, and concluding with later scenes in which they are a
married couple picnicking and dancing with their children.
Whether Richter chose to approach his theme via the subject of family is unknown,
but in view of the many scenes of idealised family life he would produce in later decades,
it is tempting to suggest that this inclination first surfaced in Lebensfreude. If this is true,
then the work had a personal dimension, but one that is difficult to discern by virtue of
his adherence to the idealising mandate of socialist realism. This applies not only to his
figures but also to the landscape, which he rendered as a pastoral setting, from which all
evidence of labour had been banished. The sole indications of the nation’s industrial
economy are a pair of distant smokestacks and a tiny tractor tucked away in the
background of the image. Since other East German murals of this period that depicted
the countryside typically placed far greater emphasis on technological progress, Richter’s
relegation of this beloved socialist subject to the margins of his work so as to focus on the
natural environment could be perceived as a reassertion of his adolescent romantic
leanings, insofar as this was possible in the context.44 His modelling of a number of his
figures after well-known classical prototypes, like the fête champêtre (in the manner of
Giorgione), the dance, and the birth of Venus (following the model of Botticelli), may
well have been a personal choice as well. In addition to relaying to his examiners his
knowledge of art historical precedent, these quotations were in keeping with the interest
in painting’s history he had already developed as a teenager. Womacka, by contrast,
avoided clear allusions to tradition, preferring work with poses and motifs drawn from
other socialist artworks.45
Richter’s treatment of the landscape in the mural bears the imprint of more recent
influences than his figures. Reduced to a tapestry of abstract colour patches, the
environment his figures inhabit is redolent of Orphism or late Cézanne, as filtered
through (and watered down by) later sources. While he no longer recalls the origins
of this technique, it was informed by his awareness of modernism, to which he had
had limited exposure during his training.46 Students of the Academy were allowed to
examine books on modernism, which were held in the school’s library, on a su
pervised, one-time basis.47 From time to time they also found modernist material in
private libraries or Western periodicals.48 During officially-sanctioned trips to the
West, Richter also encountered modernism in person. Details of these visits are in
short supply and his memories have faded, but he recalls seeing contemporary ab
stract paintings in 1955 at a commercial gallery in Paris.49 In West Germany that
same year, he visited Hamburg and Munich with the goal of appraising mural
painting trends in the country, but could locate few examples.50 A year later, he had
access to modernistic work in Dresden, at an exhibition that Lohmar had curated at
the local Albertinum Museum. Staged as part of the festivities for Dresden’s 750th
anniversary, the show featured work by fifty local figures that evinced few traces of
socialist concerns, plus contributions from twenty-five Stuttgart artists, which were
heavily abstracted in many cases.51 To whatever extent these experiences fed into
Richter’s work on Lebensfreude, he did not go as far as Womacka in adding modern-
istic touches to his painting. Perhaps mindful of his standing as a student, he confined
his use of abstracted imagery to the painting’s scenery. By contrast, the work’s figures
are depicted in a cleanly naturalistic manner, their bodies delineated crisply through
strong contouring and background shading, and their clothing modelled with con
vincing illusionism.
On the strength of Lebensfreude, which received a grade of ‘very good’ from the
school’s examiners, Richter was permitted to graduate. He then received a new
commission from the museum (on the subject of modern medicine) and was offered a
position as an ‘Aspiranter,’ or master student, under Lohmar. With this role came a
government-funded studio and a three-year stipend, which he received in exchange
for teaching evening classes.52 Buoyed by this support, he embarked on his new career
as a muralist. His hope in doing so was to liberalise his practice still further, and in
this way add something of his own creative outlook to his commissions, an ambition
that was swiftly curtailed.
Abstraction, expressionism, and Richter’s ‘Third Way’

Compared to the lives of many in the GDR, Richter’s situation after graduating was
promising. Assured of a steady income from his stipend and a series of commissions,
within a year of leaving the Academy he felt secure enough to marry his girlfriend
Marianne ‘Ema’ Eufinger. During his stint as an Aspiranter, he was able to buy a
motorcycle and (with the assistance of his aunt) a Trabant car—the latter a noted
symbol of success in the GDR.53 Prospering financially, he had little reason to doubt
that, in economic terms at least, the socialist state was making progress, from which
he would continue to benefit. Materially, therefore, he had no qualms concerning his
career. And this was not his only privilege, since he and Ema were also subject to
fewer governmental restrictions than many of their compatriots. Not only were they
spared the hardships imposed on those who defied Party policy (and this despite the
fact that Ema had participated in the Workers’ Uprising), but they were also accorded
one noteworthy benefit denied the vast majority of East German citizens: the ability
to travel to the West.54 In addition to Richter’s work-related trips abroad, he and
Ema could visit Ema’s parents in Lower Saxony, where they had resettled in 1956. It
was there that the couple had been married.
The basis for this privileged lifestyle was Richter’s rising reputation as a muralist.
Between 1956 and 1959, he completed a string of commissions, including scenes of
animals and children for a kindergarten, a sundial and stylised map of the Dresden
area, painted on the side of a schoolhouse, and a billboard for the tenth anniversary
of the Sächsische Zeitung [Saxon Newspaper], the region’s leading newspaper. Most
significant among these projects was a wall painting for the city’s SED headquarters
that he began late in 1957 and had completed by April the following year (see
Figure 1.5).55 Devoted to the theme of proletarian revolution, this was the most
pointedly political image he is known to have carried out in the GDR. It was also his
most forcefully modernistic.
Unlike his prior murals, in which he had nodded discretely toward modernism via
ornamental background elements and, in some cases, simplified and flattened foreground
motifs, in his party headquarters project he opted for a style that was more heavily
abstracted. This shift is most apparent in his treatment of the painting’s figures. Massed
together in a solid wall of flesh, a group of workers confronts a phalanx of mounted
police, which looms like a wave above them. The protestors who occupy the background
have been straightforwardly depicted, their facial features limned using heavy black
contouring and their bodies, where visible, modelled with supple naturalism. But two
foreground figures—the first attempting to pull a rider from his horse and the second
collapsing as if from a gunshot wound—are distinguished by Richter’s angular, high-
Figure 1.5 Gerhard Richter, Untitled—Worker Uprising, 1958, Socialist Unity Party
Headquarters, Dresden [destroyed]. © Gerhard Richter 2020 (12112020), cour
tesy Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden.
contrast treatment of their clothing and his distorted rendition of their anatomies. Such
non-naturalistic manipulations, which have no precedent in his prior commissions, are
echoed in his depiction of the incoming wave of riders. Behind these figures a schematic
cityscape is visible, its buildings rendered in a manner that intensifies the abstract ap
proach to scenery that was already evident in Lebensfreude. In that work, Richter had
placed his figures within abstracted surroundings that were simplified yet spatially
credible. This was not the case with the buildings behind the figures in the SED mural,
which look more like an unfinished stage set than a realistic urban environment. This
same quality of deliberate incompleteness is also present in the painting’s foreground.
Although an area of paving at the lead protestor’s feet confirms that the confrontation is
occurring on a cobbled street, the cobbles themselves are barely indicated, having been
drawn in haphazardly with the sparsest of wavering black contours. In the darkness
beneath several of the horsemen, a second clutch of cobbles is visible. Even cruder in
appearance, these stand upright and parallel to the picture plane. Wholly insubstantial,
they seem to hover in mid-air.
This intensified interest in abstraction formed part of Richter’s search for a ‘Dritte
Weg’ [Third Way] painting style following his graduation.56 During the postwar
period, abstraction had become dominant in the West, leading factions on both sides
of the Iron Curtain to construe the contrast between realism and abstraction in po
litical terms. Like their Soviet counterparts, the East German authorities regarded
nonobjective art as the epitome of asocial, bourgeois self-indulgence. Its Western Bloc
supporters, by contrast, saw it as a beacon of expressive liberty.57 Like many East
German artists at this time, Richter was initially unwilling to adopt either viewpoint.
Hoping to establish a tolerable position within the system, he sought to find a middle
path, or Third Way, between these extremes. In so doing, he hoped not only to chart
a course between realism and abstraction but also to strike a satisfying balance be
tween his obligations to the socialist collective and his desire to individualise his
practice.58 To this end, he turned his attention to two Western modernists with so
cialist credentials. The first was Pablo Picasso and the second was Renato Guttuso, an
Italian realist, committed communist and friend of Picasso whose work owed a no
table debt to the Spaniard.59 In the mid-1950s, both figures became touchstones for
progressive Eastern painters who wished to distance their work from Soviet-style
socialist realism. Although both were sufficiently well-regarded to be accepted as
honorary members of the Akademie der Künste der DDR [East German Academy of
Arts], their work’s formalistic and expressionistic leanings meant that their standing
remained contentious among conservatives.60 In East German cultural discourse of
this period these terms served as bywords for ‘individualistic.’ Exploring form for
form’s sake was held to make art into a mirror of an artist’s personality, rather than
the outer world. Expressionist distortions of form contorted reality in line with an
artist’s subjective outlook on reality, thereby privileging this viewpoint over that of
the collective. In light of these criticisms, Picasso received a mixed response in the
GDR. While his naturalistic images were celebrated, his more abstract Cubist works
were often singled out for condemnation. To the extent that Cubism was taken up by
East Germans, it was heavily diluted, with Guttuso offering a precedent for this
practice. A painting like his Self-Portrait of 1943 is clearly indebted to Picasso, but it
tones down the Spaniard’s anatomical disfigurations and retains a more credible sense
of space. Later paintings like La battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio [The Battle of
Ammiraglio Bridge] (1951–52) (see Figure 1.6) also bear the mark of Picasso but
dilute his influence still further for the sake of naturalism.
Images like these leave no doubt as to Guttuso’s influence on the SED mural. While
the self-portrait supplies a precedent for Richter’s bulging treatment of the lead
Figure 1.6 Renato Guttuso, La battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio [The Battle of Ammiraglio
Bridge], 1951–52, oil on canvas, 318×520 cm. © Renato Guttuso. Societa Italiana
Autori Ed Editori [SIAE].
protestor’s forearms, the thick contouring and starkly modelled clothing of the sol
diers in La battaglia di Ponte dell’Ammiraglio provide a likely touchstone for his
treatment of his protestors. The jagged folds of the white clothing worn by the lead
protestor and his dying companion are more expressly cubistic, suggesting the direct
influence of Picasso.
The fact that this painting was completed boded well for Richter’s Third Way in
itiative, but the project did not go off smoothly. In Richter’s eyes, the state commis
sioning system left much to be desired, a view he chose to publicise in an opinion piece
for Sonntag, a newspaper produced by the Kulturbund.61 Published in April 1958, be
neath the heading ‘Disagreements have helped me go further’ [Auseinandersetzungen
halfen mir weiter], this text voiced several criticisms of the commissioning process, to
gether with suggestions for reform. After declaring in his opening remarks that ‘com
missions and “creative freedom” have never excluded one another,’ Richter spent the rest
of the article adducing evidence to the contrary. Not only do ‘few who commission
artworks [in the GDR] know much about the arts,’ he asserted, but attempts to resolve
this problem using government ‘commissioning committees’ [Auftragskommissionen]
had not yet been successful. The function of these expert bodies was to ensure a happy
outcome for clients and artists alike, but in his own experience this process had yet to
function smoothly. To improve this situation, he asked first, that clearer guidelines be
provided to artists at the start of each new project; second, that committees refrain from
giving artists advice in the client’s absence; and third, that situations in which an artist is
made responsible to two committees on a single commission—a scenario he had evi
dently encountered—be avoided. In an effort to conclude on a happy note, he finished
with a rosy summation of his experience with the SED mural:
Concerning my most recent commissioned work, a wall painting in the SED

Headquarters in Dresden, I would like to say that I never had the feeling of being
constricted in my ‘creative freedom’ (what beautiful words!). I never took
seriously the observations about ‘major revisions’ and ‘Soviet naturalism’ from
one or two colleagues, which were meant to forewarn me before beginning work.
Nor did I need to take them seriously—to the contrary. I’d like to take this
opportunity to voice the hope that my colleagues might have many opportunities
to work with such understanding clients.
Naturally I was not spared disagreements; this would not be in keeping with the
purpose of the exercise. It was precisely these disagreements that often helped me
and spurred me on to do many things differently than I had foreseen at the outset;
not because I had to, but because—after being convinced that the client’s opinion
was correct—I wanted to.62
If the tension between these passages and the remainder of the article were not suf
ficient in its own right to cast doubt on their sincerity, Jeanne Nugent’s review of
minutes from a meeting about the project gives further grounds for scepticism.
Convened for the purpose of appraising Richter’s drawings for the mural, the meeting
was apparently the second such gathering. At the earlier meeting (the notes from
which have not been located), he had been asked to make the protestors larger and
their oppressors smaller so as to enhance the protestors’ stature. At the second
meeting, his revisions were deemed unsatisfactory and he was again instructed to give
the protestors greater emphasis. A host of smaller requests and criticisms were also
made. Among these were observations that the distance between the flags held by the
protestors was too narrow, that a wagon wheel ought to have been removed from
the composition and replaced by heads (a comment Richter seems to have heeded in
the finished work), and a request to move one of the horses to the left by 40 cm.63
Since these exacting comments provide just one example of the feedback Richter
received on the project, it is reasonable to assume that further criticism followed
during its completion. If so, he may indeed have been obliged to make substantial
changes to his design. Beyond these compositional revisions, the extent to which he
altered the work stylistically is difficult to assess. While his reference to colleagues’
comments about ‘Soviet naturalism’ does raise this possibility, no discussion of this
subject is recorded in the minutes.
Whatever the extent of pressure in this direction, Richter did not have a free hand
stylistically with the SED mural. As his photographic archive makes clear, had he had
his own way on the project, its overtures toward expressionism and abstraction
would likely have been stronger. Among the works that attest to this inclination are a
number of figure studies from 1957, which he created in the privacy of his studio.
These include drawings in the manner of Picasso that do little to limit the Spaniard’s
disfigurements (see Figure 1.7) and a nude that is cartoonishly reminiscent of Picasso’s
Femme dans un fauteuil [Woman in an Armchair] (1922), which he has placed before a
background derived from Mondrian. Richter does not recall the origins of this latter
motif, but its most likely source was a Guttuso painting called Boogie-Woogie in which
Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie appears as decor (see Figure 1.8).64
Richter’s decision to follow Guttuso on this occasion reflected his ambivalent re
lationship to non-objective art in the late 1950s. Although comfortable with the use
of abstraction at the level of ornament, he was not yet at ease with the process of
Figure 1.7 Gerhard Richter, Sitzende Frau [Sitting Woman], 1957. © Gerhard Richter
2020 (12112020), courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden.
Figure 1.8 Renato Guttuso, Boogie-Woogie, 1953, oil on canvas, 169.5 × 205 cm. © Renato
Guttuso. Societa Italiana Autori Ed Editori [SIAE].
creating more serious abstract works. He was intrigued by this prospect, but felt
unsure of how to proceed. He was thus reluctant to make his own abstract works lest
his untutored efforts result in a case of mere ‘Spielerei’—a haphazard and amateurish
play with pigment that would embarrass him professionally and personally.65 In a
1959 cartoon in pen and ink, he playfully expressed this insecurity. The drawing
shows an abstract painter in his studio, seated cross-legged with a brush in hand and
a serious look on his face. Behind him is an unfinished painting on an easel with
which he is clearly having trouble. Having set out to paint a composition consisting of
several alternating black and white stripes, he has gone astray and placed two black
stripes side-by-side.66 On a public level, the image was simple satire, but privately it
bespoke Richter’s misgivings about producing abstract images of his own. This
hesitation notwithstanding, he continued to explore abstraction in the late 1950s,
both openly and covertly, in ornamental and non-ornamental contexts.
A well-known early instance of such experimentation is a suite of monoprints
called the Elbe series. Richter created these works during a print-making class for
graduates in 1957, when he grew bored with his assigned exercises. Taking up an ink-
laden rubber roller, he used it to fashion fields of black pigment, whose density and
texture varied from one image to the next (see Figure 1.9). With their strong in
timations of openness and immateriality, the more even-toned sheets in the series
bring the diaphanous effects of postwar Western colour field painting to mind. A
contrasting group of grittier, more irregular compositions, featuring uncontrolled ink
spills and indications of the paper being placed on a rough surface, recall the earthier
sensibilities of matièriste painting, another abstract painting style, practised by the
likes of Alberto Burri and Antoni Tàpies, which was popular in Western Europe in
the 1950s and by the last years of the decade had also made some inroads in
neighbouring Poland, where abstraction had become accepted in the late 1950s.67
Figure 1.9 Gerhard Richter, Elbe #20, 1957, linocut ink on paper, 29.5 × 21 cm. ©
Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
Although Richter claims to have had neither form of painting in mind as he im
provised these images, their affinities with aspects of postwar modernism are
striking.68 So too is the resemblance of several less abstract sheets within the series to
his own early watercolour Landscape in Moonlight. Stylised as nocturnal landscapes,
in which a gleaming moon occasionally appears, these vistas offer further con
firmation that Richter was still drawn to the style of painting he had developed as a
teenager before bowing to the will of the state for the sake of his training.
Collectively, the works of the Elbe series suggest that by 1957 Richter’s wish to
expand the boundaries of socialist realism was shadowed by a more recalcitrant
desire: to escape its confines entirely and follow his own muse. As his playful ex
periments made apparent, he could do this by embracing abstraction or by returning
to the romantically-tinged style of his youth. At this stage, however, he was not yet
firm in either of these convictions. He also lacked a clear sense of how this liberation
might occur. It was this lack of clarity, he recalls, that lead him to reject the Elbe
series as a failed attempt work abstractly. Feeling as if he had blundered his way
blindly through its production and indeed engaged in mere Spielerei, he was, in his
own words, ‘embarrassed’ and ‘ashamed’ by the results.69
His sense of failure with the Elbe works notwithstanding, Richter’s interest in dec
orative abstraction persisted, as did his wish to move socialist realism in the direction of
expressive figuration. Both inclinations were evident in a group of mural designs he
prepared in 1958 for a planned café in Dresden’s Altstadt.70 Four of the designs por
trayed schematic street plans and linear cityscapes, dotted at irregular intervals with tiny
black stick figures wearing broad-brimmed hats. The latter were a regular feature of his
drawings at this time and would remain so until the early 1960s.71 A fifth design, re
miniscent of the work of Paul Klee and Joan Miró, consisted of a flowing grid of colour,
surmounted by a heavily abstracted cluster of figurative motifs rendered in outline in an
arabesque manner. In contrast to the SED mural, in which Richter used abstraction and
expressionist distortion to enhance the drama of an otherwise naturalistic, narrative
scenario, these designs dropped all deference to narrative and naturalism. Unsurprisingly,
they were rejected and while no explanation was given, Richter considers their ab
straction to have been the most likely reason for this dismissal.72 His relegation of the
human figure to the status of an ant-like silhouette in his city scenes would also have sat
poorly with the commissioning committee. Inert, inscrutable and dwarfed by their sur
roundings, his stickmen bore no resemblance to the New Man of socialism, who was at
all times to be shown performing tasks that were leading to the mastery of his en
vironment. Neither heroic in stature nor advancing the cause of socialism, Richter’s stick
figures were as far as possible from this ideal.
Whatever might be surmised in this regard, the café designs marked Richter’s
deepest public foray into abstract and expressionist territory. In the wake of their
rejection, he trod a more conservative line in his later proposals. But his interest in
modernism persisted and a year later lead him to a watershed moment in his career:
his often-recounted visit to the second documenta exhibition.
Richter at II. documenta

Featuring the work of more than 300 hundred artists, from Western Europe, North
and South America and Japan, II. documenta (as it was officially titled) was a sequel
to the first documenta, which had taken place in 1955 in the small West German city
of Kassel. Conceived as a survey of prewar modernism, documenta had been intended
by its director Arnold Bode to rehabilitate movements like Fauvism, Expressionism,
Surrealism, Cubism, and Futurism, that the Nazis had branded as degenerate. As
fascism receded into history, Bode repositioned prewar modernism as a testament to
individual liberty, which, like freedom itself, had been suppressed under National
Socialism.73 With II. documenta Bode, and curator Werner Haftmann, turned their
attention to postwar modernism, which they presented as an outgrowth of prewar
trends and once again construed in politically progressive terms. Exhibiting a
sweeping array of paintings, sculptures and prints that focussed on abstraction, along
with heavily abstracted figurative work by the likes of Alberto Giacometti, Jean
Fautrier, and Francis Bacon, they described the works on view as an organic out
growth of democracy, opposed both in style and ideology to socialist realism.
In the show’s three-volume catalogue, Haftmann made its democratic leanings explicit.
Declaring (with no small measure of historical myopia) that ‘quality in art is only possible
when it is created in complete freedom, unhindered by extra-artistic demands…,’ he
dismissed the ‘politically regimented art exercises of “socialist realism”’ as ‘propa
gandistically sanitised [aufgeschönt], pseudo-naturalistic depictions… in which the falsi
fication of contemporary man’s [sic] process of coming to terms with reality can be
recognized.’74 In deploying the phrase ‘coming to terms with reality,’ Haftmann was
adopting the existentialist rhetoric then prevalent in Western European art circles, which
construed art as a forum in which individuals sought to ‘come to terms’ with the con
ditions of their existence, as dictated by the social and historical situation in which they
found themselves.75 His condemnation of socialist realism turned on what he saw as its
inauthentic presentation of this process. Instead of providing artists with an open forum
for working through the conditions of their existence, as they themselves experienced
them, socialist artists were obliged to suppress their individual outlooks and filter the
reality they depicted through the lens of Party ideology. In stark contrast, abstraction
functioned as a ‘fundamental expressive form of personal modes of existence.’76 By al
lowing individuals to come to terms with reality on their own, freely nominated terms, it
served as a ‘source of aggravation wherever belief in authority, the will to power and
contemporary forms of political totalitarianism stand opposed to the freedom of the in
dividual.’ While the fact that so many Western artists had chosen to work abstractly in the
postwar period might have prompted Haftmann to moderate his claims, he instead took
this convergence as evidence for its value as a shared, democratic enterprise, that had been
taken up by artists in the West in a spontaneous fashion. This free process of collective
engagement had prompted the emergence of what he termed a ‘worldwide language’ of
abstraction, which could transcend ‘the constraining particularities of speech, custom,
history, racial feeling and folklore’ and facilitate ‘direct communication.’ For this reason,
he concluded, abstract artworks could serve as vehicles for individual liberation and as a
means for achieving international solidarity in a fractured postwar world.
When Richter travelled to Kassel in August 1959, he was hopeful of seeing new
examples of Western figuration that could advance his Third Way project.77 What he
instead encountered was a vast display of abstract and near-abstract works, intended
to promote expressive freedom at socialism’s expense. As an already restless artist
from the Eastern Bloc, he was ideally positioned to feel the full weight of such a
message and appears to have responded accordingly.
While Haftmann’s claim that abstraction could function as a worldwide language
passed Richter by, the capacity of nonobjective art to symbolise Western freedom
resonated deeply. Discussing his II. documenta visit with Benjamin Buchloh in 1986,
he recalled how works by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana had struck
him as so radical as to dash his remaining hopes for his career in the East. Confronted
with the tangled whorls and splashes of Pollock’s drip paintings and the elegant in
cisions of Fontana’s Concetti Spaziale [Spatial Concepts], along with many com
parable displays of radical abstraction, he recognised that socialist realism was
timidly traditional by comparison. In no way a source of strength, as the GDR au
thorities asserted, its proximity to the past affirmed the style’s weakness. Whereas
Western work was ‘brazen’78 in its willingness to cast aside historical precedent,
Eastern art instead leaned on past achievements to burnish its own image. Rather
than respecting tradition, the socialist authorities exploited it in a bid to legitimate the
mediocre art that they supported. As long as this constraint remained in place, even
the most liberal approach to socialist realism would fail to close the gap with Western
modernism. As Richter noted to Buchloh in this connection:
I lived my life with a group of people who laid claim to a moral aspiration, who
wanted to bridge a gap, who were looking for a middle way between capitalism and
socialism, a so-called Third Path. And so the way we thought, and what we wanted
for our own art, was all about compromise. In this there was nothing radical—to use a
more appropriate synonym for ‘brazen’—and it wasn’t genuine, either, but full of false
deference…. [t]o traditional artistic values… I realised, above all, that all those ‘slashes’
and ‘blots’ [of Western abstract art] were not a formalistic gag but grim truth and
liberation; that this was an expression of a totally different and entirely new content.79
As his reference to ‘false deference’ makes clear, by the end of the 1950s Richter felt
constricted by the need to retain continuity between his own work and the art of prior
centuries. His search for a Third Way painting style was premised on a wish to reduce
this obligation, but his experience in Kassel convinced him that this hope was sen
seless. Whatever he might accomplish in this regard, it would never creatively fulfil
him. Such satisfaction could only be obtained if he was free to pursue his own in
terests. With their formal radicality and promise of ‘grim truth and liberation,’ the
abstract works at II. documenta convinced him that this was the kind of painting he
wished to make.80 Far from being mere Spielerei, abstraction embodied creative
liberation, or so he came to believe in the wake of his Kassel visit.
Upon returning to Dresden, Richter made another group of abstract works.
Although still wary of the challenge of creating abstract images on a non-ornamental
basis, his time at II. documenta had proved sufficiently inspiring to prompt him to
again attempt this task. The result was a group of tiny studies, comprising dripped,
dribbled, and smeared arrays of pigment on cardboard produced late in 1959 or early
in 1960 (see Figure 1.10). While the results of these experiments were lacklustre and
confirmed that his fear of Spielerei remained well-founded, they served notice of his
wish to persevere with ‘serious’ abstraction in spite of the challenges this presented.
Figure 1.10 Gerhard Richter, Untitled, 1959. © Gerhard Richter 2020 (12112020),
courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden.
Where he would continue with his abstract work and under what conditions now
became his principal concern and by early 1961, he had decided to do so in the West.
Looking for belonging in the West

Beyond resolving Richter’s ambivalence regarding the merits of abstraction, II.
documenta made abundantly apparent the depths of support that existed for such art
in the Federal Republic. Not only were Western Bloc artists free to work abstractly,
the show suggested, but they could earn significant acclaim by doing so: in short, they
could produce the work they wanted and earn public recognition. Raised as Richter
had been to see culture as a path to distinction, this signal concerning the public
acceptability of abstraction appealed to him as fully as the prospect of obtaining
greater freedom. And, in fact, the two concerns were connected, because at heart the
freedom he desired was simply the freedom to be publicly esteemed for work that he
produced on his own terms.
The persistence of this impulse confirms not only that Richter’s bourgeois cultural
values had persisted throughout the 1950s, despite the state’s best efforts to expunge
them, but that his bourgeois social values had remained intact as well. Few traits are
as emblematic of the middle-class mindset as the desire for self-determination in one’s
work and with it the chance to succeed or fail on one’s own initiative, an ethos that
was all but impossible to reconcile with East German socialism. To this extent,
Richter fit the profile of the typical flight risk from the country prior to the building of
the Wall. Like the great majority of East Germans who fled Westward throughout the
1950s, he was young, came from a middle-class background and saw few prospects
for professional advancement in the GDR81—a state that offered security to its ci
tizens, through benefits like guaranteed employment and accommodation, but only at
the cost of a life that was so heavily regulated as to extinguish any likelihood of
exercising personal initiative. It was this disjuncture between Richter’s values and
those of the society he lived in that had stripped him of any sense of social or pro
fessional belonging.
Had he not desired the freedom to be recognised for working on his own terms, he
could have stayed in the GDR and lived what its inhabitants would come to call a
zweigleisig life: a two-track existence divided between public and private realms.82
Publicly, he could have continued working on official commissions and maintained
his privileged lifestyle. Privately, he could have gone on painting as he wished, pro
vided he was happy to show this work to only a few like-minded friends and col
leagues, something that Dresden-based abstract artists like Hermann Glöckner and
Herbert Kunze are now known to have been doing at the time.83 Their work was so
little known, however, that it had barely any public profile until after the fall of the
Wall, an obscurity that Richter was unwilling to contemplate. As he explained to
Peter Bode in the early 1980s, he had come to see this underground way of working,
which he and his friends had also been practising since their days at the Academy, as
offering a worthless kind of freedom:
We hated the regime that forbade us everything, but our rage instilled in us false
consciousness: We felt as if we were a secret elite and created for ourselves a
private, pseudo-free space. This was idiotic and accomplished nothing.84
The space he and his friends had established had been ‘pseudo-free’ and ‘idiotic’ for
two reasons. Not only had it failed to secure any meaningful reform of socialist
realism, but it had also led, in Richter’s estimation, to painting that was weak and
growing weaker.85 The reason for this decline, he concluded, was the lack of a
supportive public context in which to work. As he noted to Jan Thorn-Prikker in
2004: ‘I had the feeling that [East German] society couldn’t yield the things that were
right for me, that I needed. There were colleagues who adapted better to the system or
who lived in a state of resistance whilst doing their thing. But that wasn’t for me. I
prefer to be accepted.’86 Not only could the Western art world provide support by
giving him exposure to better art, and the chance to interact with Western
artists—experiences that could stimulate his own work—but it also offered him the
chance to be accepted for making paintings he could credibly call his own.
Richter had factors like these in mind when he wrote to Lohmar shortly after his
arrival in the West to explain his departure: ‘When I say that the whole cultural
‘climate’ in the West offers me and my artistic endeavours more, that it is more
compatible with my way of being and my way of working than the climate of the
East, I am pointing out the main reason behind my decision.’87 On the eve of German
reunification decades later, he would echo these sentiments to Werner Schmidt, a
curator who had asked him to reflect on his departure from the GDR:
As to the circumstances of my departure, I can offer nothing but

commonplaces—for example, that art requires freedom in order to develop,
and that in dictatorship there is no art, not even bad art… [I]t has to do with an
intrinsic quality in art, which makes it dependent… on a specific climate.88
Only in a climate in which abstract art was accepted did Richter feel he would be able
to properly understand it and practice it on something more than ornamental terms.89
It was his sense of the Western art world’s ability to furnish this and other collective
benefits, which were actively withheld from him in Dresden, that lead him to regard it
as an environment that could offer him a feeling of belonging.
Throughout 1960, Richter continued making small, private works in a safely
naturalistic style but is not known to have finished any further public commissions.
The resulting loss of income, combined with the expiry of his stipend, would have
impacted his lifestyle considerably and is likely to have further soured his view of
Eastern life. By the beginning of 1961, any lingering ambivalence about remaining in
Dresden had departed and he made a final plan to flee Westward. In March, he set out
on a study trip to Moscow and Leningrad, packing more luggage than he required.
Returning from the Soviet Union, whose wintry bleakness reinforced his wish to leave
the East, his train passed through Friedrichstraße Station in West Berlin, the location
of the last unsecured border crossing between the two Germanys. Disembarking from
the train, he stowed his excess luggage in a locker and continued on to Dresden.
There, he collected Ema, sold his car and packed a small number of possessions. The
pair were then driven by a friend to East Berlin, where, after a short S-Bahn journey,
they joined the ever-swelling ranks of their compatriots who had fled socialism for the
promise of a better life under capitalism. Richter would soon discover, however, that
although he was much freer in the West, achieving—then sustaining—belonging there
would be a lengthy and demanding process.
Notes
1 Typical of Richter’s reticence regarding his Eastern background is an overview of his life
that he prepared for publication in 1966 but never released. In it, he refers to being trained
in ‘realist painting’ and ‘mural painting’ at the Dresden Hochschule für Bildende Künste
[Dresden Academy of Fine Arts], avoiding use of the term socialist realism. His entry for the
years 1957–60 states that at this time he worked ‘Freelance in Dresden,’ omitting mention
of the fact that his sole client was the state. (See Richter, “Biographical Information, 1966,”
in Gerhard Richter, Writings: 1961–2007 (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers,
2009), eds. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 47.)
2 Richter’s dismissal of his Eastern work, along with the work that he produced during his first
18 months in Düsseldorf, is most evident in his decision to exclude it from his self-compiled
Werkverzeichnis [Catalogue Raisonné], the first version of which he produced in 1969 in the
form of an edition called Bildverzeichnis [Overview of Works]. Subsequent iterations of this
list, including his current multi-volume Catalogue Raisonné, maintain this exclusion.
3 This process commenced in 1983 with comments Richter offered to Peter M. Bode that
summarised his life before he had arrived in the West (see Bode, “Immer Anders, immer er
selbst,” Art. Das Kunstmagazin [May 1983]: 60). Jürgen Harten’s catalogue essay for
Richter’s 1986 survey exhibition at the Städtische Kunsthalle und Kunstverein für die
Rheinland und Düsseldorf was the first publication to discuss Richter’s work in the GDR
and reproduce examples of his work from that period. (See Harten, “The Romantic Intent
for Abstraction,” in Jürgen Harten, Gerhard Richter: Bilder/Paintings, 1962–1985 [Köln:
DuMont Verlag, 1986], 10–13.) Since then, new information about this period of Richter’s
career has continued to emerge, most notably since the year 2000. The key publications on
this subject are: Jeanne Anne Nugent, Family Album and Shadow Archive: Gerhard
Richter’s East, West and All-German Painting, 1949–1966 (PhD thesis, University of
Pennsylvania, 2005), ProQuest (3197723); Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent and
Jon Seydl, eds., Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951–1972 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty
Museum, Getty Research Institute, 2010); and John J. Curley, A Conspiracy of Images:
Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, and the Art of the Cold War (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2013), 83–116.
4 For Richter’s most extensive comments concerning his Dresden years, see Gerhard Richter,
“Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,” and Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Jeanne
Anne Nugent, 200"’, reprinted respectively in Richter, Writings, 464–479 and 510–516.
5 Jürgen Harten, for example, who was the first to reproduce one of Richter’s early Western
abstract paintings, does not mention his previous engagements with abstraction in Dresden.
(See Harten, “The Romantic Intent for Abstraction.")
6 Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 2002), 23. The author consulted this archive at Richter’s studio in 2010, but it has
since been relocated to the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden. At present, only a small
number of the works that it contains are available for reproduction.
7 John. J. Curley, “Gerhard Richter’s Cold War Vision,” in Gerhard Richter: Early Work,
1951–1972, 11–33.
8 For useful reviews of this research, which make this irresolution evident, see Roy F. Baumeister
and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a
Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3 (1995): 497–529. https://
doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497; Marco Antonsich, “Searching for Belonging—An
Analytical Framework,” Geography Compass 4, no. 6 (2010): 644-659. https://doi.org/10.
1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00317.x; and Tuuli Lähdesmäki, Tuija Saresma, et al., “Fluidity and
flexibility of ‘belonging’: Uses of the concept in contemporary research,” Acta Sociologica 59,
no. 3 (2016): 233–247. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001699316633099.
9 This conception has been in place since at least the 1960s. In this connection, see, Santokh
S. Anant, “The Need to Belong,” Canada’s Mental Health 14, no. 2 (1966): 21–27), in
which belonging is defined as ‘the subjective feeling of “being a part of” a social system’
(21). Antonsich defines it as ‘a personal, intimate feeling of being “at-home” in a place’
("Searching for Belonging": 644).
10 As Lähdesmäki et al. note: ‘Belonging is best understood as an entanglement of multiple
and intersecting, affective and material, spatially experienced and socio-politically condi
tioned relations that are context specific and thus require contextualized definitions.’
(Lähdesmäki et al., “Fluidity and flexibility of ‘belonging’”: 242.) For related observations
on the many modes and ways of performing belonging, see Antonsich, “Searching for
Belonging”: 645–647.
11 On the central roles of recognition and identification within processes of belonging, see
Anant, “Need to Belong”: 22–24.
12 Baumeister and Leary have stressed the importance of stable and harmonious relational
contexts for sustaining belonging. (“The Need to Belong”: 497.)
13 Robert Storr, “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting” (2002), reprinted in Robert Storr,
Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art,
2003), 32–33; Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting (London and Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), trans. Elizabeth M. Solaro, 3–6.
14 Richter in Bode, “Immer Anders, immer er selbst,” 60.
15 Storr, “Forty Years of Painting,” 33.
16 Nugent, “Family Album and Shadow Archive,” 148. On Richter’s ‘passion’ for Mann in
the GDR, see Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,” reprinted in
Writings, 472.
17 Storr, “Forty Years of Painting,” 34; Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,”
467–468.
18 Richter, in “Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” reprinted in Richter, Writings, 375.
19 Elger, A Life in Painting, 133, 140.
20 Elger, A Life in Painting, 137.
21 Richter, quoted in Coosje van Bruggen, “Gerhard Richter, Painting as a Moral Act,”
Artforum International, vol. 23 no. 9 (May 1985): 83.
23 Richter, quoted in Robert Storr, “Gerhard Richter: The Day is Long,” Art in America, vol.
90, no. 1 (January 2002): 68.
24 For Richter’s recollections of positive experiences in Waltersdorf, see “Interview with Jan
Thorn-Prikker 2004,” 467.
25 On Richter’s first application to the Academy in Dresden, see Bode, “Immer Anders, immer
er selbst,” 60; and Storr, “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting,” 34.
26 Andrei Zhdanov, “Speech to the Congress of Soviet Writers” (1934), reprinted in eds.
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory: 1900–1990 (London: Basil Blackwell,
1996), 409–410.
27 For an overview of socialist realism in the Soviet Union, see Matthew Cullerne Bown,
Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 1998).
28 Alla Efimova, “To Touch on the Raw: The Aesthetic Affections of Socialist Realism,” Art
Journal, vol. 56, no.1 (1997): 72. https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1997.10791803.
29 For overviews of socialist realism’s introduction to the GDR, including the Formalismus-
Realismus Streit, see Karin Thomas, Die Malerei in der DDR 1949–1979 (Köln: DuMont
Buchverlag, 1980), 13–58; and Barbara McCloskey, “Dialectics at a Standstill: East
German Socialist Realism in the Stalin Era,” in Art of two Germanys – Cold War Cultures,
eds. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann with Eckhart Gillen (New York; London:
Abrams, 2009), 105–116.
30 The New Soviet Man or emblematic Soviet citizen was a focal trope of Soviet culture. On
its role within socialist realist painting, see Toby Clark, “The ‘new man’s’ body: a motif in
early Soviet Culture,” in Art of the Soviets: Painting Sculpture and Architecture in a One-
Party State, eds. Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester and New
York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 33–50.
31 At the Academy Richter was well aware of Ulbricht’s mandate (conversation with the
author, June 23, 2010).
32 On the conflicted nature of socialist realism’s introduction to the GDR, see Thomas, Die
Malerei in der DDR 1949–1979, 38–40; and McCloskey, “Dialectics at a Standstill,” 105.
33 On the liberalisation of art in the GDR and the relation of this policy to the Workers’
Uprising, see McCloskey, “Dialectics at a Standstill,” 115.
34 On the re-opening of the Dresden Academy following the war and the education reforms
that lead to the introduction of socialist realism to the school’s curriculum, see Manfred
Altner, Dresden: von der Kö niglichen Kunstakademie zur Hochschule fü r Bildende Kü nste,
1764–1989: die Geschichte einer Institution (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1990), 426–429.
35 Speaking with Jonas Storsve in 1991, Richter described the romantic works in his appli
cation portfolio as ‘wild daubs’ in which he sought to apply colour in an enjoyable, un
inhibited manner. (Richter, “Interview with Jonas Storsve, 1991,” in Writings, 275.)
36 On Richter’s preparation for his second application to the Dresden Hochschule, see Storr,
“Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting,” 34. Richter mentioned the support of the
Dewag textile company (his employer in Zittau) for his second application in a 2004 in
terview. (Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker,” Writings, 467.)
37 Nugent, “Family Album and Shadow Archive,” 76–78.
38 For details of the Hochschule’s teaching methods and curriculum, see Altner, von der
Kö niglichen Kunstakademie, 436–438. For Richter’s own remarks on this subject, see
“Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker,” Writings, 468.
39 On the exclusion of Impressionism and later styles from the Academy’s curriculum, see Bode,
“Immer Anders, immer er selbst,” 60; and Altner, von der Kö niglichen Kunstakademie, 429.
40 Richter, “Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 377, and Storr, “The Day is
Long,” 69.
41 Richter, conversation with the author, June 23, 2010.
42 On Richter’s reasons for choosing to be a muralist, see Harten, “The Romantic Intent for
Abstraction,” 12. An extensive history of East German mural painting in the postwar
period is provided in Peter Guth, Wände der Verheissung: Zur Geschichte der archi
tekturbezogenen Kunst in der DDR (Leipzig: Thom Verlag, 1998), 94–189.
43 On Richter’s choice to study under Lohmar and Lohmar’s pedagogy, see Nugent, “Family
Album and Shadow Archive,” 85–86.
44 For other murals depicting rural areas, which place a greater emphasis on industry, see
Guth, Wände der Verheißung, 152–154.
45 Guth, Wände der Verheißung, 157.
47 Bode, “Immer Anders, immer er selbst,” 60.
48 Bode, “Immer Anders, immer er selbst,” 96–97, 100–101. Elger, A Life in Painting, 13.
Details on this subject are, unfortunately, scant.
49 Richter does not recall who these works were by, nor could he make sense of their imagery
(conversation with the author, June 23, 2010.)
50 Richter recounted this visit in an article published in an East German art periodical the
following year. (See Richter, ‘Über meine Arbeit im Deutschen Hygienemuseum Dresden,’
Farbe und Raum 9 [September 1956]: 7.) In conversation with the author (June 23, 2010),
Richter confirmed that he could indeed find few examples of West German wall painting
and had not made this claim in his article to satisfy the East German authorities.
51 750 Jahre Dresden. Kunstausstellung Dresdner und Stuttgarter Künstler im Albertinum
(Dresden: Gütenbergdruck, 1956). It is typical of the conflicted artistic climate at this time,
which was itself indicative of the fitful manner in which the SED consolidated its grip on
the country, that this exhibition could have been held.
53 Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,” 470.
54 On the travel restrictions imposed on East Germans in the 1950s, culminating in the Passport
Law of 1957, see Hope M. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet–East German
Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), 99.
55 The SED Party Mural is dated in some sources to 1959, but this may be inaccurate, since
Richter discussed the project in his opinion piece for Sonntag (examined further on in this
chapter) in April 1958.
56 For Richter’s comments on the notion of a ‘Third Way’ painting style, see, for example,
“Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 164; and Richter, “Interview
with Jan Thorn-Prikker 2004,” in Writings, 468–469.
57 On the conflicted status and persecuted practice of abstract art in the GDR, see Karl-
Siegbert Rehberg, “Die verdrängte Abstraktion. Feind-Bilder im Kampfkonzept des
‘Sozialistische Realsismus’,” in eds. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Paul Kaiser, Abstraktion im
Staatssozialismus: Feindsetzungen und Freiräume im Kunstsystem der DDR (Weimar:
VDG, 2003).
58 As Daryn Ansted has insightfully observed, Richter’s search for a Third Way style allowed
him to think dialectically about issues that concerned him via the act of painting itself. This
practice-centred process of critical reflection would be central to his art’s development
throughout the remainder of his career. (See Daryn Ansted, The Artwork of Gerhard
Richter: Painting, Critical Theory and Cultural Transformation [London; New York:
Routledge, 2017], 9.)
59 For general comments by Richter on his engagement with the work of Picasso and Guttuso,
see Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker,” in Writings, 468.
60 On the reception of Picasso and Guttuso in the GDR in the 1950s, see McCloskey,
“Dialectics at a Standstill,” 115. For an extensive discussion of Richter’s engagement with
the work of Picasso and Guttuso in the late 1950s, in the context of the broader reception
of these artists’ works in the GDR at this time, see Nugent, “Family Album and Shadow
Archive,” 54–58, 66–75, 129–132.
61 Gerhard Richter, “Auseinandersetzungen halfen mir weiter,” Sonntag, Wochenzeitung für
Kunst, Politik und Unterhaltung, April 20, 1958: 12. All quotes by Richter in this para
graph are taken from this source. [Translations by the author.]
62 Richter, “Auseinandersetzungen halfen mir weiter,” cited in Elger, A Life in Painting,
19–20. [Translation revised by the author.]
63 Nugent, “Family Album and Shadow Archive,” 128–130.
65 Richter, conversation with the author, June 30, 2010. As he later remarked to Götz
Adriani: ‘Initially, I thought that abstract painting was completely arbitrary, you can’t do
that, it’s not allowed.’ [Ich dachte anfangs, abstrakte Malerei wäre reine Willkür, das kann
man nicht so machen, das ist unstatthaft.] (Richter in Götz Adriani, “Gerhard Richter 1962
bis 1969,” in Baselitz, Richter, Polke, Kiefer. Die jungen Jahre der alten Meister [Stuttgart:
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2019], 167.) [Author’s translation.]
67 On the cultural thaw that allowed abstraction to be openly practised in Poland following
Stalin’s death, see Piotr Juszkiewicz, “Socialist Realism and Eastern Europe,” Grove Art
Online: https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T079464.
70 The café was planned for one of two squares in the Altstadt of Dresden, the Altmarkt or the
Neumarkt. Richter is no longer certain which of the two it was. (Richter, conversation with
the author, June 30, 2010.)
71 In addition to featuring in his Elbe monotypes of 1957, Richter’s stick figures are the
protagonists of a series of notebook drawings from the early 1960s, which have been
published by the Gerhard Richter Archive as Comic Strip (See Gerd Richter, Comic Strip
1962, ed. Dietmar Elger [Dresden: Gerhard Richter Archiv, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen
Dresden, 2014]).
73 On this aspect of documenta I, see Roger M. Buergel, “The Origins,” in ed. Michael
Glasmeier, 50 Jahre Documenta, 1955–2005 (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), vol. 2, 174–176.
74 Werner Haftmann, “Malerei nach 1945,” in II. documenta ’59 (Kassel: Museum
Fredericianum, 1959), 15. [Author’s translation]
75 The classic delineation of this scenario, derived in part from the work of Martin Heidegger,
is found in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, which was enormously influential in the
postwar European art world. See, for example, Sartre’s widely published 1946 lecture
“Existentialism is a Humanism.”
76 This and remaining citations in this paragraph: Haftmann, “Malerei nach 1945,” 14.
[Author’s translation]
77 Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn Prikker, 2004,” 469.
78 Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” 164.
79 Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” 164.
81 On the social demographics of GDR Flüchtlinge in the 1950s and their motivations for
emigrating, see Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918–2014: The Divided Nation
(Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015), 154.
82 On the concept of Zweigleisigkeit, see Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918–2014:
The Divided Nation (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2015), 252.
83 See Sigfrid Hofer, “Beyond Socialist Realism: Alternative Painting in Dresden,” in Art
Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art and Culture, eds. Elaine Kelly and Amy
Wlodarski (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2011), 92–93.
84 Richter, in Bode, “Immer Anders, immer er selbst,” 60.
85 As Richter noted to Dietmar Elger, ‘the paintings that I painted on the side, which were my
true concern, became worse and worse, less free and less genuine.’ (Richter, in Elger, A Life
in Painting, 29.) For critical comments by Richter on the work of other underground artists
in the GDR, see Storr, “The Day is Long,” 69.
86 Richter, in “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,” 470.
87 Richter, “Letter to Heinz Lohmar, 6 April 1961,” in Writings, 13.
88 Richter, “Letter to Werner Schmidt, 1990,” in Writings, 249.
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Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2019.
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Ansted, Daryn. The Artwork of Gerhard Richter: Painting, Critical Theory and Cultural
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Antonsich, Maro. “Searching for Belonging—An Analytical Framework.” Geography
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2 Legacies of Displacement
At the heart of the inaugural phase of Richter’s career in the West stands his first
major series of paintings: the fuzzed and smeared black and white images copied from
found photographs that have come to be known as Foto-Bilder. Since their emergence
in late 1962, many readings of these works have been proposed. In general terms,
however, they can be split into two camps. From the early 1960s until the mid-1980s,
the series was interpreted en bloc with scant consideration given to individual images
and subjects. The latter were so varied and extensive that they seemed to have been
randomly chosen, an impression that Richter helped to foster by keeping silent about
his reasons for selecting them. Confronted with this silence and other tactics he
employed, like maximising the diversity of subjects in most of his exhibitions, pro
viding statements to accompany these showings that were cryptic or absurd, and
claiming that his main motivation for using photos was to distance his art from
traditional understandings of painting as a self-expressive art form, critics did not
consider that the series might have a personal dimension.1 Instead, they concentrated
on how it related painting to photography and weighed the implications of Richter’s
claims that he wished to paint objectively.2 Not until the early 1970s did the blur
become a focus of discussion for the first time and the notion that it functioned as a
sign of our limited access to reality became established.3
As Richter started to acknowledge in the mid-1980s, however, his approach to the
series had not been as detached or indifferent as he initially implied.4 He was in
trigued by the question of painting’s role in the photographic era and the sense of de-
stylised objectivity that copying photos gave to his work, but he did not select his
sources at random. He instead chose them for personal reasons. To take two of many
possible examples, his works depicting World War Two-related subjects were linked
to his experience of the war; and his images of murder and disaster victims evinced his
sympathy for the ‘sad fates’ they had met.5 As disclosures of this kind accumulated,
discussions of the series grew more attentive to the personal underpinnings of specific
works and a second phase in their reception commenced. The best of this more recent
scholarship, by authors like Robert Storr, Benjamin Buchloh, Jay Curley, and
Christine Mehring, has used Richter’s reasons for painting certain images as a
springboard for positioning his works within a range of broader social and historical
narratives, including the German response to the Second World War, the history of
Cold War visuality, and the responses of West German artists to the postwar
Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle].6 These iconographic readings have not dis
placed the most compelling understandings of the series as a whole. They have,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266198-3
rather, complemented and enriched them, by affirming just how protean and over
determined Richter’s motives for developing the series were.
In connecting a large number of the early Foto-Bilder to Richter’s search for be
longing in the West, this chapter adds another item to the list of concerns the series
mediated. Although this impulse has to some extent been recognised by previous
authors, it has yet to be foregrounded. Nor has its persistence and pervasiveness been
sufficiently acknowledged. One reason for this oversight is the lack of attention paid
to the abstract and expressionistic works, which Richter painted prior to the Foto-
Bilder, during his first eighteen months in the West. He destroyed almost all of these
paintings around the time he started working from photographs and has since
claimed they were unrelated to the Foto-Bilder. Rejecting this assertion, the chapter
argues for significant connections between them. Not only do many of his first works
from Düsseldorf relate to his initial sense of social isolation in the West, but this
experience was more troubling and persistent than has hitherto been assumed, a
dilemma to which his choice of subjects and the emergence of his signature blurring
method attested.
Freedom and isolation in Düsseldorf

By the standards of the period, Richter and Ema’s admission to the Federal Republic
unfolded smoothly. After arriving in West Berlin, they proceeded to the city’s refugee
transit camp in Marienfelde and declared themselves Republiksflüchtlinge—refugees
from the GDR. With this declaration, they became eligible for a West German
identity card and could qualify for the financial aid the government made available to
Easterners. They were then flown out of Berlin and moved on to stay with Ema’s
parents in Sanderbusch near Oldenburg.7
After a few weeks in Sanderbusch, Richter travelled on to Düsseldorf to visit
Reinhard Graner, an old friend from Dresden. From there he planned to move to
Munich, with the intention of enrolling to study at the city’s art academy. As he
would write in his studio notebook at some point in 1964, ‘nothing comes in isola
tion’ and it was with a view to making his first contacts in the Western art world and
becoming more familiar with recent and emerging local art trends that he planned this
course of action. Securing a small government stipend to support him in his studies
gave him an additional incentive to re-train.
Since the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich was notoriously conservative, Graner
suggested Richter might find studying in Düsseldorf more engaging, a judgement
Richter seconded after spending a few days in the city. In the late 1950s, the city had
become a leading centre of the European art world and was home to a number of
important artists and gallerists. Acknowledging this fact, Richter enrolled at the
Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf [Düsseldorf State Art Academy] and by June
was working half-time in the class of Ferdinand Macketanz, a painter of portraits,
landscapes, and still-lifes in a fin-de-siècle French style.8 The logistics of settling into
Düsseldorf meant that he initially accomplished very little in Macketanz’s class. But
by the winter term of late 1961 and early 1962, he had begun to paint frenetically.9
Seizing the opportunity to paint abstractly, he pushed deep into the territory of
postwar modernism, taking his cue from the work he had encountered at II. doc
umenta. Although of limited art-historical interest, his seldom studied paintings from
Legacies of Displacement 41
this period suggest that his first taste of freedom did not bring happiness, but was
instead extremely unsettling.
Recalling his arrival in Düsseldorf in 2004, Richter spoke of an initial sense of fear
and isolation: ‘When I arrived it was… like being at zero. It was also frightening, this
sudden freedom, which was essentially nothing else but being abandoned.’10 His
correspondence from this period with Helmut Heinze and Wieland Förster, artist
friends he had left behind in Dresden, corroborates these recollections. Aside from his
relationship to Ema, friendship was the one area of his life in which he had felt
belonging in the GDR. In comparison to his public communications in statements and
interviews, whether in the GDR or the FRG, his letters to Heinze and Förster are
unusually candid and confiding, qualities that reveal just how close he had felt to
them and how painful his sense of separation from them was.
In Richter’s earliest dispatches to Dresden, he was cautiously optimistic about his
future in Düsseldorf, but by the year’s end, his mood had grown pensive, sometimes
tipping over into outright despair. After reporting to Heinze in late May that his
prospects in the West were looking bright, by mid-December this assurance had fled,
chased out, it would seem, by feelings of disorientation and isolation. ‘I won’t say
that everything is “wonderful” here,’ he wrote at this time, ‘I won’t use buzz
words…. But one thing I do know, — is that I had no idea what I was doing when I
came here, and no idea where I was going. I didn’t know how totally different it is
here. This is something one can only experience for oneself.’ Attesting to his lone
liness is his admission further on in the letter that his greeting from the doorman at
the Academy often lifts his spirits considerably.11
Richter’s correspondence with Förster followed a similar trajectory. In a letter from
the 24th of May, he declared himself ‘happy to be here!’ He then qualified this claim
by adding ‘[t]hings will soon go better for me, I hope.’12 Six months later, this hope
had turned to growing anxiety. Acknowledging the depths of his isolation, in
November he referred to Ema as ‘the only human being I have left.’13 Three months
after making this remark, he took stock of his first year in Düsseldorf and wrote of
the ongoing challenges he faced, this time stressing how disoriented he felt: ‘There is
always pain, though not like this,’ he noted, ‘It’s a question now of perseverance, of
work, endurance and resistance. I no longer feel like I know much since coming here,
or I know it differently. I’m in the middle of it all and can no longer see myself from
outside. Something I no longer know at all is what I’m doing. And I’m glad for this.’14
The works that Richter painted under Macketanz conveyed a congruent picture of
his feelings at this time. Indebted to a group of artists who had exhibited at II.
documenta, their chief models were Giacometti, Lynn Chadwick, Jean Fautrier and
Wols.15 This selection was in no way accidental, for as Richter has himself ac
knowledged, all four artists made work that resonated with his sense of isolation and
dislocation at that time.16
Particularly important in this regard were his paintings in the manner of
Giacometti and Chadwick. Among the leading sculptors in Europe in the 1950s, the
pair made slender figures whose gaunt features suggested their existence was under
threat.17 The protagonist of Richter’s paintings was equally emaciated. In each case,
it was shown either seated, standing, or hovering off-axis amid an empty field
of scumbled pigment. In some works, he stretched this figure to the point of
disappearance, such that it was scarcely identifiable and risked being confused with
a horizon line (see Figure 2.1). Elsewhere, he severed it in two at the waist
Figure 2.1 Gerhard Richter, Untitled, 1961. © Gerhard Richter 2020 (12112020), courtesy
Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden.
(see Figure 2.2). Either way, the impression was of a man with no explicit identity,
floating weightless in surroundings that were equally obscure. If this figure is regarded
as a surrogate for the artist himself, a reading to which Richter is sympathetic,18 then
his sense of isolation in Düsseldorf and his uncertainty concerning who he was in the
West become readily apparent. While situated physically in Düsseldorf, he remained
emotionally connected to his former life in Dresden. He had in this sense been cut in
half and set adrift amid indefinite surroundings.
Figure 2.2 Gerhard Richter, Untitled, 1961. © Gerhard Richter 2020 (12112020), courtesy
Some of Richter’s more abstract compositions in the manner of Wols and Fautrier
evinced similar sentiments, albeit less directly. In the postwar period, both painters
had created compositions centred on an enigmatic figure that was so abstract it was
barely articulated. Despite resembling little more than a stain or smear dispersed
across the canvas, this isolated figural presence possessed a semblance of organic
vitality, a quality that Richter carried over into his own works. The figures in these
paintings were palpable and fleshy enough to seem alive. To this extent, they felt
faintly anthropomorphic. They were otherwise indefinite, however, like Richter’s
own identity in Düsseldorf.
Götz, Materialbilder, and Nouveau réalisme

In February 1962, Richter transferred to the class of Karl Otto Götz, a gestural ab
stract painter who was linked to the Art Informel movement of the 1950s.19 After
emerging in Paris, where it was also referred to as Tachisme the movement had soon
spread through Europe. It was subject to a range of understandings, but was linked
most often to works whose imagery was ‘formless’ and spontaneously produced.20 At
II. documenta Informel had been a dominant presence, with Götz among its chief
representatives. In light of this fact and his ongoing interest in abstraction, Richter
found the prospect of studying under Götz appealing. Leaving Macketanz behind,
along with his existing artistic models, he turned to a new group of artists during his
first months with Götz.
Between April and September 1962, Richter made paintings with roughly textured
surfaces that lent them a distressed and damaged feel. Dropping all suggestions of
internal figurative imagery, he transferred the air of wounded subjectivity that had
attached to the figures in his previous works to the body of the painting itself. Many
of these works were ranged beneath the rubric of Matièrisme, the style a number of
his Elbe images had inadvertently evoked. Considered a subcategory of Informel,
Matièrisme, or matter painting, was linked to figures such as Fautrier, Antoni Tàpies,
and Jean Dubuffet, who stressed the affinity of pigment with other cruder substances,
like plaster and concrete. Alberto Burri, who substituted canvas for coarser, un
conventional supports, like hessian and plastic, was also connected to this tendency.21
In the hands of artists such as these, the object qualities of painting took precedence
over represented imagery. The same was also true of Richter’s matièriste works,
which he referred to as Materialbilder. But while the painters he sought to emulate
treated their canvasses as distressed and degraded objects, his own approach was
more anthropomorphic, steering Matièrisme toward the same domain of bodily ab
jection his previous paintings had evoked.
Typical of Richter’s output of this period were two kinds of paintings: his Flecken
[Flecks] (see Figure 2.3), some of which featured scabbed and dripping craters of
pigment in monochrome surroundings; and a second, untitled set of paintings draped
in gauze and torn clothing (see Figure 2.4). As in his images indebted to Wols and
Fautrier, both sets of works evoked experiences of trauma and wounding. They did
so, however, by transforming the whole canvas into a bandaged, damaged, or de
caying body. Here again were works informed by his feelings of unease in his new
surroundings, both his disorientation and his continuing sense of isolation despite the
fact that he had started to form friendships with a number of his classmates.
Figure 2.3 Gerhard Richter, Fleck, 1961. © Gerhard Richter 2020 (12112020), courtesy
Figure 2.4 Gerhard Richter, Materialbild [Material Picture], 1962. © Gerhard Richter 2020
(12112020), courtesy Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden.
While working on his Materialbilder, Richter became acquainted with Konrad

Lueg, who had encouraged him to make the switch from Macketanz, along with
Sigmar Polke, Manfred Kuttner and Franz Erhard Walther. Over time, his relation
ships with Lueg and Polke would strengthen and the others would fall away. In 1962,
however, it seems that, by the standards of his friendships in Dresden, he did not feel
particularly close to any of his new circle of ‘acquaintances’ as he referred to them in
a letter to Förster written early in December.22 In another letter, posted a few days
earlier, he had confided to Heinze:
There’s not much happening here with friends. (It doesn’t help that that’s not
really common in this country, for various reasons, but I’m not in a serious mood
today.) In any case, festive friendship-based encounters, such as the ones we
[Richter and Ema] knew, seem like a dream to us today, a wonderful one. It was
beautiful with you!—A misery.23
In light of these remarks, it is not surprising that the Materialbilder continued to

evince anxious sentiments, nor is it surprising that the works that followed them
retained traces of the same emotions, despite the fact that in the last of them he had
begun to move away from abstraction and engage with photography.
It was thanks to Walther that Richter’s first exhibition—a two-person showing with
Kuttner—took place. Walther, who hailed from the city of Fulda, near Frankfurt am
Main, was part of an initiative of young artists from his hometown to found the Galerie
Junge Kunst [Gallery of Emerging/Young Art]. While visiting the city on his summer
vacation, he arranged to have Richter and Kuttner’s works shown in the gallery. The
exhibition took place in September and featured two bodies of work by Richter.
According to the show’s modest catalogue, Richter showed forty works in Fulda,
most of which were Materialbilder.24 In addition to these paintings, he showed a
group of now lost figurative reliefs and paintings. These were made shortly before the
show and, consequently, were not illustrated in the catalogue. The sole contemporary
reference to these pieces, photographs of which have yet to be located, occurs in a
hostile review of the exhibition published in the Fuldaer Zeitung toward the end of its
run. As the reviewer sarcastically recounted, these works took ordinary objects as
their subject matter and were the target of much scorn from the viewing public:
The furious exhibition visitors zeroed in on Richter in particular, who uses

‘emancipated’ objects: cups, revolvers, lorgnettes, clothes brushes, and under
skirts: ‘See, these things are not banal, they merely become so through our use of
them!’ The posing figure group, a family picture that he cuts out and shows to us
as a white silhouette against a grey wall, the tragic remainder.25
While these remarks are far from explicit in their description of Richter’s work,
Richter and Walther have been able to flesh them out. On the basis of their shared
recollections, it would seem the reviewer was describing several different works. The
first was a relief assemblage, listed as Systematisches Objekt [Systematic Object]
(1962) in the exhibition checklist. Richter remembers this relief as having featured an
actual revolver and perhaps also rows of mussel shells.26 The second is a painting of
which he has no recollection, but Walther does remember. Echoing the review, he
describes it as having shown a group of figures, depicted as white silhouettes against a
plain grey background. The third is a similar painting, which, as Walther also recalls,
featured small images of everyday objects like a cup, a clothes brush, and a plate,
arrayed against a plain dark background. Like the painting of the figure group, each
of the objects was first laid down as a pale silhouette, within which a smaller, more
realistic, likeness was inset.27
Richter remembers little else about these images but does recall making figurative
works indebted to Nouveau réalisme in the lead-up to the Fulda exhibition.28 The
Paris-based Nouveau réalisme movement, which had commenced in 1961, had a
strong profile in Düsseldorf thanks to close links between the local Zero movement
Figure 2.5 Gerhard Richter, Erschießung [Firing Squad], 1962, oil on canvas, dimensions
unknown. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
and Yves Klein, the movement’s co-founder. Richter’s engagement with Nouveau
réalisme was connected to the work of figures like Armand and Daniel Spoerri, who,
in contrast to Klein, worked with objects culled from everyday life. Richter’s decision
to affix real items to a flat support recalls Spoerri’s Fallenbilder [Snare Pictures], in
which the artist glued clusters of found objects to surfaces like tabletops and hung the
resulting assemblages as relief sculptures.
Richter’s dalliance with Nouveau réalisme was fleeting, lasting several months at
most; but the retreat from abstraction that it signalled marked the start of a fateful
shift within his practice: his transition to photo painting during the autumn and early
winter of 1962. While a definite timeline for this development is hard to establish, it
was probably complete by the year’s end. By this time Foto-Bilder like Erschießung
[Firing Squad] (1962) (see Figure 2.5) and Papst [Pope] (1962), which also featured
blank silhouettes, had likely been completed and Richter had destroyed most of his
prior works in a bonfire at the Academy.29 The reason for this act of destruction was
his sense that the Foto-Bilder marked the onset of a new phase in his painting. But
while this might have been true stylistically, it was not the case thematically. As a
close examination of the genesis of the Foto-Bilder reveals, they emerged from a
confluence of motives, including his desire to make headway against his feelings of
isolation in his new social surroundings.
Pop, photography, and ice cream

The prevailing account of Richter’s shift to photo painting stresses his exposure to
American Pop Art in late 1962 or early 1963. Quite how this process unfolded,
however, is difficult to establish. Speaking with Benjamin Buchloh in 1986, Richter
recalled that the first Pop painting he encountered was a ‘cooker’ by Roy
Lichtenstein.30 This could well have been Roto Broil (1961), which was reproduced
in an article by John Coplans in the November 1962 issue of Artforum, entitled ‘The
New Painting of Common Objects.’ When shown a copy of Coplans’ article by the
author, however, Richter’s response was equivocal. He had no recollection of
Lichtenstein’s work but indicated that some of the other reproductions appeared
familiar, albeit vaguely. He also remembered that at some point in late 1962 or early
1963, Lueg showed him the catalogue for an early Pop-oriented exhibition called
‘The New Realists,’ held at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, from October to
December 1962.31 In addition to Blam (1962) by Lichtenstein, which depicts a fighter
plane, this booklet featured works by James Rosenquist and Robert Indiana, as well
as an oven sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. Walther recalls this catalogue also and
describes it as a source of great excitement for Lueg and Richter, as well as Polke. It is
unclear, however, if Lueg obtained it in late 1962 or early 1963.32
To this series of possible encounters with Pop in reproduction must be added an
important and thus far unrecounted exchange between Richter and a Düsseldorf-
based artist named Winfred Gaul. In a studio note, written between 1964 and 1967,
Richter stated that his first Foto-Bild was born in a moment of sheer exasperation
while attempting to paint like Gaul:
My first photo picture? I was doing large pictures in gloss enamel influenced by
Gaul. One day a photograph of Brigitte Bardot fell into my hands, and I painted
it into one of these pictures in shades of grey. I had had enough of bloody
painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic and
inartistic thing that anyone could do.33
Although known during the 1950s as an Informel painter, in the early sixties Gaul
began making simple abstract images derived from road-signs, which he called ‘Signal’
paintings. Unlike his prior oil-based works, the Signal paintings were made with gloss
enamel. Since Gaul’s use of enamel was confined to the Signal paintings, Richter’s
description suggests that he was influenced by them for a time. In his memoirs, Götz,
who was a friend of Gaul’s, corroborates this inference, claiming that Richter painted
Signal pictures for a brief spell in 1962, while transitioning from his Materialbilder to
his first photo paintings.34 But was this in fact the case? Speaking with the author,
Richter offered a different account of his relationship with Gaul, which Walther has
independently corroborated. Both deny that Richter made Signal paintings, but tell a
story that gives Gaul a new role in the genesis of the Foto-Bilder.35
Richter remembers that at some point in late 1962, Gaul, whose technical skills
were limited, approached him to paint ice cream cones for a series of Pop-inspired
paintings he had started after visiting New York. The cones were to be copied in a
photographic style from pictures he had cut from magazines. Since Gaul was offering
good money, Richter agreed to do the work. For reasons that remain unclear,
however, he became unhappy with the project and quit before anything had been
completed.36 A handful of Pop-related works from 1962, featuring ice cream and
related motifs, are indeed listed in Gaul’s catalogue raisonné.37 Tellingly, the motifs
are not painted but have been collaged to the canvas. The sole exception is Gaul’s
final work of the year, Lincoln’s Dream (1962) (see Figure 2.6), whose figurative
elements have been hand-painted, albeit rather poorly. These were Gaul’s only works
Figure 2.6 Winfred Gaul, Lincoln’s Dream, 1962, oil and enamel on canvas, 180 × 150 cm.
© Winfred Gaul. Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst [VG Bild-Kunst].
of this kind and the remainder of his output for the year consists of less technically
demanding Signal paintings. It is therefore reasonable to assume that when Richter
backed out of their arrangement, Gaul was unable to find someone to paint more of
these motifs on his behalf, and returned to Signal painting.
Walther’s reminiscences confirm this story but are more expansive.38 As he recalls,
Götz visited his students in their studio at some point in late 1962 and mentioned that
a painter friend of his, who had recently returned from New York, was looking for a
student to do some work on his behalf. Because Walther was in Fulda from late July
until early November, this latter date is the earliest at which this incident could have
occurred. Having learned of Pop on his New York visit, Gaul had taken an interest in
the movement. Upon returning to Düsseldorf early in the summer, he produced his
first Pop-style collages but was unable to translate these into finished paintings.
Knowing of Richter’s history in the GDR, Götz suggested that Richter take up Gaul’s
offer. Richter agreed and began the work, but quit shortly afterward—though not,
apparently, because he disliked the task at hand. On the contrary, when he arrived
back in class a few days later, Walther remembers him loudly declaring: ‘Ich bin doch
nicht blöd, das mache ich selbst!’ [I’m not stupid, I’ll do this myself!]. According to
Walther, therefore, Richter’s interest in photo painting did stem from an encounter
with Gaul, but not in the manner outlined in his studio note. It was through painting
from photographs on Gaul’s behalf that Richter sensed the potential of the process.
At this point, he began making photographic paintings of his own.39
At least one of Richter’s works shown in Fulda, the painting described by the
Fuldaer Zeitung as a family portrait, is likely to have had a photographic source. But
when he painted this work in late summer or early autumn 1962, he seems not to
have entertained the prospect of adopting a photographic style. Working for Gaul
may have prompted him to reassess this stance. Because the figurative works that
Richter showed in Fulda were already devoted to mundane subjects, it would seem
that his encounter with Gaul had little impact on his work at the level of content. It
was formally important, however, since it helped confer legitimacy on the photo
painting process. Richter is careful to stress, however, that this incident was one of a
range of factors that prompted his adoption of the technique.40
Excitement at the prospect of doing something more distinctive and innovative
than continuing with Informel was another crucial motivator. After first playing
catchup by emulating this and other established Western styles, Richter had turned to
more recent developments. He had started with Nouveau réalisme, then moved on to
Pop, a process that unfolded in the last months of 1962 and the first months of 1963.
By this stage, he had also attended a pair of Fluxus events in Düsseldorf—the concert
‘Neo-Dada’ by Nam June Paik and the two-day ‘Festum Flexorum Fluxus,’ which
featured most of the major exponents of the movement. The radical nature of Fluxus
performances, which blurred the boundaries between art and life, lent him further
confidence in working from non-artistic photographs.41
During his first months working from photographs, Richter kept one foot in the
camp of abstraction and expressive figuration, creating works like Papst and
Erschießung, which were based on media photographs, but also featured passages of
dripping, gestural brushwork, and painterly disfigurement. In the months that fol
lowed, he gradually removed these distortions and by early 1964 the Foto-Bilder had
assumed their mature form: fuzzed or slightly smeared, but otherwise copied faith
fully from their source images. As this transition unfolded, Richter became increas
ingly absorbed by the implications of this near-perfect act of replication. By the
standards of his training and those of Informel, it was provocatively inartistic. Not
only did it dispense with composition in a conventional sense, but it also did away
with any overt indications of self-expression, eliminated colour, and reduced the act
of painting to mere copying. Richter recognised, however, that it could also be re
garded as a continuation of traditional painting practices by other, more con
temporary means, both at the level of technique (copying from photographs with no
effort made to camouflage this fact) and subject-matter. During the mid-1960s, his
reflections on the Foto-Bilder in his notebooks tacked back and forth between these
two poles. ‘Do you know what was great?’ he writes at one point in 1964, ‘Not
having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by
painting—colour, composition, space….’ Elsewhere he summarily declares: ‘In every
respect, my work has more to do with traditional art than with anything else.’42
Other notes show him puzzling over the difference between a painting of a photo
graph and the photograph itself, and over why he feels inclined to make such copies.
Is it because of the photo’s sense of objectivity, or its capacity to talk about con
temporary life in a way that painting normally cannot? Or is it simply because photos
are undervalued and painting gives them the dignity they deserve?43 To judge by his
reflections on these issues from the early and mid-1960s, he was sufficiently absorbed
in such musings and intrigued by the results of his labour that he decided to keep the
series going. This curiosity, however, and the personal fulfilment he derived from it
was only part of the story. He was also attracted to photo painting by his desire for
belonging, both professionally and socially, an impulse that was at least as significant
as his artistic motives, but not as easily fulfilled.
Photo painting and professional belonging
As Richter has often noted, his engagement with photo painting was given impetus by
his friendships with Lueg and Polke, a dynamic Christine Mehring and Dietmar Elger
have explored in detail.44 As the trio’s interest in Pop deepened in late 1962 and early
1963, their work began to converge and their acquaintanceship strengthened into
friendship. In February 1963, Lueg graduated from the Academy and was confronted
with the task of attracting gallerists in order to begin his career. Faced with this
dilemma, which Richter would be sharing in a year’s time when he graduated, he
proposed that they exhibit together as a means of gaining publicity. Richter could see
the merit of this suggestion and agreed, as did Polke. Although the trio only showed
together on a handful of occasions (and not always on their own initiative), Richter
would continue to collaborate on two-person projects with Lueg and Polke for a
number of years thereafter. Lueg initially proposed that the three of them band to
gether with other emerging artists to form a group called Group 63, but Richter had
no interest in establishing a formal relationship of this kind.45 He could, however, see
the benefit of maintaining a looser association with his two colleagues and of aligning
himself publicly with labels such as Pop and Capitalist Realism (a term he and Lueg
used for a time in 1963) to help attract an audience for his work.46 Pop was an
emerging phenomenon with an international pedigree, but as yet it had no presence in
West Germany. Committing to it instead of staying with established trends would
increase his chance of being recognised on the terms the Western art world prized
most highly: innovation, risk-taking and shock, instead of an affirmation of pre-
existing standards and principles as was the case in the GDR. In this regard, Lueg was
an ideal partner. Always with his finger on the pulse and a consummate networker, he
was supremely well-adapted to the mechanisms of the market and the entrepreneurial
activities that were needed to launch an art career in the West. Richter would quickly
prove adept at such activities himself but initially took his lead from his more worldly
and outgoing colleague.
In addition to these marketing benefits, the creative stimulation Richter received
from working with his younger colleagues (Polke by nine years, Lueg by seven) was
also valuable to him. As he wrote in his notebook in 1964: ‘One depends on one’s
surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists—and especially the colla
boration with Lueg and Polke—matters a lot to me: it is part of the input that I
need.’47 A key aspect of this input was Lueg and Polke’s judgements about the quality
of his work. These carried weight with him because they were working in a similar
fashion and thus possessed a common framework for evaluating one another’s
paintings. As he explained to Stefan Koldehoff in 1999:
It was all based on short remarks: ‘That one has something’—that was the best
reaction of all… Or they’d say: ‘That’s no good; you can forget that.’ But pithy
critiques like these could only hit the mark because they were based on a strong
foundation of shared values.48
At once a style he found creatively fulfilling and a fulcrum for advancing his career,
Pop, in Richter’s estimation, offered him the best path available for securing a sense
of belonging in the Western art world. Enrolling at the Academy had given him a
supportive environment in which to start this process. His friendships with Lueg and
Polke, which were at once personal and professional, sincere and spontaneous in their
formation, but also tactically advantageous in the market, allowed him to exchange
this institutional support for the camaraderie of like-minded colleagues as he began
his career in the West. But, the temperaments of all three artists and the con-
ditions under which they were working created problems that detracted from these
benefits. All were ambitious and competitive and as Richter has frequently recalled,
the times in which harmony prevailed between them were few and far between:
‘There were rare and exceptional moments when we were doing a thing together and
forming a kind of impromptu community,’ he noted in 1993, ‘the rest of the time we
were competing with each other.’49 In a later recollection, he stated plainly that their
behaviour toward each other ‘was not at all nice,’50 especially in his relationship with
Polke, which was close but could, at times, be ‘brutal.’51 To the extent that his re
lationships with Lueg and Polke did give him a sense of belonging, it was more
tenuous and equivocal than the closeness of his friendships in Dresden.
Photo painting and social belonging I: 1962–1963

While Richter’s choice to copy photos and align himself with Pop, Lueg and Polke was
informed by his desire for professional belonging, his choice of specific photographs to
paint and the way in which he painted them was linked to his broader interest in
finding his place within society. To this end, in the early Foto-Bilder, he employed the
photo painting process as a forum for weighing his responses to many aspects of West
German life, including the forms of shared experience it made available. As part of this
process of exploration, which has yet to be assessed by art historians, he hoped to
clarify his sense of who he could become in the West, by determining where he might fit
in and where, in contrast, he preferred to stand apart. The upshot was a notoriously
nomadic body of work that showcased his continued inability to identify whole
heartedly with the forms of collectivity his works addressed.
The distortions and disruptions of his first Foto-Bilder bespoke his uneasy re
lationship with several different forms of shared experience. Notable among these
was consumer culture, which formed the subject of many paintings at this time, in
cluding Erschießung [Firing Squad]. In this now lost composition, a found image of a
Nazi soldier with his weapon levelled at a group of prisoners was ranged above an
upside-down row of smiling heads—reminiscent in their formation of the ice creams
in Gaul’s paintings—showing the same beaming blonde woman five times over. The
source for this smiling visage was a toothpaste commercial.52 In keeping with the
shadowy nature of its subject, Richter rendered the former photograph in a murky
and indefinite fashion, blanking out its stormtrooper protagonist and painting his
victims in a coarse, dehumanising manner. In stark contrast, he copied the adver
tisement closely, preserving its idealised appeal. This split in treatment reinforced the
work’s division into scenes of historical cruelty and contemporary beauty, with the
former accorded greater prominence. By virtue of this imbalance, Erschießung sup
ports a claim made by Benjamin Buchloh regarding Richter’s view of consumer so
ciety in the early 1960s.53 After almost two decades of reconstruction, West Germans
remained reluctant to assume responsibility for their nation’s savage crimes against
humanity. In the context of such evasiveness, Richter sensed that mass consumption,
which took off at precisely the time that he arrived in Düsseldorf, served partly as a
means of distraction from the events of recent history.54 Countermanding this
amnesiac behaviour, Erschießung tore aside the veil of consumer spectacle to expose
the pain and death that lay behind it.
This is not to suggest, however, that Richter was entirely against consumption. As
another early Foto-Bild suggests, he was himself an aspiring consumer who hoped to
reap the benefits of the booming West German economy. He was prevented from
doing so, however, by his own straitened circumstances. While his living standard in
the East had been comparatively high, in the West he and Ema were impoverished,
with each obliged to work odd jobs to make ends meet.55 It was against this backdrop
that the painting Faltbarer Trockner [Folding Clothes Dryer] (1962) (see Figure 2.7)
emerged. Sourced from an advertisement for the couple’s own modest drying rack,
this image resonated with what he later called the ‘tragic’ circumstances of his life in
the early 1960s, in which he and Ema were confined to ‘low-cost housing, with
nowhere to hang the washing.’56 Later Foto-Bilder depicting sports cars and holiday
activities evinced his continuing desire to reap the benefits of the West German
Wirtschaftswunder, which he had yet to receive.
A number of other paintings from 1963 attested to his feelings of separation from
three further forms of West German shared experience: Heimat [homeland] culture,
religion, and celebrity culture. A potent source of comfort in the postwar period,
Heimat culture, purveyed primarily through cinema, presented Germany as a pastoral
paradise, untouched by the ravages of conflict and untainted by the corruptions of
modernity.57 In many parts of the country, resurgent religious practices served a si
milarly reassuring function.58 The escapism of celebrity culture, meanwhile, had been
alive and well prior to the war, but strengthened its hold on public life in the postwar
period due to the rapid expansion of the tabloid media.59
Figure 2.7 Gerhard Richter, Faltbarer Trockner [Folding Clothes Dryer], 1962, oil on canvas,
99.3 × 78.6 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
In October 1963, as part of the Leben mit Pop [Life with Pop/Living with Pop]
demonstration that Richter and Lueg presented in a furniture store, Richter showed
four paintings that addressed these forms of collectivity: Mund [Mouth] (1963) de
picting Brigitte Bardot’s Lips, Hirsch [Deer] (1963) showing a deer amid woodland
surroundings, Schloss Neuschwanstein [Neuschwanstein Castle] (1963) (see
Figure 2.8) depicting Ludwig II’s palace, and Papst [Pope], which derived from a
photograph of Pope John XXIII. Here too the distortions of his subjects offered hints
of his attitudes toward them. In view of the crude, disturbing or merely puzzling ways
in which he altered these images, rendering Bardot’s mouth as a red-rimmed, unin
viting cavity, the woodland scenery in Hirsch as a maze of spikes, Schloss
Neuschwanstein as a spectral and haunting edifice, and the Pope as an eery silhouette,
these paintings can also be regarded as indictments of historical amnesia. Since the
cessation of hostilities, West Germans had not only attempted to escape their wartime
memories through consumption. They had also endeavoured to conceal them behind
the consoling visions of Heimat culture, by fleeing into the Church’s embrace, or by
losing themselves in daydreams about the lifestyles of the rich and the famous. By
hanging his disfigured paintings in a furniture showroom, amid staged scenes of
domestic contentment, he again sought to counter such acts of social repression.
As with consumer culture, Richter’s view of these subjects was not entirely critical.
In a 1990 interview, for instance, he acknowledged the appeal of subjects like
Neuschwanstein and woodland animals, despite their kitschiness—the former due to
its ‘fairytale’ connotations of ‘sublimity, bliss [and] happiness,’ and the latter by
virtue of his own, Germanic fascination with woodland life.60 But this ambivalence
did not change the bottom line concerning his relationship to Heimat culture, which
Figure 2.8 Gerhard Richter, Schloss Neuschwanstein [Neuschwanstein Castle], 1963, oil on
canvas, 190 × 150 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
at heart was the same as his attitudes to religion and celebrity. While many of his
fellow citizens could identify with both unreservedly, he could not, a response that
would recur in the years that followed as he explored his stance toward other West
German forms of collectivity.
Photo painting and social belonging II: 1963–1967

Between late 1963 and early 1964, Richter’s attitude toward his source images be
came harder to assess. Abandoning his practice of disfiguring his photographic
models, he now transposed them faithfully into paint before lightly obscuring their
imagery, a technique that revealed no obvious expressive intent. As he moved into
this new way of working, his choice of subject-matter expanded, encompassing so
many themes and subjects in the years that followed as to seem random. As noted
earlier, he reinforced this impression by exhibiting eclectic groups of paintings, ap
pending bizarre or nonsensical texts to his exhibition catalogues, and remaining coy
in his writings and interviews about his reasons for painting certain subjects.
These strategies allowed him to fulfil two objectives simultaneously. On one level,
the seeming mechanicity of the Foto-Bilder and the evident randomness of their
subjects encouraged viewers to weigh aspects of their significance having no link to
his feelings toward his subjects. On another level, this device allowed him to explore
private concerns, but in a veiled manner, indiscernible to viewers lacking knowledge
of his personal affairs. Whereas his prior Western paintings, he now felt, had been too
open in their disclosure of his emotions, his mature Foto-Bilder kept these hidden
from the public.61 In effecting this concealment, he was drawing on the skill he had
developed in the GDR of working in a zweigleisig manner. But rather than divide his
public and his personal concerns between two separate bodies of work, he now ex
plored the two in tandem in a single series. Concealed behind a screen of mechanical
indifference and detachment, the frustrations he encountered in his search for be
longing could no longer be read directly from the surface of his paintings. His
gravitation toward certain themes, however, as well as his own later comments, al
lows these feelings to be reconstructed.
As Elger and Mehring have recounted, one key theme of the early Foto-Bilder was
family life, a subject with relevance to Richter’s need for belonging both personally, by
virtue of his upbringing, and socially, by virtue of the stress placed on family in postwar
West Germany as a locus of security and contentment.62 After addressing this subject in
the painting from his Fulda exhibition, which showed an image of a family in
silhouette—thus transforming it into a lost or elusive object—Richter approached it
once again in the mid-sixties from a similar standpoint. An initial group of paintings of
his own family members from 1964 and 1965 included pictures of his Uncle Rudi, his
father Horst, and his Aunt Marianne, a mentally-troubled woman who had been eu
thanised by the Nazis. Together, these works related to his troubled upbringing and the
impact this continued to have on him.63 A second group of family-themed images
depicted other people’s families, for the most part in idyllic circumstances (see
Figure 2.9). Although many of the latter paintings were produced as commissioned
portraits, Richter’s willingness to undertake such work and his tender depiction of both
these and other families were informed, he later claimed, by his wish to have a sa
tisfying family life of his own—an experience he saw mirrored all around him in his
new social surroundings.64 He would not achieve this until the mid-1990s, but in the
Figure 2.9 Gerhard Richter, Gartenarbeit I [Working in the Garden I], 1966, oil on canvas,
meantime images of his own family members from whom he felt distant or dis
connected would continue to surface in his art on an intermittent basis.
Images related to the war were another recurring presence in Richter’s work of the
early to mid-sixties. Among these were depictions of fighter planes and bombers,
an image of the war criminal Werner Heyde, and a planned but unexecuted series of
pictures depicting Jewish holocaust victims.65 Because he had been a child during the
war and his family was not directly exposed to the fighting, he rejects the suggestion
that these paintings were related to his own experience of the conflict.66 Instead they
related to its impact on his life as an adult, who had come to recognise his nation’s
culpability as instigators of the war and perpetrators of the Holocaust. Already in the
GDR, he had felt that for all its strident anti-fascist rhetoric, the government had not
done enough to address the Holocaust or the sins of German nationalism.67 In the
West, where a climate of shame and disavowal prevailed, there was even less ac
knowledgement of these concerns. As he remarked to Robert Storr in 1996, to be
German in the 1960s was to be ‘worth nothing,’ a feeling that lurked behind all his
war-related paintings.68 Here was a further reason for isolation, since to be nobody in
this way was to feel cut off from his fellow citizens on the most fundamental level:
that of their shared nationality.
Compounding Richter’s feelings of disconnection from family life and national
identity was his alienation from contemporary culture, which prompted the creation
of Verwaltungsgebäude [Administrative Building] (1964) (see Figure 2.10). He made
this work depicting a new government building in Düsseldorf in dismayed reaction to
the ugliness of postwar German architecture.69 Flämische Krone [Flemish Crown]
(1965) (see Figure 2.11) also addressed this phenomenon but from a slightly different
standpoint. A common sight in European living rooms of the 1960s, chandeliers like
these struck Richter as ‘terrifying’ symbols of middle-class cultural debasement.70 If
self-consciously modern structures like those shown in Verwaltungsgebäude at least
attempted to move German culture forward through stylistic and technical innova
tion, then kitsch objects like Flemish crown chandeliers lacked even this saving grace.
Figure 2.10 Gerhard Richter, Verwaltungsgebäude [Administrative Building], 1964, oil on

Figure 2.11 Gerhard Richter, Flämische Krone [Flemish Crown], 1965, oil on canvas, 100 ×
150 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
By aping tradition in degraded fashion, they travestied the nation’s cultural heritage
in a manner akin to the travestying of art history by the socialist authorities. He
himself was ambivalent concerning his own work’s traditional aspects but was clear
in his own mind that culture, whether progressive or conservative, should aim always
for distinction, a trait that seemed to be in limited supply in the West.
The origins and significance of the blur

The many states of distance and ambivalence to which the early Foto-Bilder attest
make it clear that by the mid-1960s Richter’s efforts at social assimilation were
making little progress. He and Ema had plans to start a family and he had forged
important friendships with Lueg and Polke, despite their ups and downs. He felt
unable to identify with larger forms of collectivity, however, and was unhappy with
this situation. As he confessed in his studio notebook in 1964 or 1965: ‘I want to be
like everyone else, think what everyone else thinks, do what is being done… I don’t
want to be a personality or to have an ideology. I see no sense in doing anything
different.’71 So deeply embedded is the cliché of the modern artist as a social rebel
that it is hard to read these words as anything other than ironic. In Richter’s case,
however, they were not ironic, but exasperated. Not only had his explorations of
contemporary West German culture failed to ease his social isolation, but his feelings
of exclusion distressed him, a condition to which the rise of his famous blurring
process attested.
When critics describe the ‘blur’, they are referring for the most part to three
techniques, which Richter started using between 1963 and 1966. The first, which is
perhaps the classic blur, is a horizontal smearing of paint that gives all or part of an
image a striated, dissolving look. The extreme limit of such a process would be a state
of sideways streaming, liquid chaos. The second derives from manipulating contrast
relations, normally by removing mid-tones or highlights. In both cases, there is
considerable loss of detail and an increase in areas of undifferentiated blackness. The
third technique stems from a softening of contours, resulting in an allover loss of
focus. While not introduced in earnest until 1965, this has since become the principal
blurring method.
Since the blur has been subjected to a multitude of readings, especially by Richter
himself, the meanings and motivations underlying these techniques are difficult to
gauge. When he first began painting Foto-Bilder, he claimed on two occasions that he
had no idea why he blurred them. As he wrote in two studio notes from the mid-1960s:
[E]ven when I paint a straightforward copy, something new creeps in, whether I
want it to or not: something that even I don’t really grasp.72
If my paintings differ from the originals, this is not intentional on my part: it is
not a matter of design but of technique. And technique lies outside my voluntary
control and influence…73
In addition to these claims, he ventured further accounts of the blur’s significance

during the sixties and early seventies, which pulled in conflicting directions. These
ranged from a wish to ‘clarify the content’ of his works so as to make them appear
more ‘credible’ (a claim that is difficult to interpret); to giving them a less ‘artistic’ and
more ‘mechanical’ appearance; to infusing his imagery with a sense of movement, and
several other comments besides.74 Not until 1972, it should be noted, did he make the
now-canonical claim that the blur conveys something about his uncertain outlook on
reality.75 The collective effect of these scattershot comments is twofold. On one hand,
they uphold his initial assertion that his reasons for blurring were obscure to him. On
the other hand, they suggest that from his own point of view the blur functions as it
does for other viewers: as a nomadic signifier, whose meanings shift and multiply
from one image to the next in response to a range of factors. Some of these are
subjective, like the connotations an image or blurring process happens to awaken in a
viewer. Others, like a painting’s context of production, are objectively determined.
With this last concern in mind, in many of the early Foto-Bilder the blur’s meaning
and motivation can be linked to Richter’s search for belonging. Its origin, meanwhile,
of which no clear account has yet been offered, can be attributed to the time that he
spent studying with Götz.
Richter transferred to Götz’s class in early 1962 and spent his first few months
there engaging with Informel. He never sought to copy Götz’s work, and soon re
turned to figurative painting.76 These facts, along with later claims by Richter that
Götz’s chief virtue as a professor was his lack of interference with students’ work,
have encouraged commentators to downplay the question of Götz’s influence on
Richter or indeed to disregard it entirely.77 It has yet to be observed, however, that
during his time in Götz’s class, Richter’s understanding of the Informel changed
substantially, falling into alignment with his teacher’s conception of the genre.
During the 1950s, Götz began painting with a mixture of poster glue and gouache
that enabled him to work at high speeds. So rapid was his working process that his
energetic compositions could be finished in a matter of minutes and sometimes even
seconds (see Figure 2.12). While Götz often described his whiplash painting strokes as
Handschrift [handwriting], he was at pains to correct the misperception that his art
was created in a personal or self-expressive manner. Instead, he stressed his wish to
paint so rapidly as to preclude the possibility of conscious decision-making. By means
of such rapid execution, which he linked to Surrealist automatism, he sought to ‘leap
beyond the limits of subjective representation.’78 As he noted in a 1959 essay: ‘The
faster the handwriting, the slighter the level of control and the more anonymous the
image that establishes itself within the composition.’79 Practitioners of Informel
painting generally regarded automatism as a gateway to more authentic self-
expression, achieved by freeing creative activity from the strictures of the conscious
mind. For Götz, matters were reversed, with automatic painting serving as a means
for expunging subjectivity from his work.
Figure 2.12 Karl Otto Götz, November III, 1953, mixed media on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. ©
Karl Otto Götz. Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst [VG Bild-Kunst].
As his matièriste paintings made clear, during his time in Götz’s class Richter
approached Informel from a self-expressive standpoint. Two years later this stance
had evidently shifted, as an initially puzzling note from 1964 or 1965 attests:
When I paint from a photograph conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know

what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of
‘realism’.80
Since Informel was an abstract painting movement, it is surprising to see it invoked here
in connection with the Foto-Bilder, for if any form of image production could be de
scribed as ‘realist,’ it is photography. What Richter is referring to, however, is his
painting process, specifically his method of copying from photographs. To his way of
thinking both this process and the spontaneous painting methods of Informel suppress
the role of conscious decision-making in a work’s creation. This approach stands in
contrast to standard forms of ‘realistic’ painting, which emerge from a more considered
process of observing a subject closely and transposing it by stages into paint.
In the same set of notes, Richter alludes to the possibility of aligning the blur with
the Informel as well: ‘All that interests me,’ he writes, ‘is the grey areas, the passages
and tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps, and interlockings. If I had any way
of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start
painting abstracts.’81 In the Foto-Bilder it is the blur that betrays his interest in these
abstract pictorial qualities since the blur brings a realistic image closer to the
threshold of abstraction; closer, that is, to a state in which the whole work would
appear as nothing more than an aggregate ensemble of ‘grey areas’, ‘passages and
tonal sequences’, ‘pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings.’ To conceive of the
blur in this fashion is to imagine it as an Informel painting gesture—a gesture that, as
his comments about its ‘unintentional’ and ‘involuntary’ character suggest, he enacts
in an unthinking fashion.82 Working up the blur in this way frees him from the
burden of conscious decision-making in a manner reminiscent of Götz. Though he
does not recall discussing Götz’s technique with his teacher, he was certainly aware of
it and saw it as a welcome alternative to the self-expressive histrionics of standard
approaches to Informel.83 In light of this recollection, it seems likely that Götz’s
impersonal approach to abstraction left its mark on Richter’s blurring process. It was
not the speed of Götz’s technique that counted for Richter, but its impersonality,
which allowed him to work freely and unreflectively, in a relaxed and unthinking
manner. More so than his process of transcribing photographs into paint, in which
frequent moments of considered comparison between his paintings and their source
images were required, it is the blur that aligns most firmly with his impersonal
conception of the Informel. His reasons for enacting it, meanwhile, can be linked to
his troubled relationship with the subjects he painted.
If, in selecting many of his subjects, Richter was hoping to find forms of shared
experience with which he could identify, then his urge to obscure and dissolve
his sources can be related to the breakdown of this process in two ways. Casting a
screen of interference between himself and the images he painted, the blur evoked the
distance that he felt from his subjects. Prior to this point, his impersonal, self-
dissolving application of it freed him from the painful feelings that this distance
aroused. The blur’s significance may therefore have been threefold at this time.
Within a finished painting, it functioned as a figure of distance, as well as a more
open-ended sign that could support a wide range of other readings, both for himself
and other viewers. During his working process, however, its meaning became
procedural—releasing him, if only briefly, from his feelings toward the subjects he
painted, in a manner akin to Götz’s understanding of the Informel painting technique.
In the case of those Foto-Bilder that related to his search for belonging, it was his
sense of isolation that was alleviated. This feeling would eventually return and his
explorations would resume, a process that ran in circles throughout the early and
mid-1960s.
The unbearable lightness of freedom

As the foregoing discussions suggest, Richter’s problems with belonging in the West
were rooted in a tug-of-war between two impulses: his desire for liberty on one hand
and his no less pressing need for the comforts of collectivity on the other. In terms of
fulfilling the former wish, he had come out far ahead of his position in Dresden.
Resettling in Düsseldorf had given him the leeway he had hoped for in being able to
paint freely. It had also given him the chance to assess his new surroundings from an
outsider’s perspective and make decisions as to where he might aspire to fit in socially
or where he might prefer to stand apart. Unlike most of his new compatriots, who
had lived in the Federal Republic since its founding, he had no existing ties or ob
ligations. He thus had a degree of social freedom that they, for the most part, did not.
On top of this, he had been given the political freedoms guaranteed him by the
country’s Grundgesetz, its fundamental law or constitution. With this bestowal came
the right to vote, freedom of movement and freedom of expression, all of which had
been denied him in the East. He had also been accorded the right to what the
Grundgesetz describes as the ‘free development of one’s personality’—a diffuse no
tion but one that functioned as another important marker of his liberty for which
there was no equivalent in the East.84
With respect to collectivity, matters were less clear cut. Since he was still at the start
of his career, it was by no means to be assumed that he would find success in
Düsseldorf as he had in Dresden. As he embarked on this uncertain journey, he had
the camaraderie of Lueg and Polke, yet this offered him less reassurance than his
friendships in the East. Because he valued his new political freedoms, he was ahead of
where he had been in Dresden in terms of social belonging. But the abstract, in
stitutional recognition on which these freedoms rested was no substitute for more
immediate relationships with his compatriots on the basis of shared values and in
terests. As the Foto-Bilder indicated, this more personal form of recognition
proved—for the most part—to be impossible. Instead, their obscured compositions
stood as ciphers of misrecognition on Richter’s part.
If belonging requires the ability to reconcile personal freedom with collective af
filiation, then Richter’s relationship to collectivity was clearly his greatest problem in
Düsseldorf. In moving to the West he had been freed of the SED’s efforts to col
lectivise all aspects of his existence.85 But at the same time, he had lost the closeness
of his friendships. With this loss had gone the benefits of a more elective and em
powering form of shared experience than the coerced collectivity of the state, a
downside of his transition to the West that he was hardly alone in experiencing.
From the time that data was first collected in the late 1960s until well after the fall
of the Wall, the most common observation among incoming Eastern refugees was
that personal relationships in the West were more distant and superficial than they
had been in the GDR.86 Amid the many and varied responses to Western life they
offered, this finding is remarkable for its consistency. There were some who attrib
uted the closeness and solidarity they missed to a genuine sense of socialist
Gemeinschaft [communal spirit], but they more typically ascribed it to the challenge
of contending with a state that refused to acknowledge them as individuals.87
Receiving this recognition through relationships with close friends and family thus
became unusually significant.88 The shared challenge of dealing with the state’s
ceaseless flow of unfulfillable directives, which drew citizens together in solidarity
against a common enemy, provided a further impetus to social closeness.89 In the
West, where this defence was unnecessary, such closeness lost its reason for being and
tended to diminish accordingly.
Beyond the falling away of this ironic or negative ground for closeness under so
cialism, Easterners gave two further reasons for the comparative distance of Western
relationships. The first, naturally enough, was the competitive nature of life in an
Elbogengesellschaft, or ‘elbow’ society, as the FRG was often referred to in the
GDR.90 The race to get ahead in the knowledge that, in comparison to the East, there
were few public benefits available should one fail, necessitated greater self-reliance. It
also fostered a weaker sense of obligation toward anyone but oneself and one’s im
mediate family. The second perceived reason for increased social distance in the West
was the greater ease with which one could opt for solitude and develop one’s own
preferences in the areas of leisure and entertainment.91 Not only were Eastern cul
tural offerings far more limited than those in the West, but the ‘free time’ activities the
state supported were typically coordinated exercises, intended to strengthen worker
solidarity. Together, the two aspects of West German society that Easterners re
marked on—competition and greater scope to cultivate one’s interests—conduced not
only toward a more individualistic way of life but also pointed to the bivalent nature
of Western individualism. Its bright side was the democratic freedom ‘to develop
one’s personality’ it offered. Its shadow aspect was the pressure to fight for resources
and status that the capitalist economy brought to bear, as well as the greater ease with
which those who fell behind in this race—and even those who didn’t, in many
cases—could drift into a state of isolation, something the state’s intrusiveness in the
East made all but impossible.92
While many Easterners accepted the nature of the trade-off they had made in
coming West and reported forming satisfying social networks within a few years of
their arrival (albeit with a frequent focus on their Western relatives or other
Easterners, rather than on new, Western friends93), there were those who regretted
their emigration due to the pressures that Western individualism placed upon them.
Summing up the perception of refugees who fell into the latter category, one inter
viewee noted in the late sixties: ‘Here it is said that everyone is free. Certainly, ev
eryone here is an individualist, but he is a sick individualist.’94 Others were more
philosophical in their assessment: ‘Individualisation has a legally-mandated aspect
here,’ another interviewee remarked, ‘And just as compulsory is the romanticisation
of GDR closeness.’95
Regardless of their longer-term experience, incoming Easterners often endured a
period in which the challenges of their new freedom loomed larger than its benefits.
During this first phase of adaptation, which typically lasted several years, but could go
on much longer, refugees reported many of the same experiences Richter remarked on
in his correspondence. The far greater complexity and dynamism of the Western social
environment is a recurrent motif of interviews and is something that refugees often
found overwhelming. Adjusting to competition in the workplace and selling one’s skills
in the job market were also daunting for many, as was a gnawing feeling of financial
insecurity that could never entirely be dispelled. Westerners could, of course, feel such
pressures also, but Easterners were understandably more sensitive to them by virtue of
their unfamiliarity. Like Richter, they needed time to adapt to them.
Like many of his former compatriots during their first years in the West, Richter’s
response to his new freedom was ambivalent. He valued his autonomy and took
advantage of it both in his work and in maintaining his distance from forms of shared
experience he felt unable to relate to. But he also suffered from it in several ways. In
his friendships with Lueg and Polke, competition to get ahead and each artist’s desire
to maintain his creative independence placed limits on the support they gave each
other. His ability to pick and choose his social affiliations was a benefit of his
freedom, yet this same freedom contributed to his isolation. Like many of his fellow
refugees, he had a good sense of the bargain he had made in coming West, at least as
it pertained to his career. Hailing as he did from a bourgeois background, he knew
what the pursuit of success entailed and was prepared to put in work to get ahead in
his career. His mother’s family history, her berating of Horst for what she saw as his
career failings, and reading Buddenbrooks by his beloved Thomas Mann (a book that
chronicles the decline of a merchant family across successive generations as the forces
of capitalist competition overtake them), had surely endowed him with some
awareness of the downsides of a market-based existence during the 1940s. If not, then
his exposure to a barrage of socialist propaganda throughout the 1950s (which, like
most propaganda, had some basis in fact) would have highlighted these for him ad
nauseam.96 Any such awareness was purely abstract, however, and only through
direct experience would he learn in concrete terms what it meant to be an individual
in the elbow society. Correlative to this process, he would learn if he could offset his
isolation by forming strong and lasting social bonds. This challenge would be a steep
one, however, since his collective affiliations would need to place no undue restric
tions on his hard-won freedom. Only by achieving this balance could he develop a
sense of belonging in the areas of his life in which he craved it.
In Dresden, collectivity was omnipresent, but with the exception of his private
relationships had also been overbearing and confining. The lightness of individual
liberty was consequently what Richter had yearned for. In the West, the lightness of
liberation was everywhere at hand, but collectivity was now the missing factor in his
life. No longer a burden to be cast off, it was a source of security and grounding
whose absence left him unanchored and floating freely in a state of insecurity. His
earliest paintings in the West had shown his gaunt pictorial surrogate in precisely this
weightless condition, a state the sprawling diversity of his Foto-Bilder continued to
evoke. As the subjects of the more than two hundred canvasses he added to the series
in the early sixties continued to multiply, so too did the sense that their creator was a
nomad, floating helpless and off-balance amid the ever-burgeoning interstices of his
sprawling and fragmented image world—a world equivalent in its breadth and
multiplicity to Western life itself. While the precise grounds for his uncertainties were
personal, the environment he had entered in the West and conjured so expansively in
his paintings was one that he was far from alone in experiencing as being at once
liberating and challenging. On one hand, it was pregnant with possibilities for
personal advancement. On the other hand, it was fraught with insecurity and risk. To
the extent that the early Foto-Bilder point to these ambivalent aspects of Western
freedom, they could be said to stand in for the experience of anyone unsettled by the
bivalent nature of West German individualism, with its capacity to liberate and
isolate simultaneously.
In his last letter to the Heinzes, dispatched in September 1964, Richter wrote of his
need to be ‘increasingly independent’ in the West, adding that he ‘never had to be this
way before, but one has to be when everything around is so unruly.’97 During the
next phase of his career, the need to be independent amid ‘unruly’ circumstances
would continue to preoccupy him and have a far-reaching impact on his art. So too
would the challenges of Western individualism, which would intensify rather than
diminish as West German society at large underwent its values shift in the late sixties.
Notes
1 Typical of the eclecticism of Richter’s exhibitions in the mid-1960s was his contribution to
Neue Realisten (Polke, Richter, Lueg), held at Wuppertal’s Galerie Parnass in December
1964. The subjects of his works on this occasion included animals, fighter planes, portraits,
magazine reproductions and everyday objects. (See the checklist reproduced in
Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels e.V. (ZADIK), Sediment 7: Ganz Am
Anfang/How It all Began: Richter, Polke, Lueg & Kuttner [Köln: ZADIK; Nürnberg:
Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2004], 83.)
2 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, discussion of the Foto-Bilder revolved almost exclusively
around these topics. Typical of the literature from this period are: Klaus Honnef,
“Schwierigkeiten beim Beschreiben der Realität: Richters Malerei zwischen Kunst und
Wirklichkeit,” in Gerhard Richter (Aachen: Gegenverkehr Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst, 1969),
n.p.; and Manfred Schneckenburger, “Gerhard Richter, oder ein Weg weiterzumalen,” in
Gerhard Richter: Bilder aus den Jahren 1962–1974 (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1974).
3 Richter first mentioned this idea in 1972, when he remarked in an interview: ‘I can make no
statement about reality clearer than my own relationship to reality; and this has a great deal
to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness, or whatever.’ (Gerhard
Richter, “Interview with Rolf Schön, 1972,” reprinted in Writings, 60.) Already in 1969,
however, Klaus Honnef had approached the blur from this perspective. Whether he had
input from Richter is unclear, but if not then it is possible that Richter took his cue from
Honnef and not the reverse. (See Honnef, “Schwierigkeiten beim Beschreiben der Realität,”
n.p.). Whatever the case may be, it was during the early 1970s that the sceptical reading of
the blur became entrenched and crowded out prior readings of it.
4 Richter first alluded to his reasons for choosing certain subjects to paint in 1985, when he
remarked to Benjamin Buchloh in an interview, which was published the following year: ‘I
looked for photos that showed my actuality, that related to me.’ (Richter, “Interview with
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 173). Thereafter, he became more open to
discussing this topic and has done so with reference to specific paintings in many sub
sequent interviews.
5 Richter, conversation with the author, June 30th, 2010.
6 See Robert Storr, September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter (London: Tate Gallery
Publishing, 2010), 58–60, for an overview of Richter’s Foto-Bilder responding to the
Second World War. On the links between the Foto-Bilder and Cold War visuality, see John
J. Curley, A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold
War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). On Richter’s response to the
Wirtschaftswunder, see Christine Mehring, “The Art of a Miracle: Toward a History of
German Pop, 1955–1972,” in Art of two Germanys – Cold War Cultures, eds. Stephanie
Barron and Sabine Eckmann with Eckhart Gillen (New York; London: Abrams, 2009).
7 For the most extensive account of Richter and Ema’s first months in the West, see Dietmar
Elger, “Gerd Richter: It is, as it is,” in Gerd Richter 1961/62. Es ist, wie es ist/it is, as it is
(Dresden: Gerhard Richter Archiv, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; Cologne: Verlag
der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2020), 80–83.
8 Richter, letter to Wieland Förster, May 24, 1961, in Gerhard Richter. Bilder einer Epoche
(München: Hirmer Verlag, 2011), ed. Uwe M. Schneede, 43.
9 As Richter later put it ‘[w]hen I was with Macketanz, I painted like I was obsessed.’
(Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,” in Writings, 472.)
10 Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,” in Writings, 472.
11 Richter, letter to Helmut and Erika Heinze, December 11, 1961, in Schneede, Bilder einer
Epoche, 47.
12 Richter, letter to Wieland Förster, May 24, 1961, in Schneede, Bilder einer Epoche, 43.
13 Richter, letter to Wieland Förster, November 23, 1961, in “Briefe Gerd Richter an W. Förster
Januar 1961-Dezember 1962,” Gerhard Richter Archiv, Dresden. [Author’s translation]
14 Richter, letter to Wieland Förster, February 4, 1962, in Schneede, Bilder einer Epoche, 50.
15 The influences listed here are those provided by the artist. (Richter, conversation with the
author, June 30, 2010.)
16 Richter, conversation with the author, June 30, 2010. To date, this personal dimension of
Richter’s early Western works has been only been remarked on in passing by Dietmar
Elger, who notes in his biography of Richter that these paintings ‘were existential ex
pressions of emotional states’. (Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting, trans. Elizabeth
M. Solaro [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], 36.) What these states might have
been and why they might have arisen are topics Elger does not explore.
17 This was the dominant reading of both artists’ work in the postwar period. For a succinct
summation of it, in connection with the wider existential account of postwar anxiety and
uncertainty from which it emerged, see Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), volume 2: 421–424.
19 On the rise of Informel in the Rhineland, and especially in Düsseldorf, see Zentralarchiv des
internationalen Kunsthandels e.V. (ZADIK), Sediment 18: Am Anfang war das Informel
(Köln: ZADIK, 2010).
20 For influential, contemporary accounts of Art Informel, see Michel Tapié, Un art autre où il
s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel (Paris: Gabriel-Giraud et fils, 1952) and Jean Paulhan,
L’art informel (Paris: Gallimard, 1962).
21 These influences are again those offered by the artist. Richter mentions Luis Feito, Afro
Basaldella and Otto Piene (whose smoke pictures he admired and emulated in at least one
Fleck painting from the early 1960s) as other artists in whom he took an interest at this
time. (Richter, conversations with the author, June, 23 and 30, 2010.)
22 Richter, letter to Wieland Förster, December 12, 1962.
23 Richter, letter to Helmut Heinze, December 9, 1962. The translation of this excerpt is taken
from Christine Mehring, “East or West, Home is Best: Friends, Family and Design in
Richter’s Early Years,” in Gerhard Richter: Panorama. A Survey, eds. Nicholas Serota and
Mark Godfrey (London: Tate Publishing, 2011), 31.
24 The complete catalogue is available online at: http://www.artcontent.de/zadik/default.
aspx?s=531#!prettyPhoto.
25 “Streit um des Malers Hemd,” Fuldaer Zeitung, September 30 or October 2, 1962, rep
rinted in Der Junge Kunstkreis und die Galerie Junge Kunst Fulda, 1958–1973, ed. Pedro
Herzig (Fulda: Ed. Cre Art, 1996), 215. The original German reads:
“Besonders hatten es die Zornigen auf Richter abgesehen, der den banalen, ‘emanzi
pierten’ Gegenstand verwendet: Tassen, Revolver, Operngläser, Handbürsten, Unterröcke:
‘Seht, die Dinge sind nicht banal, sie werden es durch unseren Gebrauch!’ Die posierende
Menschengruppe, das Familienbild aber schneidet er aus und zeigt uns eine weiße Fläche
mit den Umrissen menschlicher Körper vor einer grauen Wand, den traurigen Rest.”
The exact publication date of this article is unclear, but was probably September 30th.
While the reprint cited here is dated October 2nd, it is an incomplete transcription. A
xeroxed clipping of the review in the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden, contains the
additional text: “(Heute letzter Tag)” [last day today]. The exhibition was scheduled to
close on September 30th, suggesting the review was published on that date.
26 Richter, conversation with the author, August 20, 2010.
27 Franz Erhard Walther, letter to the author, August 19, 2010.
29 Richter, conversation with the author, August 19, 2010; Walther, conversation with the
author, July 7, 2010.
30 Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 167.
31 Richter, conversation with the author, August 20, 2010. Richter also had no recollection of
the works by Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Rosenquist and Warhol that appeared in the
October and November/December 1962 issues of Das Kunstwerk and in Gene R.
Swenson’s “The new American ‘Sign Painters’,” ARTNews, September 1962, 44–47.
32 Richter, conversation with the author, August 20, 2010; Walther, conversation with the
author, July 7, 2010.
33 “Notes, 1964(–1967),” Writings, 21. These notes are difficult to date since some refer to
works from the early 1960s, and others to works that were not painted until 1967. The
quoted note is most likely to have been among the former group.
34 Karl Otto Götz, Erinnerungen III, 1959–1975 (Aachen: Rimbaud, 1995), 53.
35 It is possible that in writing the volume of his memoirs in which his statements about
Richter’s engagement with Signal painting appear, which was published in 1995, Götz
looked to the German edition of Richter’s writings and interviews to jog his memories (this
had been published shortly beforehand in 1993). Drawing the inference from Richter’s
passage concerning Gaul that Richter was making Signal paintings of his own during the
period preceding his switch to photo painting, he may then have carried this assumption
over into his own book. If this was the case, then it would not be an isolated error. For a
further example, relating to his misunderstanding of the workings of television, see Aline
Guillermet, “K. O. Götz’s Kinetic Electronic Painting and the Imagined Affordances of
Television,” Media Theory, vol. 3, no. 1 (2019): 133.
36 Richter, conversations with the author, June 23 and 30, 2010.
37 See works 370 and 379–381 in Winfred Gaul, Werkverzeichnis, Bd. 2 (Düsseldorf: Concept
Verlag, 1993).
38 Walther, conversation with the author, July 7, 2010.
39 In conversation with the author (August 20, 2010) Richter has confirmed the broad out
lines of Walther’s story, stating that Walther’s recollection of his outburst about wishing to
paint from photographs himself was ‘probably’ accurate.
41 Richter first acknowledged the importance of Fluxus as a legitimating influence on his work
in 1964 and has since reaffirmed this debt on numerous occasions. (Richter, “Notes,
1964,” in Writings, 21.)
42 Richter, “Notes, 1964,” in Writings, 22; and Richter, “Notes, 1964–1965,” in
Writings, 31.
43 A string of such reflections appears in Richter, “Notes, 1964–1965,” in Writings, 29–31.
44 Elger, A Life in Painting, 54–59, 62–67, 79–82; Christine Mehring, “Richter’s
Collaborations, Richter’s Turn, 1955–1971,” in Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent
and Jon Seydl, eds., Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951–1972 (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty
Museum, Getty Research Institute, 2010), 90–124.
45 Elger, A Life in Painting, 54–55.
46 Mehring, “Richter’s Collaborations,” 93.
47 Richter, “Notes, 1964,” in Writings, 23. In a letter to Förster written two years earlier,
Richter had remarked: ‘It is, above all, the relationship to one’s surroundings that makes
existence possible.’ (Richter, letter to Wieland Förster, February 4, 1962, in Schneede,
Bilder einer Epoche, 50. [Author’s translation])
48 Richter, “Interview with Stefan Koldehoff, 1999,” in Writings, 349.
49 Richter, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1993,” in Writings, 294.
50 Richter, in Elger, A Life in Painting, 103.
51 Richter, in Elger, A Life in Painting, 103.
53 Benjamin Buchloh, “Memory Images and German Disavowal,” Lecture, American
Academy, Berlin, December 8, 2009, http://www.americanacademy.de/home/audiovideo-
archive/ video/300//benjamin_buchloh/.
54 On the early 1960s as a turning point in the development of West German consumer
society, see Arnold Sywottek, “From Starvation to Excess? Trends in the Consumer Society
from the 1940s to the 1970s,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany,
1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 347–349;
and Michael Wildt, “Konsumbürger. Das Politische als Optionsfreiheit und Distinktion,”
in Bürgertum nach 1945, eds. Manfred Hettling and Bernd Ulrich (Hamburg: Hamburger
Edition, 2005), 269–271.
55 Richter and Ema’s money troubles in the early sixties are a running theme of his letters to
the Heinzes and to Förster. In addition to his work for Gaul, Richter sought to make extra
money by publishing an illustrated book and finding wall painting commissions, projects
that did not come to fruition. He also painted floats for the local carnival parade and made
money working behind the bar during the carnival festivities. (See Elger, “It is, as it is,” 91.)
56 Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990,” Writings, 253.
57 On the role of Heimat culture in mid-century West Germany, which was centred primarily
on the film industry, see Willi Höfig, Der deutsche Heimatfilm 1947–1960 (Stuttgart: F.
Enke, 1973).
58 On the significance and strength of religion as a unifying social and political force in
postwar West Germany, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New
York: Penguin Books, 2005), 266–267; and Fulbrook, A History of Germany 1918–2014:
The Divided Nation (Chichester; Malden: Wiley Blackwell), 221.
59 On the growth and transformation of the West German mass media in the postwar period,
see Konrad Dussel, “Vom Radio- zum Fernsehenzeitalter. Medienumbrüche in so
zialgeschichtlichter Perspektive,” in Dynamische Zeiten: Die 60er Jahre in den beiden
Deutschen Gesellschaften, eds. Axel Schildt, Detlef Siegfried and Karl Christian Lammers
(Gö ttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 673–694.
60 Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990,” in Writings, 253.
62 Elger, A Life in Painting, 133, 137,140; Mehring, “East or West,” 32–35.
63 Mehring, “East or West,” 32–35.
65 As outlined in Storr, September, 58–60.
66 On this subject see Richter’s comments about experiencing the war mainly in terms of play
and excitement in Storr, “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting,” 32; and “Ach so, das
war die sexuelle Befreieung,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 3, 2009. His recollections of the
war were not entirely benign, however. In 2004, he recalled how his sister and his mother
screamed when they received the news of the deaths of his uncles in battle. (Richter,
“Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,” in Writings, 466–467.)
67 Richter reached this conclusion after seeing a book of photographs of the concentration
camps at the Academy. As he later remarked to Jan Thorn-Prikker:
I was in my early twenties. I’ll never forget it. It was like a document, with reportage
photos. Awful records. Perhaps it was even an American book. Because I remember
wondering afterwards why East Germany hadn’t made more of a fuss about it. It was
almost like a secret book. (Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn-Prikker, 2004,” in
Writings, 469.)
In a likely response to these misgivings, Richter privately produced a series of illustra
tions for The Diary of Anne Frank, which remained hidden from public view—and thus, in
a sense, a secret book of his own—until they were published by Benjamin Buchloh in 2020.
(See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Documents of Culture, Documents of Barbarism: Richter’s
Birkenau Paintings,” in Gerhard Richter: Painting After All (New York: Metropolitan
Museum of Art, 2020), 23.
68 Richter, “Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 378.
69 Richter, in Coosje van Bruggen, “Gerhard Richter: Painting as a Moral Act,” Artforum
International, vol. 23 no. 9 (May 1985): 86. Richter, “Comments on Some Works, 1991,”
in Writings, 261.
70 See Richter’s lengthy discussion of this work in Richter, “MoMA Interview with Robert
Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 407–408.
71 Richter, “Notes, 1964–1965,” in Writings, 34.
72 Richter, “Notes 1964(–1967),” in Writings, 22.
73 Richter, “Notes 1964–1965,” in Writings, 31.
74 For Richter’s shifting accounts of the blur’s function and meaning in the 1960s, see Richter,
“Notes 1964–1965,” in Writings, 31–33, and Richter, “Interview with Peter Sager, 1972,”
in Writings, 64–67.
75 Richter, “Interview with Rolf Schön, 1972,” in Writings, 60.
77 To date almost no commentary on Richter’s early work has considered whether Götz
exerted any influence on his student, a stance in keeping with Richter’s own position on this
issue (as mentioned, for example, in his “Interview with Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984,” in
Writings, 136). The sole exception to this rule is Jeanne Nugent, who has noted that the
‘quasi-mechanical appearance’ of Götz’s works ‘is relevant to the photo paintings’. Her
reading of this relationship focuses on the formal qualities of Götz’s works rather than his
painting method. (Jeanne Anne Nugent, Family Album and Shadow Archive: Gerhard
Richter’s East, West and All-German Painting, 1949–1966 [PhD thesis, University of
Pennsylvania, 2005], ProQuest [3197723], 177–179.)
78 Karl Otto Götz, Erinnerungen II, 1945–1959 (Aachen: Rimbaud, 1994), 114. [Author’s
translation]
79 Götz, Erinnerungen II, 127. [Author’s translation]
82 In conversation with the author (June 30, 2010), Richter described his process of working
up the blur as ‘nicht ausgedacht’ [not preconceived] beyond an initial sense of the general
effect he was aiming for. Once he begins painting, the process becomes spontaneous and
improvised.
84 Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, Section I, Article 2., (1): https://www.
gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html. The concept of the ‘freie Entfaltung’
[free unfolding] of the self (as the German text of the Grundgesetz describes it) has its roots
in the concept of Bildung, whose meaning encompasses both education and the lifelong
development of an individual’s character. Bildung and the attendant notion of the self as
something that should be allowed to unfold freely were values championed by the German
Romantics. In coming to the West, there was thus a sense in which Richter, quite fittingly
and poetically in light of his formative artistic experiences, was granted the right to live as a
romantic.
85 As Mary Fulbrook notes, the SED were committed to ‘the quite absurd and in principle
unrealisable goal of attaining the total ideological subordination of this [the East German]
population, to be achieved by total party control of all aspects of social and individual
life… Against all the realities of individual differences—for which there was little or no
respect—the party sought to achieve uniformity in pursuit of a better future.’ (Mary
Fulbrook, Anatomy of a dictatorship: inside the GDR, 1949–1989 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 3.
86 Surprisingly little research concerning the experiences of East German refugees has been
conducted, but almost every source available corroborates this finding. See, for example, the
interviews contained in: Barbara Grunert-Bronnen, Ich bin Bü rger der DDR und lebe in der
Bundesrepublik: 12 Interviews (Mü nchen: Piper, 1970); Horst-Gü nther Kessler and Jü rgen
Miermeister, Vom “Grossen Knast” ins “Paradies”: DDR-Bü rger in der Bundesrepublik:
Lebensgeschichten (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1983); Mein Leben, Teil zwei Ehemalige DDR-
Bü rger in der Bundesrepublik, ed. Martin Ahrends (Kö ln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1989).
The foregoing publications are journalistic rather than scientific and focus on just a
handful of individuals. Less open to questions concerning their representative validity are
the results of formal surveys conducted by Volker Ronge in 1984 and Mary Fulbrook in
2005. Volke’s findings were notable for the ‘near universal observation [among his survey’s
500 participants] that social relationships in the West are “less intensive, relatively
superficial and reserved, less convivial—and relatively competitive.”’ (Volker Ronge, Von
Drü ben nach Hü ben: DDR-Bü rger im Westen [Wuppertal: Verlag 84 Hartmann & Petit,
1985], 76.) The perception that a stronger sense of community and solidarity had been
present in the East than in the West was one of the strongest findings of Fulbrook’s survey,
in which 271 subjects participated. (Mary Fulbrook, “‘Normalisation’ in the GDR in
Retrospect: East German Perspectives on Their Own Lives,” in Power and society in the
GDR, 1961–1979: the ‘normalisation of rule’?, ed. Mary Fulbrook (New York: Berghahn
Books, 2013), 301–306.)
87 See the summary remarks on this subject in Mary Fulbrook, “‘Normalisation’ in the
GDR,” 301.
88 In a report from 1990, written to support the process of German reunification, the East
German Institute for Social Data went so far as to designate close communicative bonds
between family and friends as a distinctive feature of GDR culture. (As noted in Andreas
Rödder, “Wertewandel im Geteilten und Vereinten Deutschland,” Historisches Jahrbuch,
Nr. 130 [2010], 429.)
89 Ronge, Von Drü ben nach Hü ben, 76. Uwe M. Johnson, “Die Lüge sass in Strich und
Faden,” Der Spiegel, Nr. 14, 1970: 86.
90 On the Elbogengesellschaft [elbow society], see Fulbrook, ‘“Normalisation” in the GDR,”
301. For a typical assessment of competition as a distancing factor in Western relation
ships, see Kessler and Miermeister, Vom “Grossen Knast” ins “Paradies,” 13.
91 See, for example, the interview comments in Ahrends, ed., Mein Leben, Teil zwei, 60.
92 As a refugee who spent time working in a homeless shelter in the West observed in the
1980s: ‘No one is abandoned to that extent in the East.’ (Ahrends, ed., Mein Leben, Teil
zwei, 43.)
93 Ronge, Von Drü ben nach Hü ben, 75.
94 Barbara Grunert-Bronnen, “Sehnsucht nach dem Kollektiv?,” Der Spiegel, Nr. 14,
1970: 91.
95 Ahrends, ed., Mein Leben, Teil zwei, 44.
96 For an assessment of East German media propaganda in relation to Richter’s Foto-Bilder,
see Curley, A Conspiracy of Images, 135–150.
97 Richter, letter to Helmut and Erika Heinze, September 22, 1964, in Schneede, Bilder einer
Epoche, 58. [Author’s translation.]
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Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Art Since 1900:
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Fulbrook, Mary Anatomy of a dictatorship: inside the GDR, 1949–1989. New York: Oxford
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Fulbrook, Mary “‘Normalisation’ in the GDR in Retrospect: East German Perspectives on
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Gaul, Winfred. Werkverzeichnis. Düsseldorf: Concept Verlag, 1993.
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Guillermet, Aline. “K. O. Götz’s Kinetic Electronic Painting and the Imagined Affordances of
Television.” Media Theory 3 no. 1 (2019): 127–156.
Grunert-Bronnen, Barbara. Ich bin Bü rger der DDR und lebe in der Bundesrepublik: 12
Interviews. Mü nchen: Piper, 1970.
Grunert-Bronnen, Barbara. “Sehnsucht nach dem Kollektiv?,” Der Spiegel Nr. 14 (1970):
82–92.
Herzig, Pedro, ed. Der Junge Kunstkreis und die Galerie Junge Kunst Fulda, 1958–1973.
Fulda: Ed. Cre Art, 1996.
Höfig, Willi. Der deutsche Heimatfilm 1947–1960. Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1973.
Honnef, Klaus. “Schwierigkeiten beim Beschreiben der Realität: Richters Malerei zwischen
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Johnson, Uwe M. “Die Lüge sass in Strich und Faden.” Der Spiegel Nr. 14 (1970): 86–87.
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3 The Classical and the Informel
Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s, Richter’s art changed dramatically. After
initially painting only Foto-Bilder, he rapidly expanded his horizons until, by the late
1960s, he was working in a host of different styles, from trompe l’oeil illusionism to
complete abstraction.1 No sooner had this occurred, however, than he gradually
retreated from this approach, until, by the mid-1970s, he was painting nothing but
grey monochromes.
These protean developments in his art were entangled with significant events in his
career and his personal life. With the arrival of their daughter Babette (known as
Betty) in 1966, Richter and Ema became parents, giving Richter the chance to make
up for the losses of his childhood. The couple’s marriage soon began to falter,
however, a development that contrasted sharply with his professional fortunes. By the
early 1970s, his career had not only found its feet but he was ranked among the
country’s leading artists. Yet he did not feel reassured by this position, because his
recourse to different painting styles had been neither as strategic nor as self-possessed
as his supporters had assumed.2 It had instead been prompted by growing insecurity,
occasioned not only by his marital problems but also by several other challenges with
which he was confronted at the time.3 As Pop was superseded by new movements
that pushed painting to one side, his colleagues allied to the emerging counterculture
advocated for a socialist revolution, and his friendships with Lueg and Polke faded,
he felt increasingly ill-at-ease in the Düsseldorf art world, the milieu in which be
longing mattered most to him.
The stylistic fracturing of his work was an outgrowth of his struggle to retain his
standing in this fast-changing environment, as he himself has retrospectively ac
knowledged.4 He has also related specific paintings to the problems in his marriage
and the breakdown of his friendships. This chapter contends, however, that there is
much more to be said about the impact of these troubles on his art, and also about
their underlying causes. His desire to escape them through his art has been largely
overlooked, for example, as have the two main approaches to his painting that he
developed in the late 1960s: the Informel and the classical. Despite being opposed in
Richter’s mind, and manifest in different kinds of artworks, both his Informel and
classical compositions evinced his escapist inclinations in ways that became increasingly
pronounced. The ultimate expression of this urge was his grey monochromes, which
carried the self- and world-dissolving logic of the blur to unsurpassable extremes.
Richter’s urge to take refuge in the soothing neutrality of grey was a response not
only to his personal concerns, the chapter argues, but also to the liberalising social
developments of the period. Unlike others in his milieu, who embraced these changes,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266198-4
his background, age and values made it harder for him to do this, leaving him at odds
with his contemporaries and increasingly adrift by virtue of his conservative in
clinations. His eclectic output from his nomadic decade attests to the mixed feelings
that the unfolding Wertewandlung occasioned, not only for himself, but also for
many others in the West, who valued the new freedoms of the period, but did not
support the aims of the counterculture.
Time and trouble

A photograph from 1967 (see Figure 3.1) shows Richter in his studio with artworks that
related to the troubles that were starting to unsettle him. Taken by photographer Eric
Schaal, who was well-known for his portraits of famous artists, it was published in Time
Magazine, in an article on the Düsseldorf art scene. Clad in formal but relaxed attire,
Richter regards the camera with a level gaze, his demeanour at once poised and in
scrutable. He holds a lit cigarette in one hand and rests his other hand with casual
propriety on the top edge of a painting. As the article recounted, his ‘eerie and delib
erately vague and cryptic oil renderings of commonplace snapshot subjects, magazine
and catalogue illustrations’ had by this stage earned him renown throughout central
Europe, ‘elicit[ing] viewers’ shudders and critical raves throughout West Germany,
Switzerland, and Italy.’5 Time made no mention of Pop, but the Foto-Bilder had by this
stage become synonymous with the movement, which was seen as having ushered in a
shift among the nation’s younger painters from abstraction toward new forms of rea
lism.6 After finishing his studies in 1964, he had been offered no less than three solo
Figure 3.1 Eric Schaal, Gerhard Richter in his Studio, Fürstenwall, Düsseldorf, 1967.
© Eric Schaal. Artists Rights Society [ARS].
The Classical and the Informel 73
exhibitions throughout Germany. Little had sold, but his work had clearly struck a chord
with gallerists. He had no solo outings in 1965, but his work was included in a dozen
group shows, further bolstering his profile. With his reputation rising, he had embarked
on another round of one-person exhibitions, showing an extraordinary six times in 1966,
including three times in neighbouring countries. Although his sales remained modest and
his prices low, he had been able to negotiate a contract with his Munich dealer Heiner
Friedrich. This guaranteed him a fixed monthly income plus a percentage of any sales
during the following two years.7 With this arrangement in place, he could count on a
period of steady income for the first time since his arrival. Time’s coverage gave him
further grounds to feel optimistic about his future, but as a close examination of the
paintings and other objects that surround him makes apparent, he did not feel as assured
as his photograph suggested.
The most visible work in the photograph is Flämische Kröne (see Figure 2.11),
which as noted in the previous chapter, reflected his dismay at middle-class cultural
debasement in the West. Scarcely visible behind it is Gartenarbeit I [Working in the
Garden I] (1966) (see Figure 2.09), one of his family-themed works of the mid-sixties.
Depicting a couple and their young children working in their garden on a summer’s
day, he is likely to have painted this idyllic scene during Ema’s pregnancy, in an
ticipation (or hope) of his impending familial happiness. Once Betty had arrived,
however, he was confronted with the messier reality of life with a newborn in the
house, a circumstance that prompted the emergence of Osterakte [Easter-Nudes]
(1967), which is visible above Gartenarbeit I. This ‘shameless’ image, as Richter later
described it, is one of ten pornographic nudes he painted in early 1967 and later
linked to his sexual frustration at that time.8 Under the circumstances, this could have
been a passing phase, but in retrospect, it can be seen as an early indicator of the
decline in the couple’s marriage, which would come to a head in the early 1970s.9
Exactly when or how this trouble started is difficult to gauge, but two other,
slightly earlier Foto-Bilder suggest that Richter may already have been feeling distant
from his wife before he painted Osterakte. In 1965, he had made a portrait of Ema,
which is also present in Time’s photograph. Wrapped in plastic, it hangs behind his
shoulder on the studio’s rear wall. Portrait Ema (1965) (see Figure 3.2), as the
painting is titled, shows Ema in a dark, heavy coat, her arms held in close to her sides.
Her body is turned slightly off-axis so that her gaze does not connect with the
viewer’s. She is physically present before the camera but feels psychologically re
moved, an impression reinforced by her inscrutable expression. A year later, Richter
made a second, better-known portrait, which differs significantly from the first. Based
on a colour photo he had taken in his studio, Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) [Ema (Nude
on a Staircase)] (1966) (see Figure 3.3) shows Ema in the first stages of her pregnancy.
In an interview with Betty decades later, he described how the work expressed his
love for his wife at this time, together with his hopes for their future as they prepared
to start a family together. These feelings led him to idealise her in the painting and
show her as ‘an angel coming down from heaven.’10
The painting corroborates this claim but is again marked by a feeling of distance.
Standing forth against a dim and bleary background, Ema appears radiant amid the
gloom. To this extent she does appear angelic, a far cry from her down to earth
demeanour in Portrait Ema. A single detail within the painting strikes a discordant
note, however: her failure once again to meet the viewer’s gaze. Richter could have
worked from another photograph he is known to have taken, in which Ema made eye
Figure 3.2 Gerhard Richter, Portrait Ema, 1965, oil on canvas, 105 × 95 cm. © Gerhard
Richter 2021 (0253).
Figure 3.3 Gerhard Richter, Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) [Ema (Nude Descending A
Staircase)], 1966, oil on canvas, 200 × 130 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
11
contact with the camera, yet he chose not to. He may, of course, have had other
reasons for preferring the image that he did choose, like wishing to convey a sense of
shyness or modesty on Ema’s part. But in light of later events in the couple’s life,
which would conclude with their divorce in the early eighties, it is tempting to see this
selection as relating to his feelings about their marriage.12
The breakdown of his friendship with Polke led Richter to destroy the work in the
photograph depicting Christmas ornaments, which is visible behind him to the left.13
As has already been recounted, the pair had a stormy friendship and were fiercely
competitive. They were also temperamentally at odds and had differing career as
pirations. Polke had bohemian leanings and preferred to keep his distance from so
ciety. He signalled this desire for remove by making work laced with satire and
critique. For Richter, who hoped to gain as large an audience as possible for his art,
this outlook was anathema. Although he did his best to veil it, he aspired to re
cognition, both within and beyond the confines of the art world.
As the sixties progressed, these differences became a source of growing tension. In
keeping with his penchant for critique, Polke grew more venomous and flamboyant,
setting his sights on a burgeoning array of targets. In this connection, he developed a
special fondness for kitsch, which he used to combat art world pretention and lam
poon middle-class vulgarity. Richter sometimes joined in Polke’s fun, but only in the
context of their collaborations, which he did not take as seriously as his painting.14 In
the latter context, he betrayed little sense of irony or humour.
From the mid-sixties onward, the two artists’ differences in temperament prompted
a divergence in their work. Whereas Polke retained his interest in Pop, Richter
gravitated toward new styles and painted subjects that were increasingly removed
from the realms of the everyday and the mass media. The larger this distance became,
the more important it was for Richter to underscore it, which is why he destroyed his
painting of Christmas ornaments. He does not recall exactly when he did this, but it
was most likely in the wake of his and Polke’s final collaborations in 1968, on a pair
of photographic editions. The work was not intended as ironic or satirical, but he felt
it veered too close to Polke’s painting by virtue of its subject.15 The fact that it stood
apart from his own art of the late 1960s was likely a further factor in his decision,
since by this point he had left Pop decisively behind him, a transition that prompted
the emergence of two further and final works in Time’s photograph.
For many of the magazine’s readers Röhren [Tubes] (1965) (see Figure 3.4) and 4
Glasscheiben [4 Panes of Glass] (1967) (see Figure 3.5) may not have registered as
artworks at all. Consisting of plastic tubes painted in a photographic manner, the
several Röhren in the photograph are scarcely visible in the rear corner of the studio
and could be readily mistaken for rolled-up canvasses. 4 Glasscheiben is similarly
obscured. The work comprises four panes of glass, mounted side-by-side inside
swivelling metal frames. In the photograph, however, only one pane is visible, in
sinuated, almost indiscernibly, between the camera and the rest of the scene. Its
wooden frame suggests that it was not yet complete.
The Röhren and 4 Glasscheiben belong to a large group of works that signalled the
beginning of Richter’s retreat from Pop, a shift that commenced in 1965 when he
developed a new kind of Foto-Bild. In a series of nine images of curtains (Vorhänge
[Curtains] (1965)), an isolated picture of a pillow (Kissen [Pillow] (1965)) and ap
proximately two dozen Röhren, he began painting works in the same style as his
Foto-Bilder, which he no longer copied from photographs. He instead produced these
Figure 3.4 Gerhard Richter, 8 Röhren [8 Tubes], 1965/68, painted PVC tubes, (i-iv) 168 ×
11 × 11 cm, (v-viii) 185 × 11 × 11 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
Figure 3.5 Gerhard Richter, 4 Glasscheiben [4 Panes of Glass], 1967, glass and iron, 190 ×
100 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
Figure 3.6 Gerhard Richter, Fenstergitter [Window Grids], 1968, oil on canvas, 200 × 300 cm.
© Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
compositions from scratch in a photographic manner, a process that inverted pho

tography’s position in his art. Having hitherto used photos as reliable documents of
reality, he now used painting to mimic photography’s reality effect in a manner that
was wholly synthetic. The resulting synthetic Foto-Bilder raised questions concerning
the veracity of painting and photography alike. In the years to 1968, he fashioned
many similar works, including coloured trompe l’oeil renditions of curling sheets of
canvas (Umgeschlagene Blätter [Curling Sheets] (1965)) and doors left ajar (Türen
(1967–68)), as well as gridded quasi-abstract works entitled Schattenbilder [Shadow
Pictures] (1968) and Fensterbilder [Window Pictures] (1968) (see Figure 3.6). He
referred to these paintings as ‘Konstruktionen’ [Constructions], a term that called
attention to their standing as pure fabrications.16
A crucial catalyst for this workgroup was the rapidly changing art world of the
period. Throughout the latter half of the 1960s, new styles and practices proliferated
at a rate unseen since the interwar decades, when a dizzying succession of avant-garde
developments had taken place. In Düsseldorf, the tempo was frenetic, with local
artists assimilating and discarding novel trends at a hectic pace. The result was a
crowded artistic landscape that, in addition to Pop and other forms of realism, ac
commodated Zero, Fluxus, and new modes of hard-edged abstraction like Signal
Painting. As the works of international artists filtered through in growing numbers to
the Rhineland, the situation became ever more complex. Throughout the decade,
exhibitions were devoted to many widespread international developments like kine
ticism, Op and systems-based art, along with the Italian movement Arte Povera and
US-led initiatives like minimalism and nascent conceptualism, which proved to be
especially popular. One-person exhibitions by figures unaligned with broader cur
rents added to this burgeoning ferment. Although a source of excitement for local
artists, this febrile environment was also fickle, a situation Richter had mulled over in
one of his early letters to Förster:
We swim as if in an ocean and that has to be the case. Trusted continents and islands
are alluring, but whoever rests there will wind up in a bad way. Those who build
their own islands on pre-driven foundations are better off. But that too is no good,
because it too is stagnation (entirely excusable considering how easily one tires). By
the way, it’s a general situation here, that they swim until they find a fad [Masche],
this brings money and is then repeated and repeated ad nauseam.17
As this passage makes apparent, in the early 1960s Richter had equated the status quo
with stagnation, as well he might have in light of his recent flight from the GDR. His
comments about fads in the market, however, reveal his awareness that innovation,
novelty and dynamism were not inherently positive phenomena—at least not under
capitalist conditions. Not only could they foster worthless trends, but in the boom-and-
bust environment that market forces created, it was hard to build a stable career.
Four years after writing his letter, Richter was making progress on that front, but after
riding the Pop wave to success, he now sensed it was fading amid the clamour of more
recent developments. Concerned to keep his practice moving forward, he began to di
versify his output, with the synthetic Foto-Bilder from 1965 his first step in this direction.
With these works, Richter turned away from contemporary social subjects to address
the nature of picturing itself. In so doing, he made visual perception and cognition his
new subjects of enquiry. Adopting these priorities helped him synchronise his work with
an empirical and analytic turn that had been gathering momentum in the North Atlantic
art world since the 1950s. Beginning with the rise of formalism in New York in the
postwar period—which had shifted consideration of abstract painting away from ex
pressive issues toward a process of formal self-scrutiny—and continuing with the growth
of perceptually-oriented forms of abstraction, such as Op, kinetic sculpture and
minimalism, this analytic impulse became central to Western art in the 1960s. While its
impact on the Konstrucktionen of 1965 cannot be ascribed to known encounters on
Richter’s part with specific artworks, later, more abstract Konstruktionen like the
Schatten- and Fensterbilder, as well as 4 Glasscheiben, bore the acknowledged influence
of minimalism.
Richter’s interest in minimalism was related to the fading of his friendship with
Konrad Lueg, from whom he also became estranged in the mid-sixties. Lueg had
helped to stimulate his interest in Pop, but now Lueg’s investment in the movement
was on the wane and so too was his artistic career. After growing disenchanted with
his work, he decided to open a gallery, Ausstellungen bei Konrad Fischer [Exhibitions
at Konrad Fischer], which held its first exhibition in October 1967. Trading under his
mother’s maiden name, Fischer was an instant success and was soon one of Europe’s
leading gallerists.18
The work that Fischer chose to exhibit gave Richter added impetus to change his
practice. Lueg the artist had been a champion of Pop and a painter, but Fischer the
gallerist had different inclinations. His early exhibitions focussed on minimalism and
conceptualism, after which his programme expanded to encompass related trends like
earth art and Arte Povera.19 Not until 1970 would he ask Richter to show with him,
by which point their friendship had cooled off.
Richter continued to respect Fischer’s judgement, however, and would speak often
in the years that followed of his admiration for many artists Fischer showed.20
Initially, he was drawn to the work of Carl Andre and the Dutch painter Jan
Schoonhoven (see Figure 3.7). Both were connected with minimalism and both left
Figure 3.7 Jan Schoonhoven, R72-19, 1972, painted papier-mâché on wood, 53 × 43 cm.
© Jan Schoonhoven. Stichting Pictoright.
their mark on the gridded and striped compositions of the Schatten- and Fensterbilder.21
Richter’s most emphatic response to minimalism, however, was 4 Glasscheiben,
which set painting aside entirely. Although conceived in part as a response to The
Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23) by Marcel Duchamp, 4
Glasscheiben is a work whose three-dimensionality, workshop fabrication and serial
composition firmly echo minimalist sculpture. Completed in the lead-up to the
opening of Fischer’s gallery, this foray into minimalist territory suggests that Richter
was intrigued by the kind of art his friend was exhibiting. That it proved to be a one-
off experiment confirmed his inability to leave behind the medium of painting, as he
himself would later acknowledge.22 4 Glasscheiben was the closest Richter ever came
to minimalism and marked the final moment of close alignment between his own
creative inclinations and those of Fischer. From this point forward the two former
comrades-in-arms drifted out of sync with one another.23
When the concerns to which Richter was responding in 4 Glasscheiben are added
to his flagging relationships with Ema and Polke, his posture of assurance in Time’s
photograph comes to feel increasingly hollow. Beneath his relaxed veneer, he was
feeling pressure from several directions, to which the works around him attested. And
this was not yet the full extent of the troubles he would face in the years to come. Not
only was the art world evolving in ways that he would struggle to keep pace with, but
the emerging Wertewandlung would unsettle him further.
Stop painting!
As in other Western countries, but with its own local characteristics, the late sixties
was a time of cultural upheaval in West Germany. This period is often held to have
commenced with the formation of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition [extra-
parliamentary opposition] or APO in 1966. The coalition of left-leaning factions of
which the APO was composed were angered by the formation of a government,
which consisted of a ‘grand coalition’ of the country’s main political parties, the
centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its centre-left opponents, the
Social Democratic Party (SPD). In a society still recovering from the disasters of
single-party rule, the prospect of a parliament with no significant elected opposition
was greeted with alarm in some quarters. Many young, left-leaning West Germans, as
well as a number of older intellectuals, saw this development as a symptom of
broader problems that had haunted the country since the war. In the face of con
tinued refusal on the part of preceding generations to acknowledge their roles in the
conflict; the onset of the country’s first recession since the war, which was seen by
those with socialist leanings as a symptom of intractable systemic malaise; the es
calation of the Vietnam War by the United States, which had increased Cold War
anxieties in Western Europe; and a yawning gap between the attitudes and values of
those born after the war and those born before it, a small but highly visible segment
of the population came to disdain the entire social order. The result was the coa
lescence of a counterculture that was opposed to almost every form of authority, from
the justice system, the mass media and the education system, to marriage, religion and
the conventional ‘bourgeois’ family. All were to be abolished or reconstructed on
radically new terms with a view to founding a freer, more genuinely democratic state,
whose imagined composition was seldom clearly conceived but was generally framed
in socialist terms.24
As support for countercultural ideals burgeoned within the Düsseldorf art world,
Richter gained new reasons for concern. The first was the denigration of traditional
media, like painting and sculpture, by politically-minded artists. An early and no
torious expression of this sentiment occurred in Düsseldorf in 1966, when Jörg
Immendorf, then a student at the Academy, produced a painting entitled Hört auf zu
malen! [Stop Painting!]. This now iconic work gave voice to his conviction that the
fine arts should be taken off their pedestal and rendered more socially accessible. Such
sentiments echoed those of his mentor Joseph Beuys, whose conflation of art and
politics in the late 1960s made him the country’s most notorious art radical. Inspired
by the mystical beliefs of Rudolf Steiner, which he felt could form the basis for a new,
egalitarian society, his wide-ranging practice became increasingly political as time
progressed. After spending the early 1960s attempting to guide his audience toward
enlightenment with ritualistic performances, Beuys had become preoccupied with
multiples, a new type of affordable, editioned artwork that he, along with other
progressive artists of the period, embraced for its potential to democratise the art
market.25 In 1967, he co-founded the Deutsche Studentenpartei [German Student
Party] in a bid to foster change beyond the art world, and by the early 1970s, was
promoting his theory of ‘social sculpture.’ To Beuys’s way of thinking society should
be thought of as an artwork, shaped by the collective efforts of its members. To this
end, he called for all forms of creativity, whether conventionally artistic or otherwise,
to be harnessed in pursuit of social progress.
Excluded from these activities was painting, which Beuys never explicitly con
demned, but which played no special role in his enterprise.26 His presumption that
established art forms were incompatible with radical politics encapsulates an ethos
that was widespread in the late 1960s. Even Polke, who remained a painter, created
works that shared something of this outlook. In the late sixties, he kept his work on a
progressive footing by ramping up his critique of bourgeois culture. Among his
targets were abstract painting, a style beloved by middle-class collectors, but with no
social relevance or legibility for those outside the art world.
Richter was acutely conscious of the rising opposition to painting: ‘…I clearly
remember that this anti-painting mood did exist,’ he noted to Jonas Storsve in 1991,
‘At the end of the 1960s the art scene underwent its great politicisation. Painting was
taboo because it had no “social relevance” and was, therefore, a bourgeois thing.’27
Although he remarked to Storsve that he simply ‘went on painting’ at this time, the
succinctness of this comment elides the feelings of unease that the shifting artistic
climate awoke in him. Not only were his marriage and friendships fading, but his
standing in the art world was now being actively challenged, threatening to deprive
him of the sole source of belonging he still possessed.
As Richter acknowledged with greater candour to Robert Storr a few years after his
remarks to Storsve, the late sixties was a time when ‘I lost the ground beneath my
feet.’28 In the face of not one but two waves of anti-painting sentiment, the first
centred on the new artistic trends of the period and the second stemming from the
political climate, he felt doubly disenfranchised and out-of-step with his peers.
Having experienced the repressions of East German socialism first-hand and being
old enough to recall the war’s aftermath, he could not fathom the outrage of his
radical colleagues and the cohort to which they belonged.29 He may have had his
problems with Western freedom, but he had no wish to turn back the clock in his own
practice and return to making socialist art, a conviction he telegraphed in a multiple
he made in 1968. Pointedly adopting a format favoured by radicals like Beuys, he
used it to depict Mao Zedong, from whom many leftists of the period took their
revolutionary cues (see Figure 3.8). Blurring the chairman’s features until they could
barely be discerned, he signalled his sense of separation from yet another form of
shared experience.30
Richter was not inclined to discard his favoured medium on the grounds that it was
bourgeois and reactionary. On the contrary, he held its traditional character to be a
Figure 3.8 Gerhard Richter, Mao, 1968, collotype on lightweight card, 84 × 59.5 cm.
virtue but hesitated to say so openly (a stance that will be discussed in detail below). He
was therefore both unwilling and unable to relinquish his commitment to painting. He
was equally incapable, however, of relinquishing his need for recognition from his
Düsseldorf peers. He may not have shared the left-leaning outlook of Beuys and Polke,
but he continued to admire their work, which he felt was setting high aesthetic standards
and carrying art forward as a consequence.31 Since most of the collectors who bought his
works continued to prefer the Foto-Bilder, he went on servicing this market by painting
portraits on commission, a practise he maintained until the early 1970s when he felt he
was secure enough financially to halt it. He was more concerned, however, to keep pace
with his peers by developing alternatives to photo painting. As the sixties neared their
end, his efforts in this area intensified, but it seemed as if the bar for staying current as a
painter was rising ever higher and might soon be impossible to clear. The dizzying
number of series that he worked on during this period can be viewed as an expression of
his growing sense of helplessness and desperation as he struggled to come to terms with
this and the other pressures in his life.
Finitude, helplessness, entrapment

As noted in the previous chapter, the early Foto-Bilder include many images of dis
aster victims. Among these works are: Tote (1963), showing the body of a drowning
victim whose corpse had washed ashore beside a chunk of ice; Acht Lernschwestern
[8 Nurses] (1966), showing the eight women murdered by Richard Speck in Chicago
in July of that year; and Helga Matura mit Verlobtem [Helga Matura with Fiancé]
(1966), an image of a murdered Frankfurt prostitute. In these works, Richter evinced
a lingering fascination with stories of ordinary people bought low by events they
could neither anticipate nor control. In light of his own circumstances at the time,
which were obliging him to navigate a new and unpredictable environment, it could
be argued that he identified with his paintings’ protagonists for this reason. ‘I don’t
mind admitting now that it was no coincidence that I painted things that mattered to
me personally—the tragic types, the murderers and suicides, the failures, and so on,’
he remarked in 1992.32 Like the victims whose sad stories he was drawn to, he too
had his moments of helplessness, in which he felt exposed and defenceless against the
vicissitudes of fate.
Whether or not this was the case, it is clear that the theme of human finitude
became increasingly important to Richter as the decade progressed, a shift made
apparent in the Konstruktionen. Through their deceptive illusionistic dynamics, these
works address the treachery of images. As he noted in 1967, however, it is human
fallibility and not the images as such that gives this treachery its traction:
Since the beginning of this century, the impact of photography has become ever
more widespread, so that today we trust the reproduced reality of photography
more than that of reality itself. We believe in the reality of photos, and the
information content of a photo is much clearer and more convincing than the
best drawing…. The Türen are constructed photos, meaning that they are not
based on actual photographs. At some point I was no longer happy copying
photos, so I took the stylistic traits of photography—precision, lack of focus,
illusionism—and used them to make doors, curtains and tubes.33
Richter’s claim that we trust photographs more than reality itself is questionable. But
it is the more fundamental issue of our faith in photography that is most important
here. In highlighting our instinctive inclination to believe in the veracity of photo
graphs, he is focussing on viewers, not on images. More specifically, he is addressing
the limitations of human perception and cognition, which expose any viewer of a
photograph to the prospect of deceit.
Richter voiced this concern more explicitly in a studio note from 1971. In this text
he aligned the Türen and Vorhänge with 4 Glasscheiben and his earliest Graue Bilder
[Grey Pictures] (referred to here as Oberflächenbilder [Surface Pictures]): ‘Perhaps,’
he wrote, ‘the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of
despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend
things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of rea
lity.’34 As with his statement four years earlier, these comments focus on fallibility,
but on more expansive terms. Having limited his prior remarks to the perception of
photographs, he now extended them to our experience of reality at large. This ex
pansion in the scope of his scepticism can be seen as an indication that his feelings of
professional disempowerment were deepening as the sixties ticked over into the se
venties.
The Konstruktionen can certainly be linked to this dynamic. Cued by Richter’s
description of the Türen and Vorhänge as ‘metaphors of despair,’ it is hard to shake
the feeling that in these works, as well as later Konstruktionen like the Schatten- and
Fensterbilder, a shared atmosphere of bleakness and inner emptiness prevails.
Depicting lifeless, confining spaces, rendered in subdued tones, these images are
haunted by feelings of isolation and entrapment. The near depthless Vorhänge are
claustrophobic culs-de-sac. The Schatten- and Fensterbilder feel marginally less
confining but have been stripped of the one modest comfort the Vorhänge had to
offer: the softness of their undulating drapery. Cell-like and arid, they stage painting
as an arena of imprisonment. The darkness that looms beyond the partly opened
Türen may be limitless, but its opaque blankness makes it feel no less confining.35
This sense of constriction at the hands of space itself is striking and points to a shared
irony of these paintings. While each takes a portal as its subject, these are invariably
gateways to nowhere, as if Richter were now cut off from the world around him. This
too is an experience of finitude.
Elsewhere in his work of the late sixties, Richter also evoked this condition in an
expansive array of partly and wholly abstract painting series. The sheer proliferation
of these works attested to the strength of his efforts to develop new approaches to his
painting. He began this process with the Farbkarten [Colour Charts] (1966) (see
Figure 3.9), which were derived from paint sample charts. These were followed in
1967 by his earliest Graue Bilder (see Figure 3.10). The fateful year of 1968 saw the
emergence of more Graue Bilder, along with a clutch of greyscale photographic
abstractions, four abstract works in colour called Farbschlieren [Colour Streaks]
(1968), a related composition called Gitterschlieren [Grid Streaks] (1968) and two
groups of coarsely painted photographic works depicting cityscapes and mountains
(see Figure 3.11). These Stadtbilder [Cityscapes] (1968–70) and Alpen [Mountains]
(1968–70) were joined a year later by a series of Sternbilder [Constellations]
(1969–70). Derived from photographs of the night sky, most of these works were also
painted in a coarse and choppy style.
Figure 3.9 Gerhard Richter, 12 Farben [12 Colours], 1966, oil on canvas, 150 × 110 cm.
Figure 3.10 Gerhard Richter, Stadtbild M8 (grau) [Cityscape M8 (grey)], 1968, oil on
canvas, 85 × 90 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253). Overpainted Stadtbild.
Figure 3.11 Gerhard Richter, Stadtbild Paris [Cityscape Paris], 1968, oil on canvas, 200 × 200
cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
The Alpen, Sternbilder and many of the Stadtbilder are so crudely and approxi
mately rendered as to hover on the verge of complete abstraction. So rough and
indistinct is their imagery that they resemble Foto-Bilder in which the blurring pro
cess has run amok. In the original Foto-Bilder, the blur was a device that served two
purposes. On one hand, it expressed Richter’s feelings of disconnection from his
subjects, a state figured visually through its partial dissolution of their imagery. On
the other hand, his improvised enactment of the blur helped mitigate his sense of
isolation. Several aspects of the Stadtbilder and Alpen suggest that they too bore the
imprint of these impulses, but in a more emphatic fashion than his prior works. Not
only does their increased abstraction distance them still further from reality, but this
distance was already present in their source photographs. In both cases, he worked
from overhead views of immense subjects, a vantage point suggesting an attempt to
regain his bearings amid the instability of his life. In the Stadtbilder and Alpen, it is as
if he were withdrawing from the whirling world of images that his early Foto-Bilder
had evoked, in a bid to get a clearer view of his surroundings. But having made this
withdrawal, no such clarity was forthcoming. On the contrary, in these works the
world’s turbulence and confusion appear to have intensified, causing cities and
mountains to writhe and shudder. This sense of obscure tumult again evokes a feeling
of finitude, intensified by the vastness of their subjects. So too does the painting
process from which they emerged, which speaks to a strengthening of Richter’s wish
to escape his anxieties through his blurring method. In view of the pressures he was
facing, it is little wonder that he chose to lose himself more fully in the self-dissolving
rhythms of his Informel painting process.
If the terms of this psychologistic reading are accepted, then it would seem that in
the Sternbilder, Graue Bilder and Farbschlieren, Richter’s self- and world-dissolving
inclinations strengthened further. Not only are these paintings wholly abstract but
their creation required far less conscious effort on Richter’s part than the Stadtbilder
and Alpen. The first Graue Bilder were the result of his decision to paint over failed
Foto-Bilder, a task involving little more than a choice of paintbrush, a shade of grey
paint, and a desired surface texture. His decision to replace existing images with
nothing more than a monochrome expanse highlights his unhappiness with his
practice at this time, along with his sense of helplessness as to how best to move it
forward. He produced his other Graue Bilder from the late 1960s in a spirit of still
deeper incapacity: ‘When I first painted a number of canvasses grey all over,’ he
recalled in 1975, ‘I did so because I did not know what to paint or what there might
be to paint: so wretched a start could lead to nothing meaningful.’36 This was equally
the case with the Farbschlieren and Gitterschlieren, which ‘belong[ed] to a group that
were, in the main, despairing efforts at making paintings.’37 He produced these
images by laying dabs of colour on the canvas at random, then blending these to
gether in an improvised fashion, again losing himself in the meandering rhythms of
his brushwork. A number of the Sternbilder were also the result of overpainting. They
began life as images of cosmic vastness that evoked the limitations of human agency
like nothing he had thus far created. He was dissatisfied with most of them, however,
and overpainted them.38 The abstract images that resulted were, in effect, all blur. In
this sense they were a triumph of the Informel. Carrying the self-dissolving logic of
the blurring process to its limits and in the process renouncing the world entirely,
these abstract works were doubly escapist. Their escapism did not finish there,
however. Painted as they were in such a flagrantly de-skilled manner they veered
perilously close to renouncing painting altogether by reducing it to a senseless and
infantile undertaking as if he were surrendering to the judgement that painting was
indeed an expired art form.
The classical and the Informel

The great irony of these formless abstractions is that Richter would have preferred
not to paint them. In their place, he had hoped to produce works he would later
describe as ‘classical,’ infused with an air of order, restfulness, and reassurance. He
did not begin speaking of the classical until the 1980s, but it first surfaced in his
painting as an impulse running counter to the Informel in the late 1960s, as the
Informel was strengthening its hold upon his practice.39 The two forces are opposed
on several fronts in Richter’s mind. Informel-oriented works are typified by states of
formal breakdown and chaotic indistinction. Classical images, in contrast, are lucid,
calm, and orderly. He invests these contrasting properties with existential sig
nificance, linking what he calls the Informel’s ‘destructive’ qualities to the experience
of chaos in his life, and the ‘constructive’ features of the classical to a state in which
that chaos is held at bay.40 ‘The classical is what holds me together,’ he remarked in
this connection in 2001, ‘It is that which gives me form.… It is something that tames
my chaos or holds it together so that I can continue to exist.’41 Remarks such as this
recur throughout his writings and interviews, reaching back to a studio note from
1962 in which he declared: ‘To be alive is to engage in a daily struggle for form and
for survival.’42 While his own struggle for survival takes place outside the realm of
painting, his works bear witness to its vicissitudes.
As a force that resists the Informel, ‘tames’ chaos and ‘holds’ Richter together, the
classical is linked in his thinking to artworks that are settled, well-structured, and
reassuring. He finds these qualities in the work of older artists like Titian, Pieter
Saendredam, Vermeer, and Chardin, as well as later figures like Ingres and several of
his own contemporaries. Informel-oriented artworks tend, by contrast, to be un
settled and obscure. Here, disorder has not been tamed and formlessness prevails,
often because an artist has ceded control of their working process. The function of
this impulse in Richter’s art has already been noted, but it also finds expression in the
work of other artists he admires. As he explained to Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1991: ‘As I
see it, all of them—Tachists, Action Painters, Informel artists and the rest—are only
part of an Informel movement that covers a lot of other things as well. I think there’s
an Informel element in Beuys as well; but it all began with Duchamp and chance, or
with Mondrian, or with the Impressionists.’43 These figures tend to break down form
and structure in their art, whether through Beuys’s use of soft and uncontrollable
substances like fat and honey, Duchamp’s employment of chance compositional
methods in a work like Three Standard Stoppages (1913) (formed by dropping three
pieces of string onto a sheet of canvas and tracing the resulting curves), or the
Impressionists’ dissolution of matter into a luminous state of flux, which they
achieved by rejecting the precision of French academic painting. Mondrian’s en
gagement with the Informel is complex, by virtue of his work’s entanglement with the
classical. Although he worked in an exacting manner and produced exquisitely poised
compositions, he did so by dissolving formal hierarchy in his paintings—between
form and space, on one hand, centre and periphery on the other.44 For this reason his
works hold the classical and the Informel in a state of equilibrium.
As these examples indicate, Informel-oriented artists choose to limit their control of
the creative process, in ways that lead to formal and compositional breakdown.
Richter’s own embrace of this dynamic in his early Foto-Bilder was driven partly by a
wish to escape his feelings of social isolation. As this condition was compounded by
his personal and professional difficulties later in the decade, the escapist aspect of his
painting became stronger. His increasingly formless images came to figure his sense of
incapacity in the face of an existence that felt chaotic. For the rest of his career, he
would continue making paintings that bore witness to his efforts to bring this chaos
to order, a process that commenced with the Farbkarten in 1966.
The promise of an abstract classicism

With this series, Richter sought to fashion abstract compositions with a classical
sensibility. He drew his inspiration from his friend and fellow painter Blinky Palermo,
one of a handful of post-war artists he regarded as contemporary classicists. Richter
and Palermo had been introduced by Lueg in the early sixties. As Richter’s friendships
with Lueg and Polke began to wane, he and Palermo had grown closer.45 He admired
younger colleague’s work and on first encountering his works on paper in 1963,
recalls being struck by their ‘stillness.’46 Some years later, when he visited Palermo’s
studio, he was astonished by the contrast between the chaos that prevailed there and
the ‘clean,’ ‘clear’ and ‘pure’ Stoffbild [Fabric Picture] (see Figure 3.12) that was
Figure 3.12 Palermo, Ohne Titel (Stoffbild) [Untitled (Fabric Picture)], 1967, cotton
fabric on burlap, 200 × 200 cm. © Blinky Palermo.Verwertungsgesellschaft
Bild-Kunst [VG Bild-Kunst].
hanging on the wall.47 Encounters like these convinced him that Palermo was com
mitted to ‘retrieving the classical’ in his art, an aspiration he came to share as the
sixties progressed.48 His own work diverged from Palermo’s, however, by virtue of its
orientation toward the Informel.
Whereas much of Richter’s art of the late sixties tends toward obscurity and upheaval,
contemporary works by Palermo, especially his Stoffbilder, are clear and restful. Even at
their most complex, they feel calm, relaxed, and open, traits in shortly supply in Richter’s
work. Not only did these aspects of Palermo’s art confirm him as a classicist for Richter,
but his painting had the added virtue of feeling wholly contemporary, both stylistically
and through its links to mass culture. Whether mimicking the checkerboard pattern on
the side of his favourite pinball machine in Flipper, or using richly-coloured strips of
store-bought fabric to compose his Stoffbilder, Palermo’s abstract sensibilities were
thoroughly in tune with the world around him.49 In contrast to Richter’s Foto-Bilder,
which bore witness to his struggles with Western life, Palermo’s art conveyed a sense of
give-and-take between the artist and his social surroundings. Palermo was thus a beacon
of inspiration for Richter. Not only did he fashion classical images, but he also flew the
flag for painting at a time when its authority was threatened. Capturing the spirit of
Palermo’s work would prove a challenge for Richter as he tried without success to create
classicising paintings of his own that could transcend the disorder and instability of his
life in the West.
Emerging the same year as the first Stoffbilder (whether earlier or later is un
known),50 the Farbkarten shared Palermo’s straightforward arrangements of bright,
rectangular blocks of colour. Their emulation of paint sample charts was equally in
keeping with the pop culture ethos of Palermo’s work. To this extent, the Farbkarten
evince a kinship with Palermo’s classicism. This proximity is tempered, however, by
other aspects of these paintings that align them with the Informel. In some cases, their
colour were arranged at random, a device that introduced a measure of chaos to their
compositions. The remaining Farbkarten were copied from existing paint sample
charts, a procedure that helped Richter reduce the role of active decision-making in
their creation. His use of the grid format fulfilled a similar function. Although it
enhanced the clarity of his paintings, it too required little by way of active and
conscious effort to implement. He could thus create the Farbkarten in the same self-
abnegating fashion as he blurred his Foto-Bilder and would compose his other ab
stract works in the years to come. In a further indication of the Informel’s operations,
the Farbkarten are also more unsettled than the Stoffbilder. Whereas Palermo used at
most three colours in his works and held them carefully and calmly in balance,
Richter employed a minimum of nine hues and a maximum of 192. His paintings are
accordingly more agitated. The crisp, eye-popping nature of his colour blocks (at
tained, in many cases, with the help of gloss enamel) introduces further tension to the
Farbkarten. Palermo’s works, in contrast, are more relaxed, thanks to the softness,
matte finish and organic surface qualities of his fabric swatches. In short, although the
Farbkarten are vivid and upbeat images by Richter’s standards, they lack the sense of
simple, calm cohesion achieved by Palermo. Striving for a state of classical reassur
ance, they slide back in the direction of the Informel.51
After making 16 brightly-coloured Farbkarten and three simpler, more subdued var
iations in shades of grey, Richter moved on to the Graue Bilder, Farbschlieren, and
Sternbilder, in which he again pursued his classical ideal but came up short. In these
works, he not only took his inspiration from Palermo, but also from Robert Ryman, who
supplied him with a second model of classical abstraction in the late 1960s.52 Ryman, a
painter of white monochromes, whose supports and surface treatment of his images
varied from one group of paintings to the next, began making a name for himself at this
time. In 1968, he exhibited with Fischer in Düsseldorf, showing a series of grid-format
paintings on sheets of paper, taped directly to the gallery walls.53 Fittingly, these works
were titled Classico (see Figure 3.13), and while this was a reference to the brand of
paper they employed, it cannot have gone unnoticed by Richter. Nor could their sense of
calm clarity, which accords with Richter’s notion of the classical.
In his efforts to align his work of the late sixties with Ryman and Palermo, Richter
simplified his abstract painting process as much as possible. But beyond this initial
gesture, he could see no path to his classical ideal. Concerned to overcome this
blockage, which he described to the author as a state of ‘vergebliche Unfähigkeit’
[hopeless incapacity],54 he resorted to painting blindly and instinctively for the re
mainder of the decade, in the faint hope that something new and significant would
spontaneously emerge.
Figure 3.13 Robert Ryman, Classico V, 1968, acrylic on 12 sheets of paper, 237 × 225
cm. © Robert Ryman. Artists Rights Society [ARS].
Figure 3.14 Gerhard Richter, Waldstück [Forest Piece], 1965, oil on canvas, 150 × 155
Classicism, nature, and self-extinction

In light of the many figurative artists he sees as classical, it should come as no surprise
that Richter attempted naturalistic classical paintings also. He undertook this project in a
series of landscapes, seascapes and cloud studies, painted between 1968 and 1971. In
these works, he again hoped to fashion images that would provide him with a sense of
reassurance. Instead, they wound up bearing witness to his urge to escape his insecurities.
Richter had first painted landscapes in the West in 1965, in Foto-Bilder like
Niagarafälle [Niagara Falls] and Waldstück [Forest Piece] (see Figure 3.14). Intrigued
by the prospect of updating a traditional painting genre, he had filtered these works
through the contemporary aesthetics of Pop, a tactic he had also employed with his
pornographic nudes.55 In keeping with his turn away from Pop in the late sixties,
his new landscapes were neither black and white nor sourced from found photo
graphs. Instead, they were based on his own colour photographs, taken in several
locations: the countryside near Düsseldorf, the Canary Islands and Corsica. This shift
to colour images of sites he had visited ought to have made his new landscapes feel
contemporary, but this was not the case. Showing few indications of modernity (a
low-slung bridge on the horizon, for example, or a desolate stretch of roadway), they
could well have been produced in another epoch. This was a deliberate conceit on
Richter’s part and its motives were escapist.
When asked by Rolf Gunther Dienst in 1970 about his reasons for painting
landscapes, Richter claimed only that he wanted to paint ‘something beautiful.’56 It
was not until several decades later that he acknowledged the escapist aspect of this
decision. Unable to keep pace with minimalism and conceptualism, he made delib
erately old-fashioned paintings that could console him with their beauty and tran
quillity.57 Their escapism did not end there, however, since they also offered him the
chance to escape historically from the pressures of his present-day existence.
Wary of being branded a conservative for producing traditional works like these,
Richter did not wish to publicly exhibit them. This position changed, however, in the
wake of positive responses from several colleagues to whom he chose to show them.
Tellingly, these colleagues included Ryman and the English duo Gilbert & George,
whose work of the early seventies (to be discussed below) he also viewed as classical.58
Figure 3.15 Gerhard Richter, Kleine Landschaft am Meer [Small Landscape by the Sea],
1969, oil on canvas, 71.5 × 105 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
Like the naturalistic classical works that Richter prizes, his landscapes of the late
1960s and early seventies are invariably calm and well-ordered. Most are organised
around a crisp division of the canvas into a level ground plain that runs toward a low
horizon and a large expanse of sky that looms above it. Painted with an all-over soft-
focus, they are shrouded in most cases in a delicate haze. As has often been noted, they
resemble landscape paintings of the early 19th century, most notably the works of
Caspar David Friedrich.59 Typical in this regard is Kleine Landschaft am Meer [Small
Seaside Landscape] (1969) (see Figure 3.15). Depicting an estuary that winds across a
sandy foreshore before vanishing in a sea of fog, this image bears obvious affinities to
Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer [Monk at the Seashore] (1808–10). It is thanks to this
proximity, however, that these paintings fall short of Richter’s classical aspirations.
If classical art, for Richter, is an art of reassurance, then it is hard to see paintings like
Kleine Landschaft am Meer as fulfilling this ambition, except by way of confirming his
own melancholy state of mind. Their connection to Friedrich is significant in this regard
since Friedrich’s art is also famously melancholic. Friedrich’s paintings are invariably
calm and carefully arranged, and to this extent would qualify as classical in Richter’s
eyes. This standing is offset, however, by the lack of comfort they offer viewers. With
their emphasis on remote locales, distant horizons and hazy, often twilight scenography,
they are suffused with an atmosphere of loss and isolation. With few exceptions, such
qualities are equally apparent in Richter’s landscapes, which accrue an added sense of
melancholy (and Informel-oriented diffusion) by virtue of their allover blurring. As their
imagery retreats from the viewer’s gaze, it seems as if the world that they depict might
soon be lost to vision entirely. Where the world has not yet disappeared, it is vacant. The
cumulative impact of these devices is emphatic: rather than convey an air of solace, they
stage landscape as a mirror of their maker’s isolation.
The Wolken [Clouds] (1969–71) and Seestücke [Seascapes] (1969–70) (see
Figure 3.16) Richter painted alongside his landscapes have an equally compromised
relationship to his classical ideal. Taking his cue from Ryman and Palermo, he
Figure 3.16 Gerhard Richter, Seestück (bewölkt) [Seascape (cloudy)], 1969, oil on canvas,
attempted in both series to simplify the format of his landscapes in pursuit of order
and stability. To this end, in the Wolken, he removed one tier of imagery from his
landscapes and focussed on the sky in isolation. He retained a two-tiered structure in
the Seestücke, but conjoined sea and sky with unusual sharpness along a perfectly
level horizon.60 While these manipulations did indeed give rise to simple and stable
images, the finished works were closer in appearance to his own abstractions than to
those of Ryman and Palermo. Unsurprisingly, it is this proximity that undercut his
classical aspirations.
Protean, occluded and boundless, their imagery runs strikingly parallel to Richter’s
nonobjective works of the late 1960s. More important than such formal affinities,
however, is the deeper psychological kinship between the two groups of paintings.
Echoing the Sternbilder, the Wolken and Seestücke bring their viewers face to face
with the immensity of nature, again awakening a sense of human finitude. Thanks to
their enveloping scale and their lack of pictorial incident, standing before these works
is like encountering a large-format colour field painting and feeling one’s con
sciousness disperse within its void-like interior—the finite self dissolving in an un
structured sea of imagery.
This absorptive route to self-dissolution was new to Richter’s art in the late sixties.
Pitched halfway between the wish that he expressed in his landscapes to escape his life
in Düsseldorf by retreating to the safe space of nature, and the equally escapist will to
self-abnegation that underwrote his abstract compositions, it confirmed just how
strong his urge to flee the challenges of his life in the West was becoming. Migrating
from one group of paintings to another during the course of the decade, it had spread
and mutated like a virus throughout his entire oeuvre.61 It is against this backdrop of
pervasive escapism that his painting of the early 1970s must be understood.
The triumph of the Informel

Richter’s career reached new heights during this period, yet despite having the trappings
of success, he continued to feel ‘helpless’ and ‘directionless.’62 In 1971, he was appointed
to a professorship at the Akademie, a role that gave him the prestige of an academic title,
along with a stable income to supplement his earnings from his art. His selection as
Figure 3.17 Gerhard Richter, Rot-Blau-Gelb [Red-Blue-Yellow], 1972, oil on canvas, 250
× 200 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
Germany’s representative at the Venice Biennale a year later was equally prestigious. In
addition to affirming his position as an artist of national significance, it offered him his
best chance to date to place his work on an international stage. Behind the scenes,
however, his marriage remained troubled, his sense of isolation persisted and his re
lationship to painting was as anxious as ever. Although no longer under fire as it had
been in the late 1960s, doubts about its future persisted in many quarters, above all in
Richter’s own mind as he struggled to move his practice forward.
After exploring all manner of new directions in the previous half-decade, he spent the
years to 1975 returning to and varying his styles of the late sixties, in most cases on a
much larger scale. Although he did make several efforts to fashion classical works in the
early seventies, these remained in a minority.63 Far more prevalent were Informel-
dominated gestural abstractions like his Vermalungen [Inpaintings] (1971–73) and Rot-
Blau-Gelb Bilder [Red-Blue-Yellow Pictures] (1972–73) (see Figure 3.17). Reminiscent
of the Sternbilder and Farbschlieren, these paintings were produced in the same self-
abnegating fashion. To create the former, he blended numerous shades of brown, grey,
or green together using slender, meandering brushstrokes, intermingling these at random
until the whole picture surface was overrun with snaking paint trails, or as he himself
described it shortly after their production, a ‘jungle’ of pigment that had seemingly
sprung up of its own accord.64 To create the latter, he began with dabs of the three
primary colours plus white, distributed at irregular intervals across an empty canvas. He
then blended these together using rhythmic, snaking brushstrokes to fashion glowering
fields of brownish pigment, studded with primary-coloured accents and occasional white
highlights. Like the Vermalungen, these pictures were also fashioned blindly, as if nature
were once more taking hold of his painting process and he, exploring yet another path to
self-extinction, was merely a passive conduit for its energies.
Less numerous than these gestural paintings but similar in sensibility were mural-
sized Foto-Bilder like the Ausschnitte [Details] (1970–71). Richter based these works
on photographs of small smears of paint 1–2 cm wide. He enlarged these with the
help of a projector then painted them at a vastly increased size. Field-like and ab
stract, these paintings also recalled the Wolken and Seestücke. The Farbenbilder that
succeeded them, meanwhile, were complex and chaotic versions of the Farbkarten,
which featured as many as 1024 hues (see Figure 3.18).65
Figure 3.18 Gerhard Richter, 4096 Farben [4096 Colours], 1974, lacquer on canvas, 254
× 254 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
In May 1973, Richter chose for the first time to hold a major public exhibition
containing nothing but abstract works, drawn largely from the Rot-Blau-Gelb series,
along with smaller groups of Vermalungen and Graue Bilder.66 By omitting Foto-
Bilder from his Munich show, he was sending a clear signal that his priorities as an
artist were shifting, so much so that he declared himself ‘finished’ with photo painting
at the exhibition opening.67 This hiatus was short-lived, but from late 1972 until the
start of 1975, he did indeed remain an abstract artist. Throughout this period, he
narrowed his horizons still further, until he was devoting his attention to just one
kind of abstract composition: the grey monochrome. This winnowing of focus con
firmed just how demoralised and despairing his work had become.
Since the first Graues Bild had appeared in 1967, their number had trended steadily
upward until 1974, at which point they accounted for more than half of Richter’s
output.68 While his Graue Bilder of the late 1960s emerged, like his other paintings of
this period, from his feelings of uncertainty as to what and how he should continue
painting, with time he saw a positive side to their uniformity. Writing to curator Edy
de Wilde in February 1975, he explained: ‘As time went on… I observed differences
of quality among the grey surfaces—and also that these betrayed nothing of the
destructive motivation that lay behind them. The pictures began to teach me. By
generalising a personal dilemma, they resolved it. Destitution became a constructive
statement; it became relative perfection, beauty, and therefore painting.’69 What
Richter meant here by ‘differences of quality’ were the slight discrepancies of colour
and texture that were a feature of the Graue Bilder from the outset. As the series
developed, he explored different methods of paint preparation and application, in
crementally adjusting variables like surface texture, tonality and sheen, to produce an
array of minutely differentiated images. Like Ryman’s white square, the grey format
proved surprisingly versatile, and as with Ryman’s square it gave Richter a platform
to say the ‘same’ thing many times over, which by his account was nothing at all;70 or
so he wrote to de Wilde, as his letter continued:
To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference,
noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape.71
Wringing yet another variation on his drive to self-extinction, Richter here likens
painting the Graue Bilder to embracing an anaesthetising state of nothingness. In
these blank and occluded canvasses, his excision of both self and world alike from his
imagery had arrived at an unsurpassable terminus. Not only had the world now faded
wholly from view, but as with his first Graue Bilder, his influence on his own painting
process had been reduced to an absolute minimum.
This flight from himself and from the world around him could never be definitive,
however. Like all self-abnegating processes (short of death), it had to be continually
renewed. No doubt his focus on the Graue Bilder served its purpose well for a time,
as did his other forms of painterly escapism. Yet as his work of 1975 made apparent,
this impulse was beginning to fail him. With the grey haze enveloping his work
showing no signs of lifting, it appeared as if his practice was in danger of grinding to a
halt. A suffocating blanket of neutrality had descended on his art, which he would
need to cast aside in order to regain momentum.
Gilbert & George

In 1975, he made his first attempt to do so. Setting his Graue Bilder aside, he staged a
return to photo painting, producing sixteen new works that year. These, however, merely
ratified the stasis of his practice, which remained in the grip of the Informel. Indicative of
this condition were his eight small portraits of the English artists Gilbert & George.
Richter had come to know his British colleagues in May 1970, when they exhibited at
Galerie Konrad Fischer.72 Thereafter, they showed frequently in Düsseldorf, which al
lowed him to keep up with their latest projects. As with Ryman and Palermo, Richter
saw Gilbert & George as classicists, but of a representational persuasion. Much of their
work was dark in tone and given over, if only ironically, to themes of decadence and
violence. But there was also a strand of their practice that ran counter to this tendency. In
1970 and 1971, they made drawings, photographs, and paintings of themselves amid
pastoral surroundings, which were in tune with Richter’s classical sensibilities.
The first work of this kind that he is likely to have seen is a ‘magazine sculpture’ (as
Gilbert & George termed it), which appeared in the catalogue for Kunstmarkt Köln
[The Cologne Art Fair] (see Figure 3.19) in 1970. Consisting of a shoddy-looking
black and white photograph, this image shows the pair in their trademark matching
suits, standing in a woodland dell. Lost in contemplation, they seem to be communing
with nature. Not only was a figurative work of this kind at odds with prevailing art
world trends (as the artists were well aware73), but its bucolic atmosphere embodied
the spirit with which Richter was at that time attempting to imbue his landscapes.
That Richter knew of this work is almost certain, since Gilbert & George’s image
doubled as an ad for the Galerie Konrad Fischer. That the photograph left its mark on
his own art also seems likely, because, in late 1970 and early 1971, he painted two
versions of a portrait of the politician Heinz Kühn (see Figure 3.20), whose woodland
setting and sitter’s pose echoed the imagery of Gilbert & George’s work.
In summer 1971, he had ample opportunity to view a group of six large-format oil
paintings by the pair. Known collectively as The Paintings (With Us in the Nature)
(1970–71) (see Figure 3.21), these enormous, multi-panel images were exhibited
alongside the survey of Richter’s work at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und
Westfalen from June to August. Unique in the oeuvre of Gilbert & George, and
equally at odds with prevailing art world trends, The Paintings (With Us in the
Figure 3.19 Gilbert & George, Us in the Nature, 1970. Magazine sculpture, Kunstmarkt
Köln catalogue. © Gilbert & George. Courtesy of the artists and White Cube
Gallery.
Figure 3.20 Gerhard Richter, Kühn Portrait, 1971, oil on canvas, 60 × 50 cm. © Gerhard
Richter 2021 (0253).
Figure 3.21 Gilbert & George, The Paintings (With Us in the Nature) #5, 1970–71, oil on
canvas, 230 × 680 cm. © Gilbert & George. Courtesy of the artists and White
Cube Gallery.
Figure 3.22 Gerhard Richter, Parkstück [Park Piece], 1970, oil on canvas, 250 × 375 cm. ©
Nature) showed the artists at ease in a variety of picturesque settings in the English
countryside. These vast and unashamedly conservative images seem also to have
captured Richter’s interest, as evidenced by his own multi-panel woodland painting
Parkstück from 1971 (see Figure 3.22) and a number of related works from this
period. Richter has noted on several occasions that he felt a strong connection to
Gilbert & George in the early seventies and confirms that their pastoral images
formed the basis of this affinity.74 This admiration was evidently mutual since the
English duo were the first to show a fondness for his landscapes.75 In 1974, more
over, they asked Richter to paint their portraits.76 He initially demurred, but in 1975
he relented and produced a group of photo-based works entitled Gilbert & George
(see Figure 3.23).
Figure 3.23 Gerhard Richter, Gilbert & George, 1975, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. © Gerhard
Richter 2021 (0253).
Rather than produce simple likenesses of his sitters, in these paintings, Richter
worked from multiple exposure photographs that blended two and sometimes three
images together into an abstract entanglement of form.77 He had previously em
ployed this technique in the early seventies, beginning with a group of photographs
from 1970. Among these were four images that merged his features with those of
Polke. In much the same manner as those photographs, the act of fusing Gilbert &
George together evoked the shared nature of his subjects’ life and work.78 With Polke
gone, and Palermo, who had moved to Mönchengladbach in 1971 before relocating
to New York, also absent, Richter had nothing resembling this kind of closeness in
his own life. Nor could he discern a new path forward in his art; for although his
blended imagery was well-suited to the task at hand, he was again failing to break
new ground stylistically. He was also failing to free himself from the disorder and
obscurity of the Informel. Since Gilbert & George stood as leading exemplars of the
classical for Richter in the early 1970s, this latter setback seems especially significant.
As his elegant, but often murky and confused renditions of his friends suggest, in
1975, the road to classicism remained as closed to him as ever.
In a letter to the art historian Marlies Grüterich in 1975, Richter wrote that he
began painting works like the Vermalungen because ‘the Informel is all we have’
[weil wir nichts anders als das Informel haben].79 In his Foto-Bilder of 1975, it is
evident that, for him, this was still the case, in life and art alike.
Postwar individualism and belonging in the FRG

A decade after Time’s photograph was taken, Richter’s standing in the art world had
risen far beyond the level it had reached in the GDR. But in spite of this success, he
felt no strong sense of professional belonging. There were certainly other artists, like
Ryman, Palermo, and Gilbert & George, whose work aligned with his classical as
pirations, but he did not feel able to join their ranks. Instead, his art remained
confined to the space of the Informel, and to the abstract, reductive compositions
informed by conceptualism and minimalism that had supplanted his Pop works of the
early sixties. This transition had been prompted in part by his attraction to those
movements, but was also a defensive manoeuvre intended to help keep his practice
current. As the challenge of mounting this defence had intensified, he had gone from
leading the game in his painting to chasing it, under conditions that grew more
strenuous as time progressed.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this pressure, he had been able to reinvent his
practice. In so doing, he had not only maintained his standing in the art world but
also strengthened it. But had this achievement, in fact, been in keeping with the urge
that had brought him to the West in the first place? He had come to claim his right to
make the kind of art he wanted and be supported and rewarded for doing so. But
after nearly a decade of working in the slipstream of movements that had little use for
painting, could he be said to have fulfilled this objective on which his desire for
belonging had been predicated? Or had his lengthy period of chasing the game for the
sake of his maintaining career diminished his autonomy, thereby limiting the sa
tisfaction he could draw from producing his abstract works? His feeling that he had to
disavow his interest in more traditional approaches to painting, and his questioning
of the medium’s viability throughout this period suggest that this was indeed the case.
So too does the fact that as his work had grown increasingly reductive under the aegis of
minimalism and conceptualism, it had lead him to a creative cul-de-sac. By this point, as
he later described it, ‘I was totally outside my paintings,’80 and it is not hard to see why
this was: not only was his working process self-abnegating and his imagery unworldly,
but he was taking his cues from movements inimical to the medium that anchored his
identity as an artist. In the end, it may only have been his need for recognition, rather
than internal motivation, that had pushed him to continue in this vein for so long. As
this process had unfolded, his desire for creative freedom had been pitted with in
creasing intensity against his need for belonging.
Had this need not been as strong as it was, he might have persisted with Pop as the
tide turned against it, evolving in his engagement with the movement as Polke did. He
might also have engaged more openly with tradition and made more works like his
landscapes. Whatever the case might have been, had he spent less time and energy
attempting to stay current, he might have done less damage to his marriage. As he
acknowledged decades later, his intense career focus had done him no favours on the
home front, as either a husband or a father.81
Choices like these, however, would have brought with them risks of their own. A
less ambitious Richter, who was also less competitive because of this, might have
stood a better chance of maintaining close friendships with other artists. Yet without
his intense struggle to stay current, he might have become trapped making the kind of
work that brought him his initial success. His fear of losing the respect of his peers
might have been realised and his promising career might have stalled, taking with it
his chances for a professorship. The material reward for these successes had allowed
him to buy a house in the early seventies and brought him a paycheck in perpetuity.
Without them, his family would have been less secure financially and he would have
lacked two indicators of middle class success that were important to him.82
Speculations like these are worth rehearsing because they highlight the uncertain
calculus of risk versus reward that his life as a ‘free’ individual in the West had forced
upon him. Unlike the GDR, where towing the party line would have guaranteed him
professional security—something Womacka, for example, retained until the end of
the regime—in the FRG freedom and insecurity were inseparable. To the extent that
this situation made it hard for him to reconcile the needs of his private life with the
demands of his career, it is clear that throughout the late sixties and early seventies he
remained unsettled by the same social conditions that had troubled him since his
arrival. As in the early sixties, he was compelled to compete for resources and status
in a dynamic, unpredictable, and increasingly differentiated art milieu that did not
conduce toward security on either front. Nor did it conduce toward the maintenance
of stable and supportive relationships. In short, the aporia of West German in
dividualism, with its bright side of greater freedom of choice than he had had in the East
and its shadow aspects of an increased need for self-reliance and more exposure to the
risks of isolation and financial hardship, seemed inescapable. And yet it was precisely
because this was his problem that he was by no means as isolated as he felt, for, during
this same period, large numbers of his compatriots were also looking to improve the
terms on which freedom and collective security were functioning in their lives.
From the outset, the nature of this relationship had been a focal political issue in
the Federal Republic. Haunted as the new nation was by the ghosts of the fascist past
and the emerging threat of socialist infiltration from the East, elites within the country
and their Allied backers had been eager to strengthen forms of individualism that
would keep those coerced forms of collectivity at bay. The vision that had prevailed
in the 1950s had been that of Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union, which
won the country’s first election in 1949 and went on to rule unchallenged until the
mid-1960s, when it entered into grand coalition with the SPD. During the first years
of its rule under Adenauer and his minister of economic affairs Ludwig Erhard, the
CDU had adopted a raft of measures intended to promote social stability. Among
these were an effort to hold two kinds of individual freedom, which could function as
a buffer against fascist and communist mass politics, in balance with two forms of
collectivity that they believed would maintain social cohesion.83 The freedoms were
those of political and economic individualism, as exercised respectively within the
democratic political process and the capitalist free market. Both had fared poorly in
the Weimar Republic, but the party hoped that in conjunction with other measures
like the new Grundgesetz (deemed an improvement on the Weimar Constitution) and
the presence of union representatives on corporate boards, they could prevent a re
peat of that scenario. Their aspiration in the new, postwar environment was, as
Michael Wildt has argued, to inculcate a free choice mentality among West Germans,
who would ideally come to see themselves as rational and autonomous individuals
exercising their own judgement, as voters, as workers looking to succeed on their own
initiative, and as consumers of a growing array of products through which they could
find personal fulfilment.84 The CDU were mindful, however, that the self-interested,
materialistic outlook that a competitive consumer society would foster could erode
communal support and solidarity. The ensuing alienation and resentment could in
turn beget political instability. In a bid to mitigate these prospects, efforts were made
throughout the 1950s to bolster the power of the churches and promote the tradi
tional bourgeois family, with a strong male earner at its head and a housebound wife
and mother at his side, as pillars of a unified and stable society.85 The party hoped
that these two forms of collectivity, which had historically been strong on German
soil, would transmit a common set of values and behavioural norms that, in tandem
with a generous social welfare system, would curb the excesses of capitalist in
dividualism. With these constraints in place, competitive self-interest could itself
become a source of stability by bringing, in words used often by Erhard, Wohlstand
für Alle—prosperity for all.86
Throughout the 1950s, when the war-weary populace craved security and were
obliged to expend most of their energies to secure the necessities of life, this balancing
act worked well. Amid the daily hardships of reconstruction, family and religion
offered refuge.87 When economic growth did kick in, it not only lifted incomes but
also strengthened the nation’s commitment to the values of capitalism and democ
racy.88 The story of the 1960s, however, was that of the contestation and transfor
mation of the CDU’s ideal social model, which large segments of the population had
come to find confining.
Already in the 1950s, there were vocal opponents of the CDU’s agenda, who took
the view that the freedoms made available under capitalism were unworthy of the
name. For the members of the Frankfurt School, with whom this line of thinking
originated, the structures by which postwar West Germany was being governed left
scant scope for individual freedom. What thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Max
Horkheimer and Erich Fromm saw taking shape in the postwar period was a stan
dardised and massified society, with little more to recommend it than its Eastern Bloc
or fascist alternatives.89 By day individuals laboured to fulfil the imperatives of
corporate capital, in accordance with the dictates of an abstract, governmental bu
reaucracy by which the interests of capital were supported. In their spare time, which
was granted to them only so they could service these same interests as consumers and
replenish their energies for further labour, they purchased standardised products and
consumed the no less standardised outputs of the culture industry. The chief function
of the family and the education system was to ensure that children would internalise
the values of the system they would come to serve. So disenchanted was the Frankfurt
School outlook concerning prospects for improving this situation that they could
offer no concrete alternative to the status quo.90
In the 1950s and early 1960s, this line of critique had little influence beyond academia,
and even there it was often criticised for its lack of concrete social analysis.91 As the
sixties wore on, however, aspects of Frankfurt School thought filtered through to the
counterculture, which also looked on the market and the state as forces inimical to
freedom.92 The younger radicals were less pessimistic than the older intellectuals, how
ever, and saw hope for pushing back against these and other sources of oppression.
Despite also having few concrete conceptions of what genuine autonomy might look like,
many in the counterculture attempted to form new kinds of community that could avoid
the domineering dictates of both the Soviet dictatorship and Western consumer capit
alism alike. From communes to revolutionary cells, and artists’ groups exploring shared
forms of authorship, myriad experiments were conducted with a view to striking a better
balance between freedom and collectivity than either Cold War bloc was making pos
sible.93 The minute scale of these endeavours, however, and the swiftness with which
most of them dissolved, meant that they had little social impact.
Far more consequential were the Wertewandlung and attendant Individualisierun-
gsschub of the 1960s, driven forward by the numberless West Germans who had no wish
for revolution but whose life priorities, aspirations and lifestyle choices were diverging
from those of the prewar generation to which Adenauer and Erhard both belonged.
Ironically, this shift was triggered by the very social forces the CDU’s policies had set in
motion. Thanks to a near quadrupling of average disposable incomes between 1950 and
1970, a middle class of unprecedented size and wealth had emerged within the country,
bringing with it the first era of mass prosperity in German history.94 The younger seg
ments of this ballooning demographic were also better educated than ever, in accordance
with revised, postwar curricula that placed new emphasis on independent thought.95
With a strong and fast-developing job market providing many new career paths, pos
sibilities for entering a profession of one’s choosing were higher for the new middle class
than for any prior cohort. Greater wealth also brought its members greater freedom to
pursue their own interests, projects a willing market was eager to facilitate.96 Contrary to
the premonitions of its staunchest critics, both liberal and conservative, the rise of the
consumer society did not lead to social levelling or to a loss of meaningful individual
differences.97 Nor did consumers become the passive dupes of advertisers. Instead, they
became more discriminating and increasingly diverse in their preferences. The result was
a situation that, by the early 1970s, saw a vast and still expanding array of products
being produced for a greatly expanded and ever more differentiated market.98
In broad terms, these developments were in keeping with the CDU blueprint, but the
willingness of the new middle class to exercise its independent judgement in all aspects of
life was not. Already by the early 1960s church attendance was falling, a trend that
accelerated sharply in the years that followed. By the end of the decade both denomi
nations were obliged to contend with two developments: an increasingly secular popu
lation and a growing desire among the faithful who remained to worship on their own
terms.99 Family life was also changing, with women gaining greater independence, di
vorce rates rising to their highest ever levels, the age of marriage creeping up, birth rates
dropping, and an independent youth culture developing.100 As in other Western coun
tries, liberal sexual attitudes were spreading, with cohabitation before marriage and, to a
lesser extent, homosexuality increasingly tolerated.101 Each of these developments at
tested to a wish for freedom from the homogenising social norms and structures on
which the Adenauer government had pinned its hopes for preserving social cohesion.
Accordingly, their normative authority declined.
This erosion of traditional forms of social regulation did not give rise to anomie, as
conservatives had feared, but it also failed to herald revolution as radicals had hoped.
Rather than collapsing or being overthrown, existing social structures remained intact
but were obliged to become more accommodating. The result was a society in which the
same forms of authority endured, but had been forced, as a consequence of changing
values, to become more tolerant of individual differences. As surveys conducted in the
late 1970s would reveal, the values of young and middle-aged West Germans were less
collectivistic than the values of those who, like Richter, had been born before the war.
Whereas older cohorts recorded stronger scores for adherence to collectivistic values like
duty and acceptance of one’s social position, which emphasise relationships of mutual
support and obligation, younger cohorts scored higher on individualistic measures like
autonomy, creativity, and a desire for personal fulfilment that centre on the self in iso
lation.102 This more individualistic outlook did not entail the liquidation of traditional
ways of life, nor did it spell the end of collectivity. It did, however, widen the disparity
between the bright and shadow aspects of Western individualism. On one hand, it
brought with it new lifestyle freedoms and a flexibilisation of traditional social forms:
henceforth there would be more ways to live together and to partner, more ways to
worship, a wider variety of life trajectories on offer and more subcultural diversity. On
the other hand, it worked to loosen social bonds as the lives and aspirations of the
populace became increasingly differentiated and the values of capitalist individualism
became more firmly entrenched. As survey data also revealed, the younger generations
had internalised the ethos of competitive striving for advancement more thoroughly than
prewar cohorts. More so than their older compatriots, they held to the idea that success
or failure was a personal achievement, with each responsible in isolation for his or her
own fate.103 In short, by the mid-1970s, the aporia of Western individualism had been
sharpened both for better and for worse.
Symptomatic of the unfolding Wertewandlung in the art world was its increasing
differentiation, which ran parallel to the differentiation of other sectors of cultural
production. After a period in the 1940s and 1950s in which abstraction and ex
pressive figuration had been dominant, the sixties witnessed a return to the pluralism
and expansiveness of the avant-garde’s interwar heyday. Not only were most ten
dencies of that period recovered and their legacies extended, but as the decade pro
gressed new developments, like earthworks and body art, which had no explicit
prewar pedigree, also emerged. Innovations such as these, and the rise of trends like
installation and conceptualism, were linked to a second major shift of the period: the
transition to the ‘post-medium condition.’104 Here too, another prewar impulse,
which had weakened in the 1940s and 1950s first revived and then intensified, as
younger artists became increasingly disinclined to work within the confines of es
tablished mediums. Just as the authority of traditional social institutions declined in
the late sixties, so too did the authority of what were rightly seen as bourgeois art
forms, which had dominated modernism since its inception.
As these changes gathered pace around him, Richter was caught on an un
comfortable middle ground. On one hand, his commitment to painting and his
support for the social status quo marked him as a bourgeois traditionalist, as did his
attraction to older painting genres. On the other hand, his interests in innovation and
in maintaining his work’s currency had led his work away from tradition and set him
on the path of minimalist and conceptualist reductivism. Emblematic of this am
bivalent position was the stylistic fissioning of his practice, which echoed the dif
ferentiation of the art world at large, yet remained confined to painting.
Other major figures in his milieu embraced the new opportunities that advancing
individualism and the erosion of traditional authority opened up. In true counter
cultural spirit, Polke eventually left Düsseldorf and established himself at the
Gaspelhof, an artist’s commune in the nearby village of Willich. Lueg showed himself
to be supremely well-adapted to the demands of capitalist individualism by riding
several of the late sixties art trends to lasting success. Beuys failed to make an impact
in politics but remained undeterred in his efforts to develop social projects in line with
his utopian ambitions. Richter, however, had become paralysed by the impact of the
unfolding Wertewandlung in the art world. Unwilling to lean too firmly toward a
more traditional approach to his work, lest his career suffer, but unable to further
radicalise his practice without abandoning painting and with it his identity as an
artist, he was caught in a bind that felt insoluble. His relationship problems added to
his stress, depriving him of compensatory sources of belonging in his personal life. To
regain momentum in his art and life alike, he would need to make significant changes,
a task to which he dramatically committed in 1976 when he exchanged the anaes
thetising stasis of his Graue Bilder for an altogether different kind of painting.
Notes
1 It was during this phase of his career that Richter established his reputation as a restless
virtuoso and a meta-painter, for whom in the often-quoted words of Klaus Honnef from this
period, ‘the style break’ had become ‘a style principle.’ (Klaus Honnef, “Schwierigkeiten beim
Beschreiben der Realität: Richters Malerei zwischen Kunst und Wirklichkeit,” in Gerhard
Richter [Aachen: Gegenverkehr Zentrum für Aktuelle Kunst, 1969], n.p.)
2 The notion of Richter as a masterful strategist was in place by the mid-1970s. In 1974, for
example, Manfred Schneckenburger deemed him ‘Europe’s most virtuosic painter,’ who
used a range of styles to both investigate the way painting functions and criticise the idea
of approaching reality from a single standpoint (Schneckenburger, “Gerhard Richter,
oder ein Weg weiterzumalen,” in Gerhard Richter: Bilder aus den Jahren 1962–1974
[Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1974], 10, 15). Similar accounts of Richter’s style switching
as a sovereign critical undertaking are legion.
That such readings should have emerged in the wake of Honnef’s essay is ironic, since
Honnef stressed the role of uncertainty in Richter’s restless migration between styles:
Seine Unsicherheit gegenüber Wirklichkeit und Kunst, die beiden Pole, zwischen denen
Richters malerei angesiedelt ist, die Unsicherheit, Wirklichkeit künstlerisch zu bes
chreiben und zu reflektieren, hat er thematisiert und bringt sie in seine ästhetischen
Formulierungen beständig ein.
[His [Richter’s] uncertainty in the face of reality and art, the two poles between which
his art has settled, the uncertainty of describing and reflecting reality artistically, is
something he has thematized and brings constantly into his aesthetic formulations.]
(Honnef, ‘Schwierigkeiten beim Beschreiben der Realität,’ n.p.)
3 For Richter’s most extensive remarks concerning this uncertainty, which he first ac
knowledged to Robert Storr, in the late 1990s: Richter, “MoMA Interview with Robert
Storr, 2002.” in Gerhard Richter, Writings: 1961–2007 (New York: D.A.P./Distributed
Art Publishers, 2009), eds. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 422–425.
4 ‘My uncertainty produced a certain polymorphousness that I didn’t want at all’ [‘Meine
Unsicherheit bewirkte eine gewisse Vielgestaltigkeit, die ich eigentlich gar nicht wollte’],
Richter noted to Götz Adriani decades later. (Richter in Adriani, “Gerhard Richter 1962
bis 1969,” in Baselitz, Richter, Polke, Kiefer. Die jungen Jahre der alten Meister
[Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 2019], 92.) [Author’s translation].
5 “Paris on the Rhine,” Time Magazine, June 2, 1967, 55.
6 By the mid-sixties this impulse had been dubbed der Neue Realismus [the New Realism],
with Pop its leading manifestation. The term ‘neuer Realismus’ had been applied to the
work of Richter, Polke, Lueg and Kuttner, as early as 1963, on the occasion of their
Demonstrative Ausstellung in Düsseldorf (see “Der neue Realismus in jedem Heim?,”
Düsseldorfer Nachrichten, May 12, 1963). By the mid-sixties, it was used as a shorthand
for contemporary realist art throughout West Germany, with Richter’s Foto-Bilder rou
tinely included in group shows devoted to the trend.
7 On Richter’s sales and the pricing structure of his paintings in the late 1960s, see Dietmar
Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting (London and Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2009), trans. Elizabeth M. Solaro, 113–114. The German edition of Elger’s bio
graphy contains additional information on this topic. See Elger, Gerhard Richter: Maler
(Köln: DuMont Verlag, 2002), 203–204.
8 Richter alluded to this experience obliquely in conversation with Michael Kimmelman in
2001, ‘The porno was shameless, a test: how far could I go? I was foolish. I had no girlfriend,
so I was maybe too interested in these sorts of pictures.’ Michael Kimmelman, “Gerhard
Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms,” New York Times Magazine, January 27, 2002, p. F55.
10 Richter, “Interview with Babette Richter, 2002,” reprinted in Writings, 443.
11 As Dietmar Elger recounts, Richter took many photos of Ema in preparation for his
painting, both in his studio and on the stairwell outside. (Elger, A Life in Painting, 106.)
12 Lest doubts remain about this claim, several other paintings from 1966 can be adduced,
which address the theme of trouble in romantic relationships. Depicting couples in idyllic
circumstances, Brautpaar (blau) [Bride and Groom (Blue)] (1966), Liebespaar im Wald
[Lovers in the Forest] (1966) and Helga Matura mit Verlobtem [Helga Matura with Fiancé]
(1966) would seem to echo Richter’s hopes for his marriage at this time. This impression
changes, however, when the source photographs for these paintings are considered in their
original contexts. Brautpaar (blau), for instance, derives from an article on marital infidelity.
Liebespaar im Wald was cut from an article exhorting readers to ‘Be Clever in Love’ [Sei klug
in der Liebe]. The source for Helga Matura mit Verlobtem has yet to be located, but the story
of its subject is well-documented. A Frankfurt prostitute who planned to marry and begin a
new life, Helga Matura was murdered by her neighbour before her wedding could take place.
Richter’s fascination with such articles, whose saccharine illustrations belied their darker
content, suggests a parallel with his own life at this time.
13 Richter does not recall the exact date of this painting, but he is sure that he destroyed it by
the end of the 1960s. (Richter, conversation with the author, June 23, 2010.)
14 On the ‘low stakes’ nature of Richter’s collaborations with other artists, see Christine
Mehring, “Richter’s Collaborations, Richter’s Turn, 1955–1971,” in Gerhard Richter:
Early Work, 1951–1972, eds. Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent and Jon Seydl (Los
Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Research Institute, 2010), 90.
16 Richter introduced the term ‘konstruiert’ [constructed] in a statement from 1967, where
he used it to refer to his synthetic Foto-Bilder (Richter, “Statement, 1967,” reprinted in
Writings, 47). He later broadened its application to all works without a referent in the real
world, most notably his abstractions. It is for this reason that his survey exhibition in
Toronto in 1988 contained a section entitled ‘Constructive Work’ devoted to his ab
stractions of the sixties and seventies (see I. Michael Danoff, Michael, Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, and Roald Nasgaard, Gerhard Richter: Paintings [New York: Thames and
Hudson, 1988], 74). My own use of the term ‘Konstruktionen’ refers only to those works
Richter mentions in his 1967 statement.
17 Richter, letter to Wieland Förster, December 12, 1962, in “Briefe Gerd Richter an W.
Förster Januar 1961-Dezember 1962,” Gerhard Richter Archiv, Dresden. [Author’s
translation]
18 Elger, A Life in Painting, 150–152.
19 In 1967 and 1968, minimalism and nascent conceptualism had become the hot ticket in
the Netherlands and West Germany, with major exhibitions devoted to the two trends
taking place in Amsterdam, the Hague, Eindhoven and Düsseldorf, and dealers such as
Lueg, and Heiner Friedrich in Munich, starting to focus on them. (See Paula Feldman,
Made to order: American Minimal art in the Netherlands, late 1960s to early 1970s [PhD
thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2005].)
A complete exhibition history for Fischer’s gallery appears in Ausstellungen bei
Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf Oktober 1967-Oktober 1992 (Bielefeld: Edition Marzona,
1993), 5–7.
20 For an indicative example of Richter’s acknowledgement of the esteem in which he held
Fischer’s artists, see Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings,
170. When asked by Buchloh to list the artists most important to him in the late 1960s,
Richter replied: “Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Bob Ryman, Dan Flavin, Larry Weiner, Walter De
Maria, and others.” With the exception of De Maria, all showed with Fischer at this time.
21 For comments by Richter on the influence of Carl Andre on his work of the late sixties, see
Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 170. On
Schoonhoven’s influence, see Elger, Gerhard Richter: Maler, 153.
22 As Richter recounted to Benjamin Buchloh in 1986: ‘Maybe I was just admiring some
thing that I can’t do—something I’m in no position to do.’ (Richter, “Interview with
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 168.)
23 Richter, conversation with the author, June 23, 2010. As Lueg recalled half-jokingly in
1989, ‘I fall out with Richter at least once a year.’ [Author’s translation] (Konrad Fischer,
“Die frühen Jahre,” Kunstforum International 104 (November/December 1989): 281.)
24 On the emergence and ideals of the West German APO and its wider European context,
see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books,
2005), 408–422.
25 On the role of multiples in Beuys’s practice, see Maja Wismer, “One of Many. The
Multiples of Joseph Beuys,” available at: http://walkerart.org/collections/publications/art-
expanded/one-of-many-joseph-beuys/
26 For a detailed review of these developments, see H. P. Riegel, Beuys: Die Biographie
(Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2013), 201–454.
27 Richter, “Interview with Jonas Storsve, 1991,” in Writings, 271. For further comments on
this subject, see Richter, “MoMA Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 419.
28 Richter, “MoMA Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 424.
29 As Richter explained to Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2014: ‘…those of us who came from East
Germany were initially happy to be here in the West. We were amazed at the freedom
here. Then along came the so-called ’68 generation and started saying there was no
freedom here and everyone was a fascist. I’d come from a quasi-fascist state, so I was
shocked to see how much support they got…’ (Richter, quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist,
“Interview with Gerhard Richter,” in Gerhard Richter: pictures/series, Fondation Beyeler
[Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2014], 97.)
30 Lauren Graber and Daniel Spaulding have also remarked on the distancing effect from
Maoism that Richter’s multiple suggests. They note that ‘Richter… seems to withhold
himself from too close an identification with the image, perhaps because he was wary of
associations with the communist system that he had left behind so long ago.’ (“The Red
Flag: The Art and Politics of West German Maoism,” in Art, Global Maoism and the
Chinese Cultural Revolution, eds. Jacopo Galimberti, Noemi de Haro García and Victoria
H. F. Scott [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020], 112.) But whereas Graber
and Spaulding suggest that this distance attests to an ambivalence concerning socialism on
Richter’s part, I am suggesting he harboured no such uncertainty. Richter may have been
ambivalent about many things, but his antipathy toward socialism was unwavering.
31 Richter, conversation with the author, June 30, 2010. Richter describes his appreciation
of Beuys’s art at length in an interview with Franziska Leuthäußer (See Franziska
Leuthäußer, ed., Café Deutschland 2. Im Gespräch mit der ersten Kunstszene der BRD
[Frankfurt: Städel Museum, 2018], 1254.)
32 Richter, “Interview with Doris von Drathen, 1992,” in Writings, 283.
33 Richter, “Statement, 1967,” in Writings, 47. [Author’s translation.] This text was pub
lished in conjunction with Richter’s exhibition at the Wide White Space Gallery in
Antwerp, at which a number of synthetic Foto-Bilder were shown. Confusingly, the Türen
are here described inaccurately as being photographic in appearance, when this is in fact
not the case. As noted above, they are trompe l’oeil images, painted in the same manner as
the Umgeschlagene Blätter.
In conversation, Richter has noted that many of his statements from this period took a
loose approach to the titling and classification of his paintings, which sometimes passed
through several iterations before assuming their final form. (Richter, conversation with
the author, June 30, 2010.)
34 Richter, “Note, 1971,” in Writings, 57.
35 As one early critic observed, the dark interiors of the Türen hold within them ‘the pos
sibility of hysteria.’ (Edward F. Fry, “Gerhard Richter, German Illusionist,” Art in
America, vol. 57, no. 6 [November/December, 1989] 126.)
36 Richter, “From a letter to Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975,” in Writings, 91.
37 Richter, “Comments on some works, 1991,” in Writings, 262.
38 Richter, “Comments on some works, 1991,” in Writings, 263.
39 Richter first discussed his interest in classical painting, along with his aspirations to rival the
achievements of classical painters of the past in 1983. (Coosje van Bruggen, “Gerhard
Richter: Painting as a Moral Act,” Artforum International, vol. 23, no. 9 (May 1985), 82–91.
The comments by Richter in this article were recorded two years before its publication.)
40 As Richter noted to Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1991: “The Informel is the opposite of the
constructive [konstruktiven] quality of classicism—the age of kings, of clearly formed
hierarchies.” (Richter, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1993,” in Writings, 295.
[Translation altered by the author])
42 Richter, “Notes, 1962,” in Writings, 14.
44 On Mondrian’s pursuit and eventual attainment of this formal and compositional bal
ance, see Yve-Alain Bois, “The Iconoclast,” in Piet Mondrian 1872–1944, ed. Angelica
Zander Rudenstine (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 313–372.
45 Richter’s friendship and artistic collaborations with Palermo are described in detail, in
Mehring, “Richter’s Collaborations,” in eds. Mehring, Nugest, Seydl, Gerhard Richter:
Early Work, 1951–1972, 106–120.
46 For Richter’s reminiscences of his friendship with Palermo, see “About Blinky Palermo,
2003,” in Writings, 450–453. The date and description of his first encounter with
Palermo’s work are given in Elger, A Life in Painting, 181.
47 Richter, “About Blinky Palermo, 2003,” in Writings, 450.
48 Richter, “MoMA Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 420. In an earlier
interview, Richter had aligned Palermo’s work with that of Vermeer and Chardin.
(Richter, “Interview with Astrid Kaspar, 2000,” in Writings, 370.)
49 On Palermo’s lyrical engagements with the banality of German mass culture, see Christine
Mehring, Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era (New Haven, London: Yale University
Press, 2008).
50 Mehring, Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era, 176. According to Richter’s catalogue
raisonné, the reverse side of a Foto-bild called Sänger [Singer] dated 1965/66 features an
abandoned Farbkarte, signed and dated 1965. Whether this work was in fact painted in
1965, or whether it was signed after the fact, cannot be verified. (See Dietmar Elger, ed.,
Gerhard Richter: Catalogue Raisonné Volume 1 (Dresden: Gerhard Richter Archiv
Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden/ Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 222.)
51 Speaking with Dieter Schwarz in 1999, Richter conceded his inability to paint in the same
fashion as Palermo: ‘[Palermo’s] constructive [i.e. classical] pictures have remained in my
memory because they particularly appeal to me because I can’t produce such a thing. I
always found it very good how he made it and that he made it—this astonished me. There
was an aesthetic quality, which I loved and which I couldn’t produce, but I was happy that
such a thing existed in the world. In comparison, my own things seemed to me somewhat
destructive, without this beautiful clarity.’ (Richter, “Interview with Dieter Schwarz,
1999,” reprinted in Writings, 336.) While in most cases calm and to some eyes austerely
beautiful, the opacity of the Graue Bilder affirms Richter’s judgment that his art lacks
clarity. Since this obscurity is founded on a breakdown of form, compositional structure
and chromatic difference (all colours here becoming one), it is equally in keeping with his
work’s destructiveness.
52 Richter, conversation with the author, June 30, 2010. When Richter and Palermo visited
New York together in 1971, they called on Ryman. On a number of occasions in the early
seventies, Richter cited Ryman as an artist working in a manner he aspired to. (In this
connection see Richter, “Interview with Peter Sager, 1972,” in Writings, 65; Richter,
“Interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 1973,” in Writings, 80; and Richter, “Interview with
Gisland Nabakowski, 1974,” in Writings, 86.)
53 The exhibition ran from November 11th until December 17th. Ryman exhibited twice
more with Fischer in the years that followed, once in 1969 and again in 1973.
55 Richter, conversation with the author, October 27, 2011. As Richter wrote to the Heinzes
in March 1963, thanks to Pop ‘one can once again paint nudes, in a completely different
and unartistic way’ [Man kann also ruhig wieder Akt malen,freilich ganz anders u. sehr
unkünstlerisch] (Richter, letter to Helmut and Erika Heinze, 10 March 10, 1963, rep
rinted in Gerhard Richter. Bilder einer Epoche, ed. Uwe M. Schneede [München: Hirmer
Verlag, 2011], 55.)
56 Richter, “Interview with Rolf Gunther Dienst, 1970,” reprinted in Writings, 56.
58 Richter, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1993,” 262.
59 Among the many discussions of this relationship, see in particular Hubertus Butin, “The
Un-romantic Romanticism of Gerhard Richter,” in Keith Hartley, The Romantic Spirit in
German Art: 1790–1990 (London: Thames and Hudson 1994); and Dietmar Elger,
“Landscape as a Model,” in Gerhard Richter: Landscapes, ed. Dietmar Elger (Ostfildern:
Hatje Cantz, 2011).
60 He achieved this razor’s edge precision by adjoining two cropped photographs, depicting
clouds and the ocean respectively. The resulting montage became the basis for a painting.
61 This will to self-extinction through absorption in vast fields of undifferentiated imagery
registers in even stronger terms in the dozens of sketches for room-sized installations of
the Wolken, Seestücke and landscapes that Richter produced in 1970 and 1971. He would
later describe these designs, none of which were realised, as ‘unendurable, overblown and
bombastic,’ yet at the same time capable of providing him with ‘sanctuary.’ (Richter,
“Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1993,” in Writings, 301).
62 Richter, conversation with the author, October 27, 2011.
63 Richter’s most notable classical project of the early seventies is the series 48 Portraits
(1972), which he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1972. These small-scale canvasses
comprised delicately blurred black and white Foto-Bilder, depicting an array of significant
cultural figures. A second classical project of note is Zwei Skulpturen für einen Raum von
Palermo [Two Sculptures for a Room with Palermo] (1971), a pair of plaster cast
sculpture busts, depicting himself and Palermo. Though it is striking to note that on both
these occasions he achieved a degree of order and calm clarity commensurate with his
classical aspirations, these projects have an outlier status within his work of this period,
which was otherwise given over to the chaos and disorder of the Informel. Emblematic of
this relationship is his five work series Verkündigung nach Tizian [Annunciation after
Titian] (1973). Here, he attempted to paint a faithful copy of a painting by Titian that he
had seen and admired in Venice the previous year, but was unhappy with the results. In
four subsequent canvasses, he subjected his blurred copy to a process of increasing ab
straction until the image was entirely lost to view.
64 Richter, “From a letter to Jean-Christophe Ammann, February 1973,” in Writings, 71. The
term ‘Vermalung’ is Richter’s own and is difficult to read into English. Combining the
German verb ‘malen’ (to paint) with the prefix ‘ver’ gives it a range of possible inflections, all
pointing to a painting process premised on the destruction or revision of an existing image. In
this connection, ‘ver’ could be translated in a number of ways, including ‘un,’ ‘in,’ or even
‘mis.’ Per Richter’s own stated preference, however, it is normally translated as ‘in,’ with
‘vermalen’ accordingly rendered as ‘inpainting.’ For an excellent discussion of the potential
range of meanings of ‘vermalen’ in English, see Elizabeth Solaro’s translator’s note in the
English edition of Richter’s biography. (Elger, A Life in Painting, 371, note 28.)
65 For the details of this algorithm, see Richter, “Text for catalogue of group exhibition,
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1974,” in Writings, 91.
66 Richter had already held private exhibitions dominated by abstract works. In 1966, he debuted
his Farbkarten at Galerie Friedrich & Dahlem in Munich. Four years later, his first exhibition
at Galerie Konrad Fischer had featured many small abstractions from the late sixties.
67 As reported in Hans Krieger, “Ausdruck und Aktion,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, June 5,
1973.
68 Since Richter destroyed many Graue Bilder from this period, final figures cannot be de
termined. Among surviving works, the ratio of Graue Bilder to his total output climbed
from 3:43 in 1967, to 18:63 in 1970 and 24:45 in 1974.
69 Richter, “From a letter to Edy de Wilde, February 23, 1975,” in Writings, 91–92.
70 Richter made this latter observation in 1986. Describing one of Ryman’s first exhibitions
at Galerie Konrad Fischer (in either 1968 or 1970), he recalled: ‘I thought it was very
good… [b]ecause for the first time it showed nothing. It was closer to my situation.’
(Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 170.)
71 Richter, “From a letter to Edy de Wilde, February 25, 1975,” in Writings, 92.
73 As George remarked in 2012: ‘It was us against the world in that the only galleries ex
hibiting at the time were minimal. Figurative was not really allowed. Colour was taboo.
Emotions were taboo. It all had to be a circle or a square or a line. And be grey or brown
or black or white.’ “Gilbert & George: Lives in Art,” The Guardian, March 2, 2012.)
74 Richter, conversation with the author, 27 Oct 2011. For comments in which Richter links
Gilbert & George’s work explicitly to classicism, see Richter, “MoMA Interview with
Robert Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 420–421. For further testimony of the English duo’s
importance to him in the early seventies, see Richter, “Interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist,
1993,” in Writings, 298–299.
A further work by Gilbert & George from which Richter may have drawn inspiration
is their book, Side by Side, which was published by the König Brothers in Cologne in 1971
(though its colophon reads 1972). In this publication, the duo reproduced the source
photographs for The Paintings (With Us in the Nature).
76 Elger, A Life in Painting, 244, 226.
77 Hubertis Butin, “Unknown Photographic Works by Gerhard Richter,” in Gerhard
Richter: Portraits, ed. Stefan Gronert (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006), 84. As Butin notes,
Gilbert & George responded to the photo session for Richter’s portraits, which took place
in 1974, by producing double-exposed images of themselves for a photo work from their
Dark Shadow series of that year, Dark Shadow #4.
78 Christine Mehring has called attention to this aspect of Richter’s photographs of himself
with Polke (Mehring, “Richter’s Collaborations,” 103.)
79 Richter, cited in Marlies Grüterich, “Gerhard Richters Phänomenologie der Illusion—eine
gemalte Ästhetik gegen die reine Malerei,” in Gerhard Richter: Bilder aus den Jahren
1962–1974 (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1975), 72.
80 Richter, “Interview with Dorothea Dietrich, 1985,” reprinted in Writings, 131.
81 In 2002, Richter described the late sixties as ‘a time when I thought more about my career
than my family….’ (Richter, cited in David Galloway, “Quick-Change Master,”
ARTnews, March 1, 2002: 104.) For further comments by Richter on his shortcomings as
a father, which he partly attributes to the anti-authoritarian climate of the late sixties, see
Richter, “SPIEGEL interview, conducted by Susanne Beyer and Ulrike Knöfel,” in
Writings, 501–502.
82 On the importance to Richter of homeownership, see Elger, A Life in Painting, 203.
83 For an overview of this project, see Erica Carter, “Postwar National Identity and the West
German Woman,” in How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the
Consuming Woman, ed. Erica Carter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 22–29.
84 Michael Wildt, “Konsumbürger. Das Politische als Optionsfreiheit und Distinktion,” in
Bürgertum nach 1945, eds. Manfred Hettling and Bernd Ulrich (Hamburg: Hamburger
Edition, 2005), 255–283. In a now classic article from the early 1960s, Rolf Dahrendorf
contended that the 1950s marked the birth of economic individualism on German soil, a
development facilitated by the new, more robustly democratic political structures of the
period, and the loss of power sustained by pre-war German elites. (Rolf Dahrendorf,
“Demokratie und Sozialstruktur in Deutschland,” European Journal of Sociology/
Archives Européennes de Sociologie/Europäisches Archiv für Soziologie, vol. 1, no. 1
[1960]: 86–120.)
85 On official support for religion in the reconstruction period, see Detlef Pollack,
“Secularisation in Germany after 1945,” in The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-war
German History, ed. Christoph Klessmann (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), 110–112.
On CDU family policy in the 1950s and its discontents, see Robert G. Moeller,
“Reconstructing the Family in Reconstruction Germany,” in West Germany under
Construction: Politics, Society, and Culture in the Adenauer Era, ed. Robert G. Moeller
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 109–134. For the effects of this
policy on women, see Carter, “Postwar National Identity and the West German Woman,”
in Carter, How German is She?, 29; and Brigitte Löhr with Rita Meyhöfer, “Wandel in
Ehe und Familie,” in Lütz Niethammer et al., Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland:
Historische Einblicke, Fragen, Perspektiven (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1990), 601–603.
86 Wohlstand für Alle became a slogan of Erhard’s in the late 1950s. It was also the title of
his best-selling book from 1957, in which he outlined the principles of his ‘social market’
economy. In contrast to the liberal free market, the social market model blends aspects of
free market capitalism with government controls intended to temper the market’s worst
effects. (Ludwig Erhard, Wohlstand für Alle [Dü sseldorf: Handelsblatt, 2014 (1957)],
translated into English as Prosperity Through Competition [Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von
Mises, 2011 (1958)].)
87 Moeller, “Reconstructing the Family,” in Moeller, West Germany under Construction,
130; and 110–112; Pollack, “Secularisation in Germany after 1945,” in ed. Klessmann,
The Divided Past, 112; and Fulbrook, The Divided Nation, 221.
88 Fulbrook, ibid., 152.
89 For indicative assessments by these three thinkers of the disempowered role of the in
dividual in postwar society, see: Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Rinehart &
Company, Inc., 1955), 120–153; Theodor Adorno with Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J.
Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Norton,
1969 [1950]), 747–750; Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass
culture (London: Routledge, 2001); and Max Horkheimer, “Authority and the Family,”
in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, trans. M. J. O’Connell (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1972). By the 1950s, Fromm had left the school, but his views remained aligned
with those of his former colleagues in key respects.
The summary of the Frankfurt School position offered here is indebted to the following
sources: David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990),
67–69, 110–137; and Anthony Elliott and Charles C. Lemert, The New Individualism:
The Emotional Costs of Globalization (London: Routledge, 2006), 56–61.
90 Other figures in the Frankfurt School tradition, like Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas,
were less pessimistic than their older colleagues and attempted to at least sketch out a path by
which the status quo could be transformed. Nonetheless, they also held to the judgement that
the individuals of consumer society were at the mercy of domineering structures whose needs
had been decoupled from their own. They were thus deprived of any prospect of genuine
fulfilment or autonomy. With special relevance to the late 1960s, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros
and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (London: Abacus, 1972); and Jürgen
Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J.
Shapiro (San Francisco: Beacon Press, 1971).
91 Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, 371–374.
92 As Nepomuk Gasteiger has recounted, Frankfurt School critique, especially of the stan
dardising impact of the culture industry and the influence of the mass media, became
influential among radicals in the late sixties. Thereafter, in the 1970s, the School’s basic
concerns, often distilled to the level of catchy slogans, had some impact on general public
consciousness and even on government regulation. (Nepomuk Gasteiger, “Vom manip
ulierten zum postmodernen Konsumenten: Das Bild des Verbrauchers in der west
deutschen Werbung und Werbekritik, 1950–1990,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte vol. 90,
no.1 (2008): 146–149.)
93 For an extensive and insightful overview of experiments with new forms of collectivity in
West Germany in the late 1960s, centred on the art world but also considering connec
tions between the art world and other radical social practices, see Jacopo Galimberti,
Individuals against Individualism: Art Collectives in Europe (1956–1969) (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2017), 244–299, 321–327.
94 Figures are those given by Mary Fulbrook in her A History of Germany 1918–2014: The
Divided Nation (Chichester; Malden: Wiley Blackwell), 153
95 On the restructuring of the West German education system to support the values of liberal
democratic citizenship, see Detlef Siegfried, “Vom Teenager zur Pop-Revolution.
Politisierungstendenzen in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur 1959 bis 1968,” in
Dynamische Zeiten: Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften, eds. Axel
Schildt, Detlef Siegfried and Karl Christian Lammers, (Gö ttingen, Niedersachs: Wallstein,
2005), 594; Irmgard Wilharm, “Wiederaufbaudynamic und Wertewandel,” in
Niethammer et al., Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, 568–570; and Martin
Greschat, “Protestantismus und Evangelische Kirche in den 60er Jahre,” in Niethammer
et al., Bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, 545.
96 Arnold Sywottek, “From Starvation to Excess? Trends in the Consumer Society from the
1940s to the 1970s,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany,
1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 340ff.
97 On these fears, emanating from both ends of the political spectrum, see Wildt,
“Konsumbürger,” in Hettling and Ulrich, Bü rgertum nach 1945, eds. Manfred Hettling
and Bernd Ulrich (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005). 278–279.
98 As the market became more differentiated, so too did habits of consumption, with con
sumers now employing commodities, as Michael Wildt has argued, as a means of sending
two social signals. The first of these was group-facing and indicated a consumer’s con
formity to the norms and standards of their preferred social ‘reference group.’ The second
was personal and served as a means of distinguishing oneself as an individual from others
in that group. Whereas the former impulse had been more dominant historically, the latter
now came increasingly to the fore. (See Wildt “Konsumbürger,” in Hettling and Ulrich,
Bü rgertum nach 1945, 272–273.)
For more on the differentiation of the consumer world of the 1960s and the growing
individualisation of consumer behaviour, see: Ruppert, “Zur Konsumwelt der 60er
Jahre,” in Schildt, Siegfried and Lammers, Dynamische Zeiten, 758–764; and Gasteiger,
“Vom manipulierten zum postmodernen Konsumenten,” 142–143.
99 Martin Greschat, “Protestantismus und Evangelische Kirche in den 60er Jahre,” in
Schildt, Siegfried and Lammers, Dynamische Zeiten, 545; and Karl Gabriel, “Zwischen
Aufbruch und Absturz in die Moderne. Die Katholische Kirche in den 60er Jahren,” in
Schildt, Siegfried and Lammers, Dynamische Zeiten, 537–540.
100 See the data on birth rates, divorce rates and age of marriage in Wolfgang Zapf, Sigrid Breuer
and Jürgen Hampel, Individualisierung und Sicherheit: Untersuchungen zur Lebensqualität in
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 1987). On the growing independence of
West German youth culture from the late 1950s onward, see Siegfried, “Vom Teenager zur
Pop-Revolution. Politisierungstendenzen in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur 1959 bis 1968,”
in Schildt, Siegfried and Lammers, Dynamische Zeiten, 585; and Kaspar Maase,
“Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, ’Americanisation,’ and the Irresistible Rise of
Popular Culture,” in Schissler, The Miracle Years, 440–445. On the increasing freedoms for
women in the 1960s, see Carter, “Postwar National Identity and the West German Woman,”
in Carter, How German is She?, 41–42.
101 Nazi-era legislation criminalising homosexuality was not repealed in West Germany until
1969. (See Robert G. Moeller, “The Homosexual Man Is a ‘Man’,” in Moeller, West
Germany under Construction.)
102 Helmut Klages, Wertorientierungen im Wandel: Rü ckblick, Gegenwartsanalyse,
Prognosen (Frankfurt; New York: Campus Verlag, 1984), 18. See also the qualitative,
interview-based research of Martin Osterland and Dorothee Wierling, which came to
similar conclusions: Martin Osterland, “Lebensbilanzen und Lebensperspektiven von
Industriearbeitern,” in Soziologie des Lebenslaufs, ed. Martin Kohli (Darmstadt/
Neuwied: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1978), 272–290; and Dorothee Wierling,
“Generations and Generational Conflict in East and West Germany,” in Klessmann, The
Divided Past, 81.
103 Osterland, “Lebensbilanzen und Lebensperspektiven von Industriearbeitern,” in Kohli,
Soziologie des Lebenslaufs, 285.
104 Rosalind Krauss, “A voyage on the North Sea”: art in the age of the post-medium con
dition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). On Richter’s work in connection with the
post-medium condition, see Rosemary Hawker, “Idiom Post-Medium: Richter Painting
Photography,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 32, no. 2 (2009): 263–280.
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4 The Living Method
After struggling in his pursuit of professional belonging for the best part of a decade,
signs emerged in the late 1970s that Richter was again making headway in this
process. In 1976, he bid a sudden and dramatic farewell to his minimalist abstract
works with a new series he called the Abstrakte Skizzen, whose stylistic touchstones
were gestural abstraction and colour field painting. In these jostling and haphazard
images, which he eventually retitled Abstrakte Bilder, he erratically layered colours,
shapes, brushwork, and occasional passages of photographically stylised imagery to
produce highly complex compositions.1 By the early 1980s, he was composing them
in a part-random and partially premeditated manner that he likened to human efforts
to bring order to existence. It was this ‘living method,’ as he later termed it, that he
modelled in each new painting he created.
This chapter argues that Richter’s development of a more conscious, considered,
and assertive painting process, coupled with his turn toward gestural abstraction and
colour field painting, signalled the end of his attempts to escape from his problems in
the West and his adoption of a new approach to achieving belonging in his art.
Instead of pursuing recognition from his peers by aligning his work with con
temporary trends, as he had until that point, he now sought it in relation to an
imagined community of past artists, whose achievements he admired, but could also
build on on his own terms. This model of elective affiliation with tradition would
come to serve him well in other areas of life as well and marked the beginning of the
end of his search for belonging.
Arriving as they did in the late 1970s, the Abstrakte Bilder left Richter well-positioned
to benefit from painting’s surprising return to prominence in the early 1980s. At the time,
the series was perceived to be his vehicle for critiquing the work of younger West German
Neo-Expressionists. But his relationship to their work was considerably more complex
than this, especially when the select but significant affinities between neo-expressionistic
art and the neoconservative political movement of the early 1980s are taken into ac
count. If, as this chapter argues, Neo-Expressionism and neoconservatism can both be
regarded as attempts to mitigate the breakdown of communal structures to which the
liberalising social developments of the sixties were by this stage understood by con
servative commentators to have led, then Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder and the attitudes
to history, tradition and individual freedom they expressed, can be seen in some
respects to resonate with this perspective, albeit without succumbing to its reac
tionary excess. Neither rhetorical deconstructions of the presuppositions of
Expressionist painting, nor critiques of abstraction’s history, as critics were wont to
argue in the early eighties, they were instead a vehicle for Richter’s efforts to at once
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266198-5
The Living Method 115
ground his painting in the stabilising soil of tradition and build on that tradition’s
accomplishments on his own terms. The series therefore modelled a productive re
lationship between freedom and communal constraint. On this basis, it allowed him
to achieve belonging on the terms on which it was available in West German society,
a decade after the initial Individualisierungsschub.
Regulating disarray
Richter started to develop his living method in 1976, when he created a work called
Konstruktion [Construction] (see Figure 4.1), a one-off composition that appeared
amid a run of Graue Bilder early in the year. He did not produce this work from
scratch but instead altered an Informel painting called Fiktion [Fiction] (1973), an
allover, nebulous image resembling the Rot-Blau-Gelb Bilder.2 In contrast to his
Konstruktionen of the late 1960s, whose titles alluded to the fact that they did not
derive from photographs, this painting’s name refers to his attempts to bring order to
Fiktion’s destructive imagery. His first step in this direction was to introduce a battery
of hard-edged striations to Fiktion’s cloudy interior, which established a clearly-
bounded foreground cavity within its hazy depths. After finishing this cage-like en
closure, he added an array of freely brushed red and orange highlights, together with
a flock of brown chevrons that blankets most of the image. Together, these alterations
transformed Fiktion from a subdued, near-uniform composition into a seething zone
of conflict, riven by an interplay of contrasting forces: taut flatness vying against
dizzying recession, shrill accents flaring out against a void of abyssal darkness, islands
of lucid imagery standing forth amid a sea of disarray.
Konstruktion marked the start of a new phase in Richter’s art, in which conflicts such
as these would be central to his abstract work. Departing from the stifling uniformity of
Figure 4.1 Gerhard Richter, Konstruktion [Construction], 1976, oil on canvas, 250 × 300
116 The Living Method
the Graue Bilder, he developed a more complex and dynamic form of nonobjective
painting. Abandoning his efforts to make classical abstractions, purged of the chaos of
the Informel, he sought to chart a new course between these two extremes.
In pursuit of this objective, he registered a number of false starts. The first was his
addition of geometry to the nebulous depths of Fiktion. With this intervention, he
introduced a region of clear structure to the painting but was unhappy with the re
sults. The work was now pitched partway between order and disarray, and in this
sense split the difference between the classical and the Informel. But unlike classical
abstractions by Ryman and Palermo, which feel both exacting and relaxed, the
careening stripes of Konstruktion seem rigidly premeditated. The net effect, for
Richter, was a work that appeared too ‘constructed’ and ‘thought out.’3 It thus re
mained a one-off experiment.
Toward the end of 1976, Richter started on a new group of works called the
Abstrakte Skizzen (see Figure 4.2). Although a good deal smaller than Konstruktion,
the Skizzen are no less eclectic. To produce them, he layered streaks, dabs, and
thickets of impasto brushwork over hard-edged and hazy zones of colour with no
evident compositional rationale. Their hectic compositions were denser and more
erratic than Konstruktion, with less clearly articulated contrasts.
He dubbed these paintings Skizzen due to doubts about their worth as finished
paintings. Defining them as preparatory sketches allowed him to explore them further
in spite of these misgivings. As he explained to Heribert Heere in 1982, ‘I called them
“sketches” to belittle them, so I could continue to paint undisturbed.’4 Earlier, in a
letter to Grüterich from 1977, he had described the potential that he sensed in their
erratic compositions: ‘Ugly sketches is what they are,’ he wrote,
Figure 4.2 Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (398-1) [Abstract Picture (398-1)], 1976, oil on
canvas, 65 × 60 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253). Formerly titled: Abstrakte
Skizze [Abstract Sketch].
the total antithesis of the purist Grey Pictures. Colourful, sentimental, associative,
anachronistic, random, polysemic, almost like pseudo-pyschograms, except that they
are not legible, because they are devoid of meaning or logic—if such a thing is
possible… An exciting business, at all events, as if a new door had opened for me.5
Excited he may have been, but this assessment was not without ambivalence.
Although they broke decisively with the minimalism of the Graue Bilder and shed any
connection to conceptualism, they were chaotic and blindly painted, traits that kept
them firmly in the ambit of the Informel. As he explained to Dieter Schwarz in 1999,
he felt he had produced them too ‘carelessly and unsystematically,’ as if ‘burrowing
half-blind through the undergrowth.’6 To correct this deficit, he used them as the
basis for a range of more considered compositions.
Most important among these were the Weiche Abstrakte (1976–80) (see Figure 4.3),
which derived from photographic close-ups of the Skizzen. Returning to a process he had
used with the Ausschnitte, he enlarged these details and then repainted them as hazy
blowups. Unlike the Ausschnitte, however, which consist of faithful copies of their source
images, softened only slightly by the enlargement process, the Weiche Abstrakte are fuzzy
to the point of indistinction, their forms bleeding together in an ethereal haze of colour.
They could thus be described as impure copies of their source images, whose extreme
blurring gives them a calmer feeling than the Skizzen.
In an isolated work named Nach ‘Fallschirm’ [After ‘Parachute’] (1977), Richter
varied this replication process by transposing a Skizze called Fallschirm [Parachute]
(1977) (see Figure 4.4) into watercolour rather than oils. As he later explained to
Schwarz, he did this in an effort ‘to bring my abstract painting to a more serious level,
no longer just painting around so carelessly and unsystematically but more
Figure 4.3 Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (419) [Abstract Picture (419)], 1977, oil on
canvas, 225 × 200 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253). Enlarged detail of
Figure 4.2.
Figure 4.4 Gerhard Richter, Fallschirm [Parachute], 1977, oil on canvas, 60 × 45 cm. ©
consciously, being master of the situation.’7 After sketching the outlines of

Fallschirm’s composition on a sheet of paper, he coloured in this network of in
scriptions using watercolour, creating a new version of his original. When copy and
original are placed side-by-side, the resemblance between the two is strong, but points
of contrast also emerge. Fallschirm preserves the layout of its predecessor, but its
palette has been dimmed and desaturated, its opaque grey expanses diffused into a
wan and washed-out black. In addition to this blanching, its imagery looks softer and
its composition flatter by virtue of the shift into watercolour. The result is a more
settled, less tautly energised replica of Fallschirm, an atmospheric change akin to that
enacted in the Weiche Abstrakte.
Richter’s impure copies were calmer and more considered than the Skizzen and in
this regard moved closer to his classical ideal, but he still found them unconvincing.
As he explained to Elger in 2001, the Weiche Abstrakte looked too ‘mannered’ and
‘constrained.’8 By transposing the Skizzen into a photographic idiom, he had suc
ceeded in muting their disarray and in this sense had made them feel more controlled.
He had overshot his mark, however, by draining them too fully of their vitality. He
worked on the Weiche Abstrakte until 1980, but with diminishing conviction and the
series eventually petered out. His appraisal of Nach ‘Fallschirm’ was similarly dim.
Having reworked his original sketch, he felt his watercolour copy appeared too
planned and homogeneous, and thus set it aside.9 But he continued to develop the
Skizzen, and it is here that his bid to strike a balance between the classical and the
Informel at last gained traction.
The Skizzen Richter painted between 1977 and 1980 remained exploratory and
thus vary widely in appearance. Collectively, however, they attest to his desire to
bring order to their tumult in a manner that did not restrict their liveliness, a task in
which he grew more proficient as time progressed. He made progress on this front
initially in a group of works from 1978, whose imagery he covered in a loose array of
horizontal stripes (see Figure 4.5). Although uniform enough to bring a sense of firm
structure to his paintings, these wavering striations were freer than the razor-sharp
vectors he had added to Konstruktion. The order they established thus felt more
relaxed.
In a second group of Skizzen produced the following year, he continued to explore
the process of compositional veiling. Eliminating stripes, he used an uneven topcoat
of red, blue, or yellow to again create a sense of contrast between the surface of his
images and their partly hidden depths (see Figure 4.6). By 1980, he had pushed this
practice further and was creating compositions containing many layers of imagery, all
of which were visible in the finished painting. As his facility with this technique in
creased, his canvasses grew steadily more expansive, eventually reaching sizes of up to
three metres square. With these works, which he now entitled Abstrakte Bilder, he at
last struck a satisfying balance between the Informel and the classical.
‘Half-blind’ abstraction
Among the paintings that announced this achievement is Rana (1981) (see
Figure 4.7), in which a cleanly layered buildup of textured pigment floats atop a hazy
bed of colour. While its mode of composition is reminiscent of the early Skizzen and
Figure 4.7 Gerhard Richter, Rana, 1981, oil on canvas, 120 × 175 cm. © Gerhard Richter
2021 (0253).
its underlying field of fuzzy chroma echoes the indistinction of the Weiche Abstrackte,
Rana is distinguished from both series on several fronts. In place of their obscure
interiors, in which the threshold between form and void is frequently unclear, the
work features two contrasting registers of imagery—an expansive, immaterial
backdrop and a compressed accumulation of tangible foreground paintwork. Instead
of being copied from a photograph, the backdrop was created from scratch, the
vastness of its sunlit yellow depths casting the superficiality of what lies before it into
sharper relief. This stratified assemblage of colour features motifs present in the
Skizzen but adds to their repertoire of streaks, dabs, and patches with dragged and
stippled areas of pigment applied using a rigid plastic squeegee—a tool that would
play a growing role in Richter’s practice as the decade progressed. With this addition
he extended both the optical and tactile range of his imagery, whose palette he had
already expanded in the late 1970s. Throughout that period, he had traded in the
olives, browns and mauves of the first Skizzen for a brighter, more eclectic set of
primary and secondary hues, offset by occasional grey passages. This shift engendered
more vivid chromatic contrasts, whose impact was further heightened by his move
toward a cleaner form of composition. Layered on discretely, the foreground ele
ments of Rana seldom blend together as they did in the early Skizzen; nor do they
obscure one another as completely as they had in his last, veiled entries to the series.
These points of difference make Rana more complex than Richter’s paintings of the
late 1970s, but its careful counterbalancing of structurally significant elements pre
vents it from becoming more disorganised. Its foreground and background elements
are given equal emphasis, while its major compositional vectors form a stabilising ‘x’
configuration. Together, these devices give the image as a whole a quality of poised
disarray. Neither excessively disorderly and random nor too rigid and constrained, it
is the kind of composition he had been trying to produce since the mid-1970s but had
needed half a decade to develop.
In 1982, Richter explained to Amine Haase what this process had entailed:
I started this direct [i.e. non-photographic] work on the canvas in 1976, though
at the time it was in smaller formats. And I needed a fairly long time to gain the
sense of freedom and experience to manage these large formats so directly
without any [photographic] template. To make it work, I had to find and learn to
accept a new concept of painting, which would have seemed arbitrary to me at an
earlier time.10
What made the Abstrakte Bilder arbitrary was the fact that they had no fixed com
positional format, as had been the case with his abstract works of the early 1970s.
Because they were neither gridded nor monochromatic nor copied from a photo
graph, he had no idea when he began them of how they would look when they were
finished. Their final appearance was thus unknowable in advance. His method of
creating them was not arbitrary, however, since without a degree of conscious
planning works this complex risked dissolving into a messy mix of colour, in
sufficiently distinct from his allover works of the early seventies. Ensuring this did not
occur required him to work with great care, so as to build into each painting’s
imagery as many forceful contrasts as possible.
He had, in fact, sought to do this with the earliest Skizzen, but had needed several
years to achieve the results he had been seeking. Writing to Grüterich in 1977, he
spoke of working on the first Skizzen slowly, ‘mostly with long pauses in between
[painting sessions], which made sure that these paintings… became more and more
heterogeneous.’11 Pausing for deliberation helped him resist slipping back into a
uniform approach to composition by giving him the chance to observe and then resist
this dynamic should it happen to assert itself. He had this safeguard in mind when he
spoke to Schwarz of working on the Skizzen in a half-blind (instead of wholly blind)
manner. But despite his attempts at conscious guidance, he felt that he had acted too
blindly when creating the first works in the series, producing compositions that were
vague and disorganised. The lack of clear distinctions in their imagery attested to this
shortcoming. Not until the early 1980s had he been able to redress this deficit in the
Abstrakte Bilder, which hold all manner of strong contrasts in suspension.
This divided sensibility was the product of a split working process that Richter also
refined as time progressed. In creating both the Skizzen and the Abstrakte Bilder, he
commenced with the kind of unthinking improvisation he had favoured in his allover
works, before drawing on a mixture of chance and conscious oversight to bring a
painting to its final state. In this way, he combined the blindness of the Informel
painting process with the more deliberative working methods of the classical. The
former inclination was dominant in the early, freer stages of this process when, as he
put it in 1993, ‘it doesn’t matter if I add red or green [initially], since it always looks
good somehow.’12 This latitude for painting blindly diminished as an image grew
more complex, however, due to the challenge of enhancing its heterogeneity while
preserving its sense of ease and spontaneity. To make matters more demanding, he
endeavoured to fulfil these objectives with a minimum of conscious pre-planning so as
keep the end result as far as possible from anything he could visualise at the outset.
This complex juggling of priorities determined the dynamics of his working process as
he added new passages of imagery to a painting, a task he formalised with his layered
approach to the Abstrakte Bilder.
In determining when to add fresh pigment to these paintings, Richter relied on a
form of decision-making that moved back and forth across the threshold of conscious
awareness. Prior to each new painting session, he observed his canvasses for days and
sometimes weeks, formulating and rejecting numerous potential interventions. He did
not try to force inspiration but rather waited for ideas to emerge in their own time. At
this point, he decided if they would move a painting forward in a satisfying manner.
When this process functioned smoothly it concluded in a moment of decisive intui
tion, in which, after ‘going back every day to look,’ he explained in 1986, ‘suddenly
one knows what the painting needs.’13 These insights were abrupt in their emergence
but by no means unconsidered. Instead, they were the product of unconscious cog
nition, informed by his repeated acts of looking and his depth of experience as a
painter. He acknowledged his reliance on this kind of tacit decision-making in 1990,
when he remarked to Sabine Schütz that his efforts to avoid pre-planning were a way
‘of bringing in unconscious processes, as far as possible.’14 Earlier, in an interview
with Benjamin Buchloh, he had given an example of this procedure: ‘It sometimes
happens that I mix the paint for a particular painting and then put it into
another—and this has hardly ever turned out to be a mistake. But this is really an
unconscious strategy that I can use to outwit myself’.15 As these comments indicate,
the promptings of Richter’s unconscious supplied hypotheses for developing an
image, which he then chose to test or set aside. By virtue of their tacit formulation, he
could think of these as chance events. Due to the care he took in vetting them,
however, he did not work at random. For this reason, he did not create his paintings
arbitrarily, in spite of his reliance on chance.16
When it came to proceeding in this planned yet random fashion, he brought a second
form of chance into play, determined by the measure of control he exerted on his
painting implements. By grasping a long-handled brush at some distance from its paint-
laden bristles, he restricted his ability to finely guide its movements, an effect recorded in
the three orange strokes that occupy the foreground of Rana. This voluntary hindrance
gave rise to unplanned meanderings and irregular paint dispersal as the brush traversed
the canvas. He relied on this technique to give a sense of freedom to his brushwork,
which was otherwise carefully arranged, an effect used extensively in paintings like
Schwefel [Sulphur] (1985) (cover image) from the mid-1980s.
Like most of Richter’s paintings from this period, Schwefel features prominent
foreground configurations of supple, free-floating brushstrokes, applied for the most
part with broad house-painter’s brushes. Thanks to the dense layering of its imagery
and its myriad off-axis elements, this composition feels dynamic and freely im
provised. Such qualities are deceptive, however, since they emerged from a process of
measured and deliberate accumulation. After laying down a bed of soft colour, fol
lowed by a smeared entanglement of red and black smudges he created with a
squeegee, he used a series of large, trailing brushstrokes to bring a measure of de
terminate structure to the image. Each stroke unfurls along a simple, rectilinear
trajectory, which is long enough and broad enough to add to the rigour of the image.
But by traversing this vector with soft hands, he ensured that it would not appear too
rigidly geometric, like the hard-edged striations of Konstruktion. He enhanced this
quality of controlled irregularity by painting many of the strokes in two colours.
Most of the nearly vertical brushstrokes in the work’s upper left-hand quadrant, for
example, were first applied in yellow before being partly overpainted in green. Those
near its lower righthand corner layer red on top of yellow in a similar, but freer
fashion. In both cases, he retraced the contouring of the first colour when adding the
second, but worked loosely enough to allow for irregularities and deviations. In this
way, he used regulated randomness at the level of the work’s component elements to
contribute to its sense of structured liberty.
The living method

As these examples indicate, the Abstrakte Bilder exposed a rich vein of painterly
possibility for Richter, which he continued to mine for many years. By the mid-1980s
the series had already become his largest and its numbers were still growing by some
50 works annually, an expansion that continued unabated in the 1990s and early
2000s. Not until 2009 did this output taper off, though even then he went on adding
to the series periodically. In total he has fashioned more than 1,500 Abstrakte Bilder,
accounting for more than half his career output. The question thus arises as to why he
committed to them so intensively.
Richter initially embraced his new idiom for negative reasons, as the antithesis of the
uniform Graue Bilder. By the time he had refined it, however, he had come to appreciate
it for its own sake, both aesthetically, as a source of beauty, and semantically, as a means
of imbuing abstract form with a plurality of possible meanings. In the 1980s he was wary
of applying the word ‘beautiful’ to the Abstrakte Bilder due to the unwanted connota
tions this might arouse: ‘[A] lot of nonsense can be created with the word “beauty,”’ he
remarked to Christiane Vielhaber in 1986, ‘There’s a tawdry beauty, for instance. When
it’s exalted, it can be unpleasant. The Nazis are the worst example of this. A beautiful
body, a beautiful mind, and all that crap….’17 But despite these reservations, he was
searching for beauty in the series from the outset and in a time-honoured fashion. In
keeping with an intuition first voiced by Plotinus in Antiquity, which has since become a
leitmotif of Western aesthetics, he sought to craft compelling compositions by uniting a
diverse array of elements.18 As he explained to Dorothea Dietrich in 1985: ‘I want the
painting to be very heterogeneous, but nevertheless, everything has to be of one mould,
as contradictory as it may be. The contradictions have to be there but must coexist, must
converge.’19 With their multi-threaded balancing of all manner of formal and structural
elements, which occasionally added geometric planes and photographically-rendered
shapes to his repertoire of brushstrokes, the Abstrakte Bilder allowed him to pursue this
objective in an endlessly generative fashion.
When judging the success of his balancing activities, Richter was wont to reach for
two comparisons. On one hand, he spoke of wanting to make works that ‘have a
similar structure to and are organised in as truthful a way as nature.’20 On the other
hand, he likened his compositions to music, where diverse abstract elements must also
be convincingly united.21 Claims such as these have often been put forward in
evaluating abstract compositions.22 But they remain controversial due to their
framing of abstract imagery in terms that are obliquely illusionistic. In the eyes of
some observers, this undermines the purity of abstraction. This is not the case for
Richter, however, who sees talk of pure form as depriving art of meaning: ‘[P]ure
painting is inanity,’ he wrote in 1985, ‘and a line is interesting only if it arouses
interesting associations.’23 Far from undermining the integrity of the Abstrakte
Bilder, he sees oblique forms of resemblance as imbuing them with life and sig
nificance: ‘If you don’t see anything in Malevich’s Black Square,’ he pointedly re
marked that same year, ‘then the painting would only be a stupid black spot.’24
Consistent with this outlook, during his first years of engagement with the series he
teased out further connotations from his imagery. Certain details in his pictures re
minded him of objects and experiences, the pale yellow passages from Schwefel being
one case in point. He also noted more expansive parallels, including the suggestion
that his paintings are as baffling as reality at large. The latter claim is worth con
sidering closely since it bears on his adaptation to Western life.
Richter ventured this assertion in a studio note from 1981, relating it to all
paintings, whether representational or abstract: ‘Painting is the making of an analogy
for something non-visual and incomprehensible,’ he wrote on this occasion, ‘giving it
form and bringing it within reach… an analogy for something that, by definition,
transcends our understanding, but which our understanding allows us to postulate.’25
Quite what this transcendental ‘something’ might be and how it might relate to the
Abstrakte Bilder is something he did not make explicit. A year later, however, he shed
further light on both claims in a statement published in the catalogue for documenta
7. In this exhibition, he showed five large Abstrakte Bilder, which he described as
‘models’ of an unknowable reality:
When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we

create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be
animals. Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality
that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate. We
denote this reality in negative terms: the unknown, the incomprehensible, the
infinite. And for thousands of years we have been depicting it through surrogate
images such as heaven and hell, gods and devils.
In abstract painting we have found a better way of gaining access to the
unvisualizable, the incomprehensible; because abstract painting deploys the utmost
visual immediacy—all the resources of art, in fact—in order to depict ‘nothing.’26
With his talk of the unknown, the incomprehensible and the infinite, Richter might
seem to be suggesting that his paintings model hidden metaphysical realms, a claim
echoing the rhetoric of pioneer abstractionists, like Piet Mondrian and Kasimir
Malevich. As a convinced materialist, however, he harbours no such metaphysical
beliefs.27 His use of such terminology is thus entirely mundane and refers to physical
reality as a whole. Since our access to reality is limited by virtue of our finite faculties,
direct depictions of it are impossible. Painting can evoke its inexplicable immensity,
however, using surrogate imagery, specific to the times and places of its production.
Later passages from this statement pointed to the way in which even mundane images
can achieve this:
Of course, pictures of objects have this transcendental side to them. Every object,
being part of an ultimately unknowable world, also embodies this world…. So in
dealing with this inexplicable reality, the lovelier, cleverer, madder, more extreme,
more visual and more incomprehensible the analogy, the better the picture.28
In Richter’s eyes, works like his Foto-Bilder are shadowed by a sense that their
subjects are fragments of a larger, inexplicable whole, from which the process of
representation has detached them. With abstract works he can figure this whole in its
entirety, as Ulrich Loock and Doris von Drathan have both observed.29 What has yet
to be considered in this connection, is the relevance of his working process to this
conception of the Abstrakte Bilder, to which he pointed in a studio note from 1989
that addressed his use of chance while painting:
Chance as theme and as method. A method of allowing something objective to

come into being; a theme for creating an analogy [Gleichnis] (picture) of our
survival strategy:
1 The living method, which not only processes conditions, qualities, and events as
they chance to happen, but exists solely as that non-static ‘process,’ and in no
other way.30
If the Abstrakte Bilder evoke reality in its overwhelming and enigmatic immensity, then
according to these comments Richter’s part-random, partially controlled approach to
making them can be seen as a symbolic reenactment of his response to that reality, with
which he must contend in order to survive, but has no hope of comprehending let alone
of mastering. While creating these images he reacts to unexpected and contingent events
as they happen to impinge upon him, much as he does in real life. As is also the case in
real life, this process is unending, continuing from one day and one empty canvas to the
next. This obligation to contend with the challenges of existence, with no prospect of
final resolution, helps explain his decades-long commitment to the Abstrakte Bilder.
From abstraction as escape to abstraction as belonging

Since finitude and uncertainty are perennial features of existence, the living method is
aptly named. The Abstrakte Bilder can accordingly be seen as allegorical expressions
of the human survival process. In light of Richter’s history with abstraction, they can
also be linked more specifically to his search for belonging in the West. From the
moment he started blurring the Foto-Bilder, abstraction had functioned in his prac
tice as both a marker of his isolation and his wish to escape from this condition.
Beginning with the Skizzen, however, his abstract work ceased to be escapist and
instead signalled, through his more assertive working process, a new approach to his
problems with belonging. No longer painting in a manner that was wholly self-
abnegating, his efforts to restrict the chaos of the Informel relayed his renewed de
termination to contend with the demands of Western freedom, which had obliged
him to become more self-reliant and accepting of uncertainty than he had had to be in
the East. Having written in the early 1960s of his need to become more independent,
he now exerted more autonomy in his painting process.
Stylistically, he also showed greater independence by making work at odds with that of
other leading abstract painters of the period. Anti-painting sentiment had eased by the
mid-1970s, but in Europe the sense that ‘advanced’ painters were either minimalists like
Ryman, Palermo, or Brice Marden or else conceptualists like Daniel Buren remained
strong, as did the conviction that gestural abstraction, in particular, was dead and
buried.31 Richter’s break with this consensus was thus a gesture of striking independence
that contrasted sharply with his prior shifts of course in the West. Having previously
chosen to align his work with new trends, he was now prepared to go his own way
regardless of the risks to his reputation this change in course might involve.
His confidence in striking out on his own was by no means absolute to begin with,
particularly so after his first exhibition of the Skizzen and the Weiche Abstrakte—at
Fischer’s gallery in Düsseldorf in 1977—was not especially well-received.32 He per
severed, however, and after spending the rest of the seventies showing his newest
work either outside West Germany or in out of the way domestic venues, he began
exhibiting close to home again and in more prominent spaces.33 By this stage, he had
not only refined his approach to his new idiom and was more assured of its merits but
also had other reasons to feel less concerned for its reception.
On a personal level, he was feeling energised by his relationship with the sculptor
Isa Genzken, which began in 1978. The following year, he separated from Ema and
he and Genzken moved in together. In 1982 they were married and in 1983 they
relocated to Cologne. Richter has said little concerning his relationship with
Genzken, but the comments he has made reveal parallels to his friendships with Lueg
and Polke. Like his erstwhile comrades in arms, Genzken was an unsparing critic of
his work. He recognised her talent, however, and therefore valued her judgement.34
As he had with Lueg and Polke, he collaborated with Genzken (on subway decora
tions for the city of Duisburg), and exhibited jointly with her on a couple of occa
sions. Their marriage soon became fractious and would dissolve in the early 1990s,
but he attributes the bright and surging dynamism of his Abstrakte Bilder of the early
eighties to the infusion of happiness the relationship initially brought him.35
It was during this same period that the artistic climate also shifted unexpectedly in
his favour, bringing colourful, expansively gestural painting back into fashion.
Richter was unimpressed by the work that was then rising to prominence under labels
like Neue Wilde in West Germany, the Transavanguardia in Italy, and Neo-
Expressionism in the English-speaking world. But its popularity and affinities with
the Abstrakte Bilder created a more sympathetic context for their reception. As he
noted to Wolfgang Pehnt in 1984, he was surprised by the new painting’s emergence:
I hadn’t realised that such things were going on in the studios at the same time,
and that my pictures bore a certain resemblance to them. When I started on these
[Abstrakte Bilder] in 1976, I thought to myself, “Doing this is an issue that’s
personal to me.”36
It was true, of course, that he had broken with minimalism for his own reasons, but
he was happy to learn after the fact that younger painters had also grown tired of its
prohibitions.37 After seeing the tide of art world fashion swing against him in the late
sixties and deciding to follow it, then reversing his course a decade later and choosing
to swim against it, he now found it turning in his favour and giving his career a boost
he had not expected. The uncertainties of Western life could be unsettling, but they
could also, as he was now reminded, be rewarding.
Richter’s reservations concerning the new painting were directed mainly at the
work of the young West Germans whose crude, often violent-looking work earned
them the label Neue Wilde—the New Fauves. Their untutored and naive-looking
approach was seen as evidence by their supporters of their wish to criticise more
refined techniques and reclaim painting as a forum for strong and direct emotional
expression.38 In Richter’s eyes, however, it suggested they simply couldn’t paint.39 He
was equally unimpressed with what he took to be their callow approach to history.
Not only had they turned their backs on minimalism, but as he saw it, they had also
jettisoned the past entirely, believing they had nothing to learn from it: ‘History is
rejected [in their work],’ he complained in 1987, ‘and exchanged for the illusion that
one can start from zero again.’40
In view of the clear parallels between the work of some Neue Wilde painters and a
range of established modernist styles and attitudes, this claim was excessive. Berlin-based
artists like Helmut Middendorf (see Figure 4.8) and Rainer Fetting, for example,
to whom the Neue Wilde label was first attached, worked in a manner indebted heavily
Figure 4.8 Helmut Middendorf, Sänger [Singer], 1981, acrylic on canvas, 175 × 220 cm.
© Helmut Middendorf. Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst [VG Bild-Kunst].
to the original Fauves and Expressionists. Clearly, they had gravitated to past styles and
attitudes they felt could serve their expressive needs in the present. This conviction was
evident in the way that they employed them, which was akin to their use by their ori
ginators. On one hand, they used expressionistic styles artistically to break with what, by
the late 1970s, had become a new kind of academic orthodoxy: minimalist abstraction
and the longer lineage of abstract painting from which it had descended. On the other
hand, they used them socially to signal their sense of distance from the dominant, middle-
class culture, by celebrating their experiences in subcultures like the punk and gay club
scenes. Identifying with the Fauves, Expressionists, and later modernists as social out
siders, they emulated that position by using much the same expressive language.41 It was
precisely here, however, that they could be said to have rejected history since for these
Neue Wilde artists it was enough to simply dust off prior techniques and attitudes and
reuse them readymade in the present.
In the case of Cologne-based figures like Walter Dahn and Jiri Georg Dokoupil,
who belonged to the Mühlheimer Freiheit group that also became linked to the Neue
Wilde, Richter’s charge of ahistoricism was more reasonable, although the artists
themselves would not have seen this as a problem. By their own admission, they were
eager to set the past to one side and simply paint in a spontaneous manner, chan
nelling whatever inner preoccupations surfaced in the course of their working process
and using whatever style they felt inclined to adopt from one group of canvasses to
the next.42 Such restlessness had affinities with Richter’s work of the late sixties but
was at odds with his more focussed and selective engagement with abstraction’s
history in the Abstrakte Bilder.
He certainly found much from the genre’s past that he could work with, most
obviously gestural brushwork and immaterial expanses of colour. His impersonal
approach to gesture and his use of squeegees as one method of enacting this approach
were both inheritances from Götz and thus historical also. So too were the framing of
his working process in existential terms, and his interests in the musical and natural
connotations of his imagery. To the extent that he revived these prior outlooks, he
was like the Berlin Neue Wilde in finding a present use for past approaches.
In contrast to his younger colleagues, however, who displayed no inclination to
critique the past practices they engaged with or to self-consciously adjust them in light
of changed historical circumstances, Richter took it as self-evident that both these
processes were needed to maintain established standards in the present. As he noted
in 1983, in the course of a lengthy rumination on this subject: ‘…the better we know
tradition… and the more responsibly we deal with it, the better things we shall make
similar [to historical artworks], and the better things we shall make different.’43 In his
case similarities were certainly at issue, but so too were significant departures, which
allowed him to make work that was more than a mere revival or pastiche.
As had been the case since the 1920s, when the first successors to the pioneer
abstractionists took up the paradigms the pioneers had put in place and adapted them
to fit their own purposes, Richter also engaged in this process. Formally, he chose to
work within the paradigms of gestural abstraction and the monochrome, while
leaving the paradigm of geometry largely (though by no means entirely) to one side.
The idiom he then developed using gesture and disembodied colour was distinctive on
many fronts, ranging from his complex balancing of contrasts and his considered
approach to gesture, to his distinctive use of layering and predilection for jarring
combinations of synthetic hues. Thematically, his recognition that all meanings
attached to abstract form are associative led him to reject once strong convictions that
abstraction should be a pure undertaking. Instead, he approached his work on terms
akin to figures like Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, who had interpreted
their imagery in a similar fashion. But unlike his American forebears, and his erst
while teacher Götz, he had no interest in Surrealist automatism or in a Freudian
conception of the unconscious as the wellspring of the meanings he and others might
bring to bear on his imagery.44 As has already been remarked, he did not credit
abstract form with a capacity to proffer access to a hidden or higher realm of ex
perience. Instead, he construed his working process as one of coping as best he could
with the challenges of his mundane existence.
A crucial aspect of this coping process was his wavering yet never extinguished faith
that, as he put it in 1985: ‘painting is intrinsically capable of giving visible form to our
best, most human, most humane qualities’ and thus of serving as a source of hope and
comfort in a world where these are sorely needed.45 Exactly what these qualities were is
something he found hard to articulate, beyond opposing them to every state of feeling we
could conceivably desire to be released from. In a world beset by ‘misery,’ ‘stupidity,’ and
‘hopelessness,’ in which ‘violence,’ ‘cruelty,’ and ‘suffering’ are all too prevalent (to pick
out terms that recur throughout his writings and interviews from this period), he valued
art for its ability to offer reassurance. A further reason for his dislike of the Neue Wilde
was their failure to embrace this capacity:
I’m not one of the “Junge [i.e. Neue] Wilde,” he noted in 1982, ‘and the tendency
to scoff at everything, and to replace strength with rawness and violence, is
foreign to me. I also find it infuriating when obvious stupidity is washed up on
the wave of the “wild” movement, when the mere brazenness of these party
painters is enough for them to gain acceptance.46
Elsewhere, he rebuked them for their ‘resignation, a sort of hopelessness: no future.’47

He saw his own work, by contrast, as hopeful and linked this quality to both its
innovative aspects and its abstraction—traits absent from the work of the Neue
Wilde. All art is concerned with ‘agony, desperation, and helplessness,’ he noted in
1983, but only some art aspires to transcend this: ‘The Black Square [of Malevich]
has no less to do with agony than a picture by [A. R.] Penck; but it has more to do
with hope.’48 Penck, an older artist whose work was linked to Neo-Expressionism,
saw his stick figures and elementary symbols as the basis for a universal language that
could overcome political divisions. He would therefore have disputed Richter’s claim.
In Richter’s eyes, however, he was yet another painter trying to begin again from
scratch instead of building on historical achievements. Reverting to an idiom recalling
cave painting not only destroyed everything of value that, in his view, could be taken
from tradition but also presented formal regress as a kind of progress. The art of
Malevich, by contrast, had been radically forward-looking and utopian, with a sense
of hope attached to it because of this. As Richter saw it, Abstract Expressionism and
minimalism had also possessed this forward-looking orientation and he was eager
that the Abstrakte Bilder should continue in this vein.49 He remained uncertain,
however, as to how this could occur.
As he wrestled with this question, the best response he could come up with is that if
an Abstraktes Bild succeeded it would possess an intuitive sense of ‘rightness’ akin to
that which he discerned in music or in nature.50 This rightness would, in turn, imbue
the painting with a sense of saying something worthwhile about the present, while
also offering a glimpse of a better future: ‘[o]ne that,’ as he put in 1986, ‘presents our
situation more accurately; one that has more truth in it, one that has something of the
future in it…’51 Exactly how this truthful vision would be manifest pictorially was
unclear, but Richter felt that he could only achieve it through a blend of innovation
and traditionalism. When questioned on this subject by Benjamin Buchloh in 1986,
he agreed with Buchloh’s suggestion that new painting should ‘liquidate’ aspects of
bourgeois culture that were no longer progressive or credible.52 But he also stressed
that this liquidation should not be so radical as to cast this inheritance aside in its
entirety, an act that would necessitate that painting be destroyed as well:
[I]n this respect I’m extremely conservative. It seems to me like someone saying
that language is no longer usable, because it is a bourgeois inheritance, or that we
mustn’t print texts in books anymore but on cups or on chair legs. I am bourgeois
enough to go on eating with a knife and a fork, just as I paint in oil on canvas.53
Here also, younger painters were at fault in his eyes. They too used oil on canvas but
acted with too little respect for history or an aspiration to build on its achievements.
Such is the obscurity of much of what Richter said in the 1980s concerning his
aspirations for the Abstrakte Bilder that it isn’t easy to see them as fulfilling his
loftiest ideals, or even grasp how this might have been possible. What can be re
cognised, however, is the intensity of his efforts to position them as worthy additions
to the history of abstract painting and in doing so become part of that history. In the
late 1950s, he had come to see abstraction as a worthwhile locus of belonging due to
its standing as a shared language of freedom in the West. By the mid-1970s that belief
had faded, but as he returned to two modes of abstraction to which he had first been
drawn in the late fifties, they again held out the prospect of liberation. It was now
minimalism and not socialist realism whose strictures he was eager to escape from,
and a lineage of abstract painting that preceded minimalism’s emergence, which of
fered him this promise. As his engagement with the Skizzen deepened and his dialogue
with abstraction’s past intensified, he took as his new locus of belonging a historical
community of abstract artists, whose work he admired for the lasting value of their
achievements—figures like Mondrian, Malevich, and Barnett Newman, whom he
greatly esteemed, despite the fact that his own compositions bore scant resemblance
to theirs.54 His relationship to this community could, of course, only be imaginary;
but the fact that he benchmarked his achievements against theirs provided further
indication of his increasing confidence and his resolve to make headway against his
problems with artistic belonging.
If belonging requires reconciling freedom with collectivity, through a process by which
a group supports one’s projects and one in turn gives up a measure of one’s freedom and
submits to the group’s authority, then it is evident that Richter’s work on the Abstrakte
Bilder unfolded on these terms. On one hand, he acknowledged the authority of the
established abstract painting tradition by consenting to work within the limits of its
existing stylistic repertoire. He then used elements of that repertoire to develop his own
idiom and express his own concerns. Having failed to strike a satisfying balance between
collectivity and freedom in his minimalist abstract work, which had left him too little
latitude to paint on his own terms, and indeed to paint at all, he had regained greater
freedom by connecting his work to a tradition that could give him the support he needed
to move his practice forward—a tradition that those who were against painting or were
invested in a linear view of its history deemed to have ended, but which he sensed was
still vital and could be further extended by returning to the point in abstraction’s history
that preceded the rise of minimalism. His efforts to embed his work in this tradition in
effect added a second dimension to his living method. Beyond enacting his struggle with
uncertainty, it reflected his attempts to mitigate his isolation by securing a place for
himself in the history of abstraction. There was doubt aplenty in this struggle, and a risk
initially that his career would suffer, but these concerns were exceeded by his ambition
and his faith in his abilities.
Ambivalent freedom, lost collectivity

To say that Richter sought belonging in the past is not to make a claim for his un
iqueness among West German painters in the early eighties. As several critics re
marked at the time, the same could be said not only for the Berlin Neue Wilde but
also for more established Neo-Expressionists like Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer.
With respect to Baselitz and Kiefer, Donald Kuspit argued that their recourse to an
expressionistic idiom with clear Germanic overtones formed part of a search for an
‘authentic identity,’ to be found by reconnecting with national traditions. He deemed
this goal impossible, however, due to modernity’s erosion of traditional ways of life,
which leaves the artist
like a sandcrab, trying to live in an alien shell in the hope that he or she might
gain an understanding of what a home might be (while knowing that they [sic]
can never actually have their own by the terms of the modern condition).55
Since Expressionism in its original incarnation was itself an assertion of alienation

from modern social conditions, it is hard to see how it could offer respite from these
conditions in revived form decades later. In light of the movement’s denigration under
National Socialism, however, it could offer Baselitz and Kiefer a platform from the
prewar past on which to rebuild German painting in the present, a process that in
volved interrogating that past as well. Like Richter, but with a nationalistic focus,
they too could be seen as artists looking for belonging in the past, but in a more open-
ended and conflicted manner.56
Wolfgang Max Faust discerned a different and more complex dynamic of affilia
tion at work in the art of Fetting, Middendorf, and their Berlin colleague Salomé.
Producing images relating to their lives in the city’s underground milieus, these
‘Heftige Maler’ [violent painters], as they were sometimes referred to, affirmed their
sense of social marginality. They did not suffer from this condition, however, since
they identified strongly with their subcultures and also with prior artists:
[T]he history that concerns the “Violents,” Faust wrote in 1981, ‘is one of
outsiders, loners, pariahs who had the guts not to conform; to go their own way.
Yet compared to their models, the better known of which, other than the
expressionists, are Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch, these
young “Fauves” cannot be said to be lonely, for they belong to an alternative
scene, to a subculture whose turf is as much New York as Berlin.57
To the extent that they too pursued belonging in the past, the Berlin Neue Wilde did
not do so on a nationalistic basis, but rather as self-styled social outsiders, a gesture
that, as Faust acknowledged, was in tension with their actual life circumstances. On
one hand, they sought belonging to a tradition of alienated avant-gardists, whose
opposition to the norms and values of bourgeois society they saw as equivalent to
their own. On the other hand, they celebrated their experiences in subcultural milieus
in which they were happily immersed. The extent to which they could credibly claim
kinship with figures like Gauguin, Van Gogh, or the original Fauves and
Expressionists was therefore limited. Thanks to the growing individualism of the
postwar period and the values shift it had occasioned, the Neue Wilde had been
granted the self-expressive and lifestyle freedoms their avant-garde forebears had had
to fight for. Instead of struggling to carve out a zone of liberty in a hostile and op
pressive environment, they lived in a more diverse and accommodating society, in
which existing subcultural spaces were already at hand, in which they could live and
work unchallenged. One of these was the art world itself, which had provided them
with ample institutional support from the beginning. Instead of suffering en route to
recognition, they had founded their own gallery as students and found success with it
immediately.58 The Mühlheimer Freiheit artists, many of whom (to Richter’s con
sternation) had never studied painting, also had strong sales and exposure from the
outset. Artistically, both groups were briefly able to claim a measure of marginality in
comparison to minimalism and conceptualism. But as their swift and emphatic em
brace by the market and public institutions alike made apparent, they had a waiting
audience for their work outside their native milieus. Belonging was thus made
available to both groups on terms that differed substantially from those on offer to
the avant-garde painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Baselitz and Kiefer travelled longer and bumpier roads to recognition but benefitted
from advancing individualism and the sixties values shift nonetheless. Emblematic of this
development were the contrasting responses to two moments of controversy in Baselitz’s
career. In the early 1960s, he was infamously tried for obscenity when he exhibited Die
große Nacht im Eimer [Big Night Down the Drain] (1962-3), a painting of a grotesque
figure with an enlarged phallus. When, in 1981, he again caused consternation with a
sculpture in the West German pavilion at the Venice Biennale that some saw as offering a
Nazi salute (it was in fact based on the antique statue of the Dying Gaul with an upraised
arm), no legal action was forthcoming and the controversy soon died down. This was
also the case with the response to work by Kiefer that featured imagery relating to the
Nazi period.59 Were it not for both artists’ willingness to broach taboo aspects of
German history and take pride in aspects of their national identity, they would have
found themselves in much the same position as their younger colleagues, as had become
the case by the mid-eighties, once critics’ initial shock at the nationalistic aspects of their
work had faded. Although both artists struck a pose of opposition to social norms and
preferred to live in relative isolation, resistance to their work was modest and they could
hardly claim the status of outsiders. It is not that there were no longer norms that they
were able to oppose, but rather that society was now sufficiently differentiated, and
support for self-expressive values now sufficiently widespread, that theirs was an in
dividual liberty guaranteed to them from the outset, needing only to be asserted instead
of fought for. To the extent that they did present themselves as marginal, they were
merely underscoring their constitutionally assured right to Selbstentfaltung—the un
folding of their personality—not attempting to secure such a right where none existed.60
What set Richter decisively apart from his colleagues was not his search for be
longing in the past, but his problematisation of the freedom that was his for the
taking. In contrast to other West German painters, who either stressed their desire for
liberation from oppressive social forces or simply took advantage of a freedom they
already possessed, Richter cast his freedom in ambivalent terms, at once welcoming it
as a consequence of progress and lamenting it as a state that was hard to bear due to
the stresses and responsibilities that came with it.
He described this condition in his notebook in 1986:
This plausible theory, that my abstract paintings evolve their motifs as the work
proceeds, is a timely one, because there is no central image of the world (world view)
any longer: we must work out everything for ourselves… with no centre and no
meaning; we must cope with the advance of a previously undreamt-of freedom.61
Beyond restating the terms of his living method, these remarks allude to the central
thesis of a book that had left its mark on him in Dresden: Verlust der Mitte [Loss of
the Centre] by the Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr. In an essay Richter wrote at
the Academy in 1956, he had performed the unlikely manoeuvre of placing
Sedlmayr’s right-leaning critique of modernism in service of socialist ideology. In
Verlust der Mitte, the staunchly Catholic and conservative Sedlmayr contended that
the stylistic plurality of modernism and the increasing independence of the arts from
one another in the modern era were symptomatic of a breakdown in social order.62
He further argued that the distortions of the human figure in Expressionism and its
absence from abstract artworks were symptomatic of moral and spiritual decline,
thanks to the waning of religious authority and the universal frameworks of belief
and behaviour it had sustained. Echoing these concerns, Richter described postwar
Western art as being mired in stylistic ‘chaos’ and argued that the unified, collecti
vistic style of socialist realism would help create ‘a new spiritual centre… that is not
present in West Germany.’63 The centre he had in mind was not religious, but rather
political and avowedly materialistic. In the face of the disorder that religion’s decline
had wrought, Richter claimed that socialist artists were poised to play their part in
returning cohesion and purpose to modern life by providing healthful and uplifting
images of the New Man of socialism. These idealising depictions would be opposed to
the degenerate abstraction and expressive figuration of postwar Western art.
Decades later, after behind leaving the socialist project, making stylistic plurality a
hallmark of his practice, and developing a form of abstract painting reminiscent of
the styles from the 1950s he had critiqued in his essay, Richter reaffirmed Sedlmayr’s
diagnosis concerning the disorderly consequences of the breakdown of the early
modern social order. He was no longer proposing, however, that art should seek to
restore this stability: ‘[W]hat he [Sedlmayr] was saying was absolutely right,’ he
explained to Buchloh in 1986, ‘He just drew the wrong conclusions, that’s all. He
wanted to reconstruct the Centre that had been lost.’64 Unlike Sedlmayr, who became
a staunch supporter of the Nazis, Richter looked on freedom from religious authority
and non-democratic forms of government as positive phenomena and had no wish to
turn back the clock.65 He acknowledged, however, that this freedom had its costs,
among which was diminishing social stability as a result of the erosion of universal
norms and values: ‘[T]here are specific, new, concrete facts which have altered our
consciousness and our society, which have overturned religion and therefore changed
the functioning of the State,’ he continued in his comments to Buchloh, ‘There are
only a few makeshift conventions left to regulate the thing, keep it practicable.
Otherwise, there’s nothing left anymore.’66
In this free but disorienting situation, order and security are difficult to come by but
are still craved by those who struggle with the challenges of self-reliance that modern
freedom has brought with it. It was this insecurity that helped explain the rise of
fascism in the 1930s and the zeal with which many in East Germany embraced so
cialism following the war. Richter was, of course, dismissive of such undertakings,
but yearned for a more stable and collectively cohesive social order nonetheless, as
was evidenced by his descriptions in the early 1980s of the traditional Foto-Bilder he
continued to produce intermittently and exhibit alongside the Abstrakte Bilder.
As had been the case since the late sixties, he continued painting landscapes with
romantic overtones that brought him reassurance during periods of stress and sad
ness. The remote and melancholic Alpine vistas he painted in 1981, for instance, were
painted shortly after his divorce from Ema.67 A year later, he began painting mem
ento mori still-lifes of skulls and candles to give him comfort in the face of his fear of
death, which had, perhaps, increased around the time of his fiftieth birthday that
year.68 In contrast to his abstract works, however, which were also linked to his day-
to-day experience, his Foto-Bilder retained the escapist aspect they had always pos
sessed, something that was no longer the case with the Abstrakte Bilder: ‘If the
Abstrakte Bilder show my reality,’ he wrote in his notebook in 1981,
then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning… [B]ut though these pictures
are motivated by the dream of a classical order and a pristine world—by
nostalgia, in other words—the anachronism in them takes on a subversive and
contemporary quality.69
Four years later, he echoed these comments publicly in an interview with Dorothea
Dietrich:
If I were to express it somewhat informally, I would say that the landscapes are a
type of yearning for a whole and simple life. A little nostalgic. The abstract works
are my presence, my reality, my problems, my difficulties and contradictions.70
Statements such as these set up a contrast between abstraction and representation

that had not been present in Richter’s work in the late sixties and early seventies. At
that time all his work had been escapist, but a split had since emerged between the
two wings of his practice. Whereas the Abstrakte Bilder relayed his efforts to contend
with the vicissitudes of his existence, his traditional Foto-Bilder still had an escapist
dimension, just as they had in the late 1960s. One aspect of this escapism related only
to the landscapes, above all to the leafy Rhineland pastorals he painted in 1984 and
1985 (see Figure 4.9). More intimate, immersive, and welcoming than his previous
images of nature, which had tended to be empty and remote, these sun-drenched
scenes indulged a fantasy of nature as a paradise, rather than a realm that is, at best,
indifferent to our wellbeing and, at worst, liable to destroy us: ‘[M]y landscapes are
not only beautiful or nostalgic…,’ he wrote in his notebook in 1986, ‘but above all
‘untruthful’… and by ‘untruthful’ I mean the glorifying way we look at nature —
nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning…
Figure 4.9 Gerhard Richter, Buche [Beech], 1987, oil on canvas, 82 × 112 cm. © Gerhard
Richter 2021 (0253).
and is absolutely mindless.’71 But there was also a second sense in which all of his
Foto-Bilder from the early eighties were escapist. Per his comments about dreaming
of a lost classical order, they evoked a bygone social era in which life and art alike
had, in his view, possessed the reassuring qualities of classicism—traits that in the
modern era had given way to the disorder of the Informel.
As was noted in the previous chapter, Richter traces the emergence of the Informel
to Duchamp and Impressionism, thus positioning it implicitly as a modern phe
nomenon.72 In the early 1990s, he made this relationship explicit when he described it
as ‘the opposite of the constructive [konstruktiven] quality of classicism—the age of
kings, of clearly formed hierarchies.’73 With this comment, which was in keeping
with his reading of Sedlmayr, he related the entropic formal qualities of the Informel
to the breakdown of the stable social order of the early modern era. It was during this
‘age of kings’ that the classical tradition, for Richter, was at its height and was em
bodied in the works of artists he admires such as Vermeer, Titian, and Chardin. Later
classicists such as Friedrich and Ingres worked in the closing stages of this period.
In his view, these painters fashioned classical images for reasons linked to the
societies in which they worked, which were less liberated and dynamic than those of
modern life but also simpler, more orderly, and more settled—classical conditions
that modernity eroded. Both the breakdown of form in Impressionism and
Duchamp’s embrace of chance decades later emerged in response to this development.
Later still, the Abstrakte Bilder evinced his own responses to modern life, both in
terms of his own social experience and his broader understanding of history.
His description of the Abstrakte Bilder in 1986 as ‘metaphors… about a possibility of
social coexistence’ bears on the latter aspect of the series.74 He ventured this remark to
Buchloh after Buchloh had explained to him that Mondrian saw his mature paintings as
models of a ‘nonhierarchical, egalitarian society.’75 They expressed this condition
through their balancing of colour, line, and shape, such that no one formal element took
precedence over any other. Richter responded with a reading of the Abstrakte Bilder
along similar lines: ‘[A]ll that I am trying to do in each picture,’ he explained, ‘is to bring
together the most disparate and mutually contradictory elements, alive and viable, in the
greatest possible freedom. No paradises.’76 Like Mondrian, he was striving for balance in
his compositions. But unlike Mondrian, who aspired to a state of perfect order in his
works, corresponding to a state of utopia, Richter stressed his less sanguine sense of
modernity’s insurmountable disarray. The balance he attained in his own works was thus
more tenuous than the Dutchman’s, and his compositions, which sought to hold a more
diverse array of elements in tension, more dissonant and dramatic.
As these comments indicate, Richter’s understanding of modern freedom is char
acteristically ambivalent. Although supportive of its advances and eager to see these
continue, he does not regard it as entirely benign, because it serves as a source of
social conflict and disorientation, as well as emancipation. This perspective carried
over into his social interpretation of the Abstrakte Bilder. Any effort to make a totally
ordered painting along the lines of Mondrian’s compositions would be implausible
and dangerous, in his mind, since it would echo the rage for control that animated
fascism and socialism. As he expressed this line of thinking jokingly in 1993: ‘It
would be terrible if the Broadway Boogie-Woogie painting [by Mondrian] were a
model of society: there would be the Yellows, the Reds and the Blues, all moving
ahead in straight lines.’77 Mindful of the disasters this kind of rigidity begets, he
regards it as more honest and more credible to make paintings that, in keeping with
his experience in the West, establish a more precarious harmony among elements
whose differences remain unsuppressed.
Clearly, Richter’s own exposure to the ambivalences of Western individualism un
derwrote this reading of the Abstrakte Bilder and it is against this biographical backdrop
that his ‘dream of a classical order,’ which was at once social and artistic, must be
assessed. If the Abstrakte Bilder relayed his responses to the challenges of contemporary
individualism, then his nostalgic and escapist Foto-Bilder drew him back to a more
communal epoch in which his freedom would certainly have been restricted but his
collective security would have been enhanced, especially in his professional life.
Whereas the lives of early modern subjects were in many respects unenviable, this was
less emphatically the case for painters. On one hand, they were forced to cater to the
whims of their patrons and, by later standards, given little freedom of expression. On the
other hand, their work was socially indispensable, and since their expectations of ex
pressive freedom were lower than has since become the case, it can be reasonably assumed
that they felt less constrained in this regard than later artists. It is thus not implausible to
imagine, as Richter does in his moments of nostalgia, that they enjoyed a more secure and
esteemed existence than their modern successors, whose growing expressive liberty has
come at the cost of their social marginality. From this perspective, his still-lifes and his
landscapes of the 1980s can be seen as a further expression of his search for belonging in
the past. In contrast to the Abstrakte Bilder, which allowed him to connect to a tradition
of painting that, in his view, was still living, his Foto-Bilder were wistful excursions into
genres from a vanished epoch—‘quotations’ of lost forms of painting (as he described
them on several occasions) belonging to a lost social order.78 As he stressed in his ex
change with Buchloh, he had no wish to see this lost order recovered. He did, however,
recognise its strengths with respect to collectivity, especially for painters.
As had been the case since the 1960s, the classical remained his unattainable ideal,
both socially and artistically, a distance signalled by the delicate haze in which he
bathed his Foto-Bilder of the eighties. The Informel, meanwhile, was his reality but
was a state he now felt able to combat to some extent in the Abstrakte Bilder by
means of his living method. Recognising this division in his work of the early eighties,
and the distinctiveness of his attitudes to freedom, collectivity, and history in the
context of his peers, permits a new understanding of his place among the leading
West German painters of that period.
Expressionism in quotations?
In the early 1980s, Richter’s work was deemed significant for the critique of ex
pressionistic painting it was seen to mount. This opinion gained traction among critics
who were suspicious of Neo-Expressionism since it seemed to flout the lessons of
modernist art history. Whereas expressionistic techniques like distortion, heightened
colour, and a spontaneous working method could once be credibly linked to an ethos of
direct self-expression, the rise and fall of gestural abstraction in the 1950s had called this
credibility into question. After first being positioned as Expressionism’s apotheosis,
which saw the subjective depiction of the outside world give way to a putatively pure
evocation of the self, by the end of the decade this notion had declined to the status of a
cliché. With legions of painters now laying their souls bare in an identical fashion, what
had once passed for authenticity had begun to feel all too formulaic. Rather than af
firming their individuality, minor abstract artists of the 1950s seemed merely to rehearse
the rhetoric of self-expression, an accusation that was soon laid at the feet of the Neo-
Expressionists. Instead of being seen, like the original Expressionists, as engaging in
salutary acts of self-expression that spoke to wider social concerns, most of the younger
West German artists were dismissed as glib manipulators of expressionistic codes and
signs, producing hollow, self-involved work bereft of any genuine pathos.79 The result, in
the words of Craig Owens, was Expressionism ‘in quotation marks,’ which was none
theless put over with complete sincerity.80
Not so in the case of Richter, whose Abstrakte Bilder were hailed as a tonic to this
trend. After noting their initial sense of wild spontaneity and the kinship this es
tablished with the Neue Wilde, critics homed in on other aspects of their appearance
that served to undermine this first impression. Their exquisite sense of poise, for
example, was seen as evidence of planned composition, while their smoothed out,
hazy backdrops and the crisply shaded geometric planes that occasionally emerged
from their depths were held to raise the spectre of mechanical (and thus impersonal)
reproduction.81 On the basis of such appraisals, the notion that these paintings had
expressive motivations was dismissed. Instead, it was concluded, their purpose was to
simulate approaches to abstraction that had once been credibly self-expressive but
could no longer be practised on this basis.
Opinions varied concerning the significance of this feint. German critics familiar
with Richter’s work since the 1960s took their cue from established understandings
of his art. With the sceptical reading of the Foto-Bilder now solidly entrenched, they
saw the Abstrakte Bilder as approaching the theme of doubt from a new perspective.
Just as the Foto-Bilder called the truth claims of photography into question, the
Abstrakte Bilder were held to do the same with respect to nonobjective painting. In
light of his description of these paintings as analogies of the incomprehensible, which
was published on several occasions in the early eighties, Richter’s opaque and con
fusing imagery was correctly taken to affirm his lack of faith in any prospect of
transcendence via painting. His measured approach to developing his compositions,
meanwhile, was seen to contest the conception of the abstract brushstroke as a
conduit of pure self-expression.82
New York critics, who set the tone for his reception in the English-speaking art
world, where his profile began to lift in the early eighties, pursued a narrower in
terpretive agenda. Less familiar with his prior work and unaware of his remarks
about the series, they saw in the Abstrakte Bilder a wish to comment critically on
recent West German painting. ‘Our contemporary expressionism [sic] needs, in many
respects, to be debunked and Richter is easily the man for the job,’ wrote Nancy
Princenthal in 1983, a sentiment that echoed through the U.S. art press in the years
that followed.83 Opinions also varied concerning the exact tone of his work (was he a
playful satirist or a sober-minded conceptualist?), but the bottom line was always the
same: he was hailed as a meta-painter who enacted ‘a telling critique of the old
Expressionist idea that gestural paint equals emotional truth.’84 On this point U.S.
critics were united with their West German colleagues.
In light of Richter’s 20-year effort to frustrate personal readings of his work, the
firmness of this consensus is unsurprising. Yet when asked about his motives in
creating the Abstrakte Bilder, he made it clear that he did not regard them as im
personal or inexpressive, let alone ironic or conceptual. In an interview with Coosje
van Bruggen in 1983, he baldly declared: ‘The pictures [Abstrakte Bilder] are iden
tical to me. There’s no detour and no transformation and not too much intellect. I
want the painting to be transparent. I want it to tell the whole drama.’85 Per these
comments, it would seem he had not only abandoned his commitment to im
personality but had also revived the orthodox approach to gestural abstraction. Was
he then a Neo-Expressionist rather than the anti-Expressionist for which he had been
taken? His subsequent remarks about the role of self-expression in his art were diffuse
but confirmed that this was not the case.
In an interview with Dorothea Dietrich in 1985, he was pushed to speak at length
about this topic. At the start of a long exchange on self-expression, Dietrich quizzed
him on his interest in bringing out ‘the personal, the individual’ in the Abstrakte
Bilder. ‘This [self-expression] is, of course, important to me,’ he replied:
But I want to avoid at all costs that this personal expression be too direct… I like to
compare my process of making art to the composing of music. There, all personal
expression has been subjugated to the structure and is not simply shouted. That is
why my paintings [the Abstrakte Bilder] take such a long time. I interrupt the
progress of one painting and return to it after a longer pause to make sure that the
painting will not be all in one mood, but be more carefully controlled.86
Here too it seemed that Richter was presenting the Abstrakte Bilder as openly ex
pressive paintings. He was going a step further than he had in his comments to van
Bruggen, however, by describing his approach to conveying his emotions. Just as
composers must work hard to communicate their feelings in a well-structured
manner, adhering to the dictates of good musical form, he claimed to do the same
when painting. This ensured that his emotions were conveyed effectively and ‘not
simply shouted,’ as they were in the works of the Neue Wilde. With further probing
from Dietrich, however, it became evident that this is not what he meant.
Shifting to a different line of questioning, Dietrich spent the rest of the interview
interrogating Richter on his efforts to avoid self-expression. Circling back to this
topic several times, she received different responses. Initially, Richter made the off
hand claim that self-expression is ‘very easy’ and ‘rather boring,’ giving the sense that
it was simply beneath him.87 Later, he claimed to have more earnest motivations: ‘I
always mistrusted that [self-expression] or didn’t dare to do it,’ he remarked, before
adding: ‘How I feel and what I think is rather uninteresting. Therefore I am always
tempted to generalise or I try to give things a general validity.’88 Later still, he ad
mitted for the first time to a fear of self-exposure in his art, which the Abstrakte
Bilder helped him to avoid:
Dietrich: Are you afraid to make your personal feelings public?

Richter: Yes—but you can’t avoid it. All paintings show your feelings somehow.
Dietrich: Surely, but an abstract painting erects certain barriers—
Richter: —yes, abstract paintings are more removed.89
At once fearful of unwanted self-exposure and resigned to the fact that self-
expression is inevitable in painting, Richter took steps with the Abstrakte Bilder to
avoid ‘that this personal expression be too direct.’ Interrupting his working process so
a painting would not be ‘all in one mood’ was one such tactic; chance painting
methods were another. As had been the case since he began work on the early Foto-
Bilder, he veiled his work’s self-expressive aspects , to the point where its personal
motivations were opaque to anyone but himself.
This process of depersonalisation did not make the paintings themselves in
expressive, however, because, in his eyes, their imagery was richly expressive in its
own right, something he attempted to explain to Buchloh the following year. During
a lengthy and sometimes fractious conversation, Buchloh repeatedly asked Richter if
the Abstrakte Bilder were conceived as meta-paintings, eliciting a string of firm de
nials from the artist. He first asked if the series was ‘not an ironic parody of present
day expressionism?,’ to which Richter flatly answered ‘No.’90 Rephrasing the ques
tion, he asked if they were ‘not a perversion of gestural abstraction? Not irony?’
Richter again demurred, this time with indignation: ‘Certainly not!,’ he exclaimed,
‘What kind of questions are these!’91 Revisiting the issue for a third time, Buchloh
asked if the Abstrakte Bilder were rhetorical paintings, intended to expose the failures
of abstract art. At this point, Richter grew exasperated: ‘And what would be the point
of that?,’ he protested, ‘That’s the last thing I’d want to do.’92 Far from being merely
rhetorical, he insisted his imagery was replete with feeling: ‘As a whole and in every
detail, its effect is emotional. It sets up moods.’ These moods were not his own,
however, but a function of the imagery itself, expressed through the myriad con
notations it calls to mind: ‘They do set up associations,’ he added, ‘They remind you
of natural experiences….’93
With this reference to nature, which he supplemented elsewhere in the interview
with comparisons to music and the aforementioned idea that his compositions might
be understood as models of a diverse society, Richter underscored his investment in
the analogical potential of abstract imagery. But in contrast to his earlier remarks on
this subject, he now stressed the affective potential of such associations, together with
the fact that any feelings they awakened were not his own. Since his half-blind
working process decoupled his imagery from his emotions, any feelings his paintings
might awaken in other viewers would be a product of the imagery itself, in dialog
with each viewer’s subjectivity. It thus would not be the product of his own state of
mind when he produced it.
Exchanges such as these confirmed that Richter was indeed opposed to Expressionism,
but not for the reasons surmised by critics. Instead of critiquing gestural abstraction or
the work of the Neo-Expressionists, he was maintaining his commitment to Zweig-
leisigkeit and avoiding making paintings that exposed his private feelings. Despite his
criticisms of the Neue Wilde, he had no interest in using his paintings to comment on
their work. Nor was he remarking on the historical failings of the modes of abstract
painting he chose to work with. His critical reflections on painting’s history and the work
of his contemporaries undoubtedly informed his practice, as they would the work of any
artist. But this, in and of itself, did not make him, in any special sense, a meta-painter.
The Abstrakte Bilder were therefore not rhetorical, nor were they vehicles for critique.
They were, however, vehicles through which he sought to come to terms with the
shadow aspect of his freedom, a concern that placed him at odds with his contemporaries
on the issue of art’s relationship to liberty. Whereas they either viewed their freedom as
unproblematic or approached it, like the original avant-garde, as something that still
needed to be seized, as Richter had had to seize it in the GDR, in defiance of an op
pressive social order, it was the isolation and disorientation that accompanied the
freedom he already possessed with which he was wrestling in his work. To the extent
that all his paintings in the early eighties were a product of this struggle, he can be seen as
unique among West German painters of the period, whose response to the growing
individualism of the sixties and the Wertewandlung it had set in motion was more closely
aligned with those outside the art world, who had begun to voice concern regarding the
mixed blessings of those developments, than with the views of his colleagues.
Empowered and disempowered individualism

Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, the individualising dynamics of the previous
decade had slowed but continued nonetheless, in West Germany as in other Western
countries.94 As in other countries, moreover, they aroused concern among conservatives,
who perceived the values shift as being less than wholly progressive. For commentators
like Daniel Bell in North America and Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in the Federal
Republic writing in the mid-1970s, the liberalising trends of the sixties were noteworthy
mainly for their hedonistic consequences. Focussing chiefly on the impact of prosperity
on social values, both saw increased leisure time and universal prosperity as having
undermined the bourgeois values and virtues of hard work, thriftiness and self-restraint
to which capitalism owed its success.95 Noelle-Neumann, in particular, was concerned
that the anti-authoritarian impulses the sixties had unleashed were socially corrosive—a
sign of decadence instead of liberation. By the early eighties, such misgivings were suf
ficiently widespread that they became a leitmotif of political discourse. Within the
English-speaking world, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are remembered for
their calls at the beginning of the decade for a revival of ‘traditional moral values’ (as
Thatcher termed them) and the resonance these appeals found with voters. In his cam
paign for re-election as West German chancellor in 1983, Helmut Kohl made a similar,
and equally well-received, appeal for a ‘spiritual and moral renewal’ of the country,
words which hearkened back to the politics and social ideals of the Adenauer era.96
Following his electoral success, which greatly increased his party’s mandate, the political
winds in West Germany began blowing in the same neoconservative direction as those in
Britain and the United States.
Despite Kohl’s initial aspirations to restore the values of the early postwar era, the
liberalising and individualising trends that had set in in the sixties persisted throughout
his tenure. Indicators like (modestly) increasing tolerance of homosexuality and abortion,
the growing prevalence of non-traditional family arrangements, a diversification of re
ligious attitudes, and the emergence of a broad spectrum of youth cultures, all attested to
a process of ongoing pluralisation.97 In tandem with other ongoing dynamics of the early
postwar period, like growing participation in higher education, progress toward equality
for women, greater discretionary income, and a wider range of goods on which to spend
it, these trends provided individuals with greater freedom—along with an increasing
desire—to determine the structure of their lives rather than inheriting a pre-scripted life
trajectory based on the circumstances of their birth.98
The capacity to exercise this freedom was undermined, however, by the economic
changes of the period. As Kohl’s government attempted to revive the economy, which
had been struggling for much of the 1970s, it showed less appetite for the neoliberal
policy prescriptions pursued in the Anglophone world. Throughout his tenure, welfare
spending remained high and his deregulation and privatisation initiatives were modest.
The latter were enacted, however, and as elsewhere they eroded economic securities for
many workers, bringing to an end the material stability of the postwar era.99 With
unemployment high, prospects for secure employment dwindling and greater flexibility
and agility increasingly demanded from workers, growing numbers of West Germans
were obliged to assume the risks of this uncertain situation. As the expectations of fi
nancial security that had accrued since the 1950s declined, the same freedom from a
predetermined life course—in this case, a protected job for life and the assurance of a
smoothly rising income—that could be seen as a source of liberation and empowerment
in other contexts became a source of pressure and insecurity.
So too, for growing numbers of West Germans, did the sheer openness of lives that
were not only losing economic stability but also the stability of pre-given social norms
and values. As sociologist Wolfgang Zapf observed in 1986:
Growing numbers of people, growing numbers of families, and growing numbers

of households find themselves in living situations for which there are no clear
behavioural rules available. In many respects this has reduced traditional conflicts
and tensions. The range of choices for individuals and households increases, but
the need to structure one’s own life and decide for oneself grows as well and is the
source of new conflicts and inequalities.100
Ulrich Beck, who alongside Zapf emerged as a leading theorist of individualisation in the
1980s, stressed the need for individuals to be increasingly active and self-reflexive in the
construction of their biographies, under conditions of growing social fluidity, a task that
some were better placed than others to perform.101 For those with independent in
clinations, or educational and financial advantages, having increased leeway to chart
one’s own in course in life was empowering. For those without these advantages, the
growing need for self-determination, both socially and economically, in the early 1980s
was challenging, much as it had been for Richter upon arriving in the West.
Richter had, of course, been wrestling with his own sense of precarious in
dividualism since the early sixties, and his feelings of insecurity and disempowerment
in the face of social and professional instability had been conditioning his practice
since that time. During the period in which he had evolved his living method and
began conceiving of his traditional Foto-Bilder as nostalgic portals to a more secure
era, this had remained the case. But although he was responding to his personal
concerns in his work, rather than to changes he discerned within society, his concerns
were now shared by growing numbers of his compatriots, as their exposure to the
downsides of individualism increased. As the boom years receded into history, West
Germans were increasingly being pushed to negotiate a complex and unpredictable
environment with fewer communal resources to help them in this task, whether by
providing them with shared norms of belief and conduct or with economic stability.
Having felt this pressure consistently since his arrival in the West, Richter had by now
adjusted to it and was thus on a better footing than many of his compatriots. In contrast
to his situation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he felt unable to meet the
challenges of insecure individualism, he was now far more assured of his ability to chart
his own course through life. Not only was he more willing to go his own way in his
painting regardless of its reception and thus more capable of being self-reliant, but he was
also well-positioned to withstand the economic challenges of the early eighties. His po
sition at the Academy still guaranteed him a stable income and thanks to his rising
reputation in New York, where German painting had become a market favourite, his
earnings from sales were now rising significantly.102 But despite this security, he re
mained attuned to the isolating and disempowering potential of individualism, which he
correctly, if diffusely, regarded as an outgrowth of long-term historical dynamics that
had eroded secure communal structures throughout the modern period. But unlike those
conservatives who wished to counter the newest phase of this erosion by turning back the
clock to the 1950s, he harboured no such aspiration. Accepting the reality of the double-
edged nature of his freedom, he had committed to managing its vicissitudes as best he
could. In this way, his living method could be seen as modelling not only his response to
his own insecurity and isolation but also as the only viable response to these conditions
available to his unsettled compatriots. They could only hope to strive as best they could
amid uncertainty to bring a sense of structure to their lives while living as best they could
on their own terms. To the extent that the Abstrakte Bilder reflected his own success in
that endeavour, they could indeed be seen as hopeful paintings. By bringing harmony to
elements whose differences were preserved, they could also, per his comments to
Buchloh, be understood as models of a society in which freedom and security could be
reconciled—not only by individuals but collectively.
Richter’s elective affiliation with a historical tradition of abstract painting had
emerged as a key resource in his bid to achieve this professionally. From the late
1980s onward, he would apply this elective traditionalism to his personal and social
lives as well and thematise it in his art with growing openness.
Notes
1 In 1986, Richter retitled the Skizzen Abstrakte Bilder, in recognition of the fact that the latter
had evolved from the former. So smooth had this transition been that no clear line of de
marcation could be drawn between them. For ease of reference and to stress the initial,
experimental role the Skizzen played in Richter’s practice, this book retains their original title.
2 Jürgen Harten, “Der romantische Wille zur Abstraktion,” in Gerhard Richter: Bilder
1962–1985, in Jürgen Harten, Gerhard Richter: Bilder/Paintings, 1962–1985 (Köln:
DuMont Verlag 1986), 53. Precisely which painting Richter overpainted is unknown, but
it was most likely Fiktion (1) (1973), a work of the same dimensions as Konstruktion,
which is listed as destroyed in his catalogue raisonné.
3 Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting (London and Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), trans. Elizabeth M. Solaro, 229, 231. Richter echoed this judgment in
conversation with the author. (Richter, conversation with the author, October 27, 2011.)
4 Richter, quoted in Heribert Heere, “Gerhard Richter — The Abstract Pictures:
Concerning Content,” in Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder, 1976 bis 1981 (Munich:
Galerie Fred Jahn, 1982), 22.
5 Richter, “Answers to questions from Marlies Grüterich, 2 September 1977,” in Gerhard
Richter, Writings: 1961–2007 (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), eds.
Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 94–95.
6 Richter, “Interview with Dieter Schwarz, 1999,” in Writings, 332.
7 Richter, “Interview with Dieter Schwarz, 1999,” in Writings. Fallschirm was later re
named Abstraktes Bild [431-10].
8 Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: Maler (Köln: DuMont Verlag, 2002), 260–61. [Author’s
translation.]
9 Richter, “Interview with Dieter Schwarz, 1999,” in Writings, 332.
10 Richter, “Interview with Amine Haase, 1977,” in Writings, 122.
11 Richter, “Answers to questions from Marlies Grüterich, 2 September 1977,” in Writings, 95.
12 Richter, unbroadcast video interview with Henning Lohner, December 13, 1993: 11. A
transcript of this conversation is available in the Gerhard Richter Archive, Dresden.
13 Richter, “Interview with Dorothea Dietrich, 1985,” in Writings, 155.
14 Richter, “Interview with Sabine Schütz, 1990,” in Writings, 256.
16 Such is the underlying logic of potentially puzzling statements like the following, which
Richter offered to Jonas Storsve in 1991: ‘I don’t proceed arbitrarily [willkürlich], so
much as go forward in a planned way, in a direction in which I let something arise by
chance in order to correct it again, and so on….’ (Richter, “Interview Jonas Storsve
1991,” in Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007: Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, eds.
Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist [Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König,
2008], 280: ‘Dabei gehe ich weniger willkürlich vor, sondern eher geplannt in der
Richtung, dass ich per Zufall etwas entstehen lasse, um es wieder zu korrigieren, und so
fort.’ [Author’s translation.])
17 Richter, “Interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986,” in Writings, 191.
18 Throughout the history of Western aesthetics, this concept has been continually debated.
For an overview, see Crispin Sartwell, “Beauty,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, <http://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/spr2014/entries/beauty/>
22 On the history of abstraction conceived as a form of visual music, see Kerry Brougher
et al., Visual music: synaesthesia in art and music since 1900 (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2005). For a comprehensive treatment of the relations between abstract art and
natural beauty, see Meanings of abstract art: between nature and theory, eds. Paul
Crowther and Isabel Wünsche (New York: Routledge. 2012).
26 Richter, “Text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982,” in Writings, 121.
27 Richter outlined his materialist beliefs in his studio notebook in 1986: ‘I am a materialist
on principle. Mind and spirit, soul, volition, feeling, instinctive surmise, etc., have their
material causes (mechanical, chemical, electronic, etc.); and they vanish when their phy
sical base vanishes, just as the work done by a computer vanishes when it is destroyed or
switched off.’ (“Notes, 1986,” in Writings, 161.)
28 Richter, “Text for catalogue of documenta 7, Kassel, 1982,” in Writings, 121.
29 Von Drathan has argued that the Abstrakte Bilder are intended to evoke a sense of reality
as it exists beyond our normal apprehension. Loock has described Richter’s abstract
watercolours in similar terms. (See Doris von Drathan, “Gerhard Richter: les pouvoirs de
l’abstraction,” Les cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, no. 40 [Summer 1992]:
82–84; and Ulrich Loock, untitled essay in Gerhard Richter: Aquarelle [Munich: Galerie
Fred Jahn, 1985], n.p.)
31 It was this conviction, for example, that underlay the exhibition Fundamental Painting
held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1975, in which Richter, exhibiting Graue
Bilder, participated. The show’s catalogue offered an overview of recent exhibitions
focussing on abstract painting indebted to minimalism and conceptualism. (See
Fundamentele schilderkunst = Fundamental painting [Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam, 1975], 12.)
32 See, in this regard, the biting review of the exhibition by Peter Moritz Pickshaus,
“G. Richter bei Fischer. Aufsässig,” Rheinischer Post, November 16, 1977, n.p.. A sub
sequent showing of the Weiche Abstrakte in New York at Sperone Westwater Fischer
received mixed reviews. Barbara Flynn, writing for Artforum, dismissed the works as
‘empty’ variations on Richter’s past efforts (Barbara Flynn, “Gerhard Richter,” Artforum
International, vol. 16, no. 8 [April 1978]: 62). In ArtNews I. Michael Danoff declared
himself, in contrast, to be captivated: “…like beautiful details from a larger work—the
paintings are visually appealing and psychologically stimulating.” (I. Michael Danoff,
ArtNews, vol. 77, no.4 [April 1978]: 151.) On Richter’s initial hesitation to exhibit the
Skizzen, see his comments to Robert Storr, in Richter, “MoMA Interview with Robert
Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 427.
33 In the late 1970s, Richter showed the Skizzen and the Weiche Abstrakte in New York (at
Sperone Westwater Fischer in 1978), Halifax, Nova Scotia (at Anna Leonowens Gallery
in 1978), Eindhoven (at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in 1978) and London (at the
Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1979). Not until 1982, did he again show them in the
Rhineland, as part of a survey of his abstract work since 1976, held in Bielefeld and
Mannheim. That same year, he also showed the Abstrakte Bilder widely with gallerists in
West Germany for the first time.
36 Richter, “Interview with Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984,” in Writings, 136.
37 Richter, “Interview with Babette Richter, 2002,” in Writings, 445.
38 For indicative examples of this position, see Robert Rosenblum’s account of the new
painting as a ‘liberating eruption… from beneath the repressive restraints of the in
tellect…’ in the catalogue for Zeitgeist, a major public exhibition of the period (Robert
Rosenblum, “Thoughts on the Origins of ‘Zeitgeist’,” in Zeitgeist. International Art
Exhibition Berlin 1982 [Berlin: Martin Gropius Bau, 1982], 11), and Wolfgang Max
Faust’s many essays stressing the intensity and raw emotional violence of the work of the
Neue Wilde (for instance: “‘Du hast keine Chance, Nutze sie!’ With it and against it:
Tendencies in Recent German Art,” Artforum, vol. 21, no. 1 [September 1982]: 37.)
39 Richter, conversation with the author, June 30, 2010. In 2002, he described the atmo
sphere of the period as one in which painting badly was mandatory: ‘“good” painting was
frowned upon, and quality was practically a swear word.’ (Richter, “Interview with
Babette Richter, 2002,” in Writings, 395.
40 Richter, “Notes, 1984,” in Writings, 133–134.
41 This identification was most explicit in the work of Fetting, who painted images of Van
Gogh in Berlin, through which he expressed his sense of kinship with the artist as a social
outsider. One reason for this feeling of marginality was Fetting’s homosexuality, which, in
a gesture that was unusual for the period, he openly addressed in his work. So too did his
colleague Salomé, who at one point claimed that homosexuals in West Germany lived in
conditions akin to concentration camps, a claim that was greatly exaggerated but by no
means baseless. (On these positions and identifications, see Refigured Painting: The
German Image 1960-88, eds. Thomas Krens, Michael Govan and Joseph Thompson
[New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum/Munich: Prestel, 1989]: 261 and 281
respectively.)
42 As the artists recounted in an interview in 1981, their work had no underlying concept or
programme and no didactic aspirations, nor did they have any stylistic allegiances.
Instead, they looked upon their work as an exercise in self-discovery, which was as
mutable as the self itself. (“Mühlheimer Freiheit/Eine Interviewmontage,” Kunstforum
International 47 [1981]: 117–119.)
44 On Richter’s rejection of Surrealist automatism as a working principle, see “Interview
with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” reprinted in Writings, 182.
45 Richter, “Interview with Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984,” in Writings, 139. Richter’s wavering faith
in his work’s potential to fulfil his highest hopes for it was a perennial concern of his writings
in the 1980s. A studio notebook entry from February 1985 encapsulates this sentiment:
Of course I constantly despair at my own incapacity, at the impossibility of ever ac
complishing anything, of painting a valid, true picture… But then I always have the hope
that if I persevere, it might one day happen. (Richter, “Notes, 1985,” in Writings, 140.)
46 Richter, “Interview with Amine Haase, 1982,” in Writings, 127.
47 Richter, “Interview with Anna Tilroe, 1987,” in Writings, 198.
49 As Richter wrote with respect to minimalism in 1983: ‘I saw this as an attempt to develop
a new alphabet for the art of the future.’ (“Notes, 1983,” in Writings, 129.) Related
comments on the radical and progressive nature of postwar abstraction appear in his
notes for 1985 (Writings, 142.)
54 For indicative remarks about these artists, who, tellingly, painted works that are far more
classical than Richter’s, see Writings, 129, 182, 187.
55 Kuspit, “Flak from the ‘Radicals’: The American Case against Current German Painting,”
reprinted in Art after modernism: rethinking representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York:
New Museum of Contemporary Art; Boston: D.R. Godine 1984), 151.
56 As was argued, for example, by Klaus Wagenbach in 1980, when Baselitz and Kiefer first
rose to international prominence. (See Klaus Wagenbach, “‘Neue Wilde,’ teutonisch,
faschistisch?,” Freibeuter 5, 1980: 138–147.)
57 Faust, “‘Du hast keine Chance, Nutze sie!,’” 37.
58 On the founding of the Galerie am Moritzplatz, as this exhibition space was called, see
Ernst Busche, “Van Gogh an der Mauer,” Kunstforum International 47 (Dec 1981/Jan
1982): 111. As Busche notes with respect to the freedoms extended to the Neue Wilde,
Berlin was itself a milieu of greater tolerance and openness, ‘permitting more space for
development and experimentation’ (109) than other cities in the country.
59 For a useful review of this controversy and responses by the artists, see Wagenbach,
“‘Neue Wilde,’ teutonisch, faschistisch?”: 138.
60 The question of marginality in the art world of the early 1980s turned not on the ac
ceptability or otherwise of certain forms of self-expression, or on the right of artists to
express themselves as they saw fit. Instead, it turned on the degree of recognition accorded
to certain modes of self-expression and to artists belonging to particular segments of
society. As they had throughout the modernist period, white, male painters could achieve
recognition most readily. Recognition of female artists still lagged significantly behind
that of their male colleagues but had certainly improved since the early sixties. The re
lative ethnic homogeneity of West Germany meant that racial marginality did not play a
major role in the art world, but the homosexuality of the Neue Wilde painters Salomé and
Fetting was a talking point. The artists themselves stressed their marginalisation within
society, but the recognition they achieved and the blasé response to their homoerotic
paintings, affirmed the growing tolerance of the art world in keeping with the recent
values shift. Beyond the art world, prejudice remained but had softened significantly
throughout the 1970s (on this point, see Clayton J. Whisnant, Male Homosexuality in
West Germany: Between Freedom and Persecution, 1945-69 [London/New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012], 204–212.
62 Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte. Die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als
Symptom und Symbol der Zeit (Salzburg-Wien: Otto Müller Verlag, 1948), published in
English as Art in Crisis: The Lost Centre, trans. Brian Battershaw (London: Hollis and
Carter Ltd., 1957).
63 Richter, “Meine Auffassung über die Situation der modernen Kunst,” May 12, 1956,
quoted in Jeanne Anne Nugent, “From Hans Sedlmayr to Mars and Back Again: New
Problems in the Old History of Gerhard Richter’s Radical Reworking of Modern Art,” in
Mehring, Nugent, Seydl, eds., Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951–1972, 39.
70 Richter, “Interview with Dorothea Dietrich, 1985,” in Writings, 146. For a second ac
count of this distinction, see Richter “MoMA Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in
Writings, 425.
72 It should be noted that on one occasion Richter also placed Hals and Goya in the lineage
of the Informel tradition, but as forerunners to the practice of rapid-fire abstract painting
that took hold in the mid-20th century, hence as precocious exemplars of an otherwise
modernist lineage. (See Richter, “Interview with Irmeline Lebeer, 1973,” in Writings,
79–80.)
73 Richter, “Interview mit Hans Ulrich Obrist, 1993,” in Text: 1961–2007, 295.
[Translation revised by the author.]
78 Richter, “Interview with Dorothea Dietrich, 1985,” in Writings, 146; “Interview with
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings; and van Bruggen, “Gerhard Richter:
Painting as a Moral Act”: 83.
79 For critical appraisals of Neo-Expressionism that stress its overblown insincerity, see
Craig Owens, “Honor, Power and the Love of Women,” Carter Ratcliff, “The Short Life
of the Sincere Stroke,” and Hal Foster, “The Expressive Fallacy,” all of which appeared in
a special issue of Art in America. (“The expressionism Question II,” Art in America, vol.
71, no. 1 [January 1983].)
80 Owens, “Honor, Power and the Love of Women”: 10.
81 On the outwardly spontaneous but in fact carefully planned nature of Richter’s compositions,
see, for instance: “Abstraktion ist wieder ‘in’,” Westfalen Blatt, December 12, 1982;
Wolfgang Minaty, “Lava auf der Leinwand,” Die Welt, January 21, 1982; and Peter Moritz
Pickshaus, “Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder, 1976–1981,” Kunstforum International, vol.
39, no. 3 (April/May, 1982): 220. On the mechanical appearance of the backdrops and
shaded geometries of the Abstrakte Bilder, see Peter Winter, “Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte
Bilder, 1976–1981,” Das Kunstwerk 35, Nr. 2, (1982): 65; and Stephen Ellis, “The Elusive
Gerhard Richter,” Art in America, vol. 74, no. 11 (November 1986): 186.
82 Remarks by Richter on abstraction and the incomprehensible appeared in the catalogs for
‘documenta 7’ and ‘Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder 1976–1981,’ both held in 1981.
The latter was the first major exhibition of the Skizzen and Abstrakte Bilder. For critical
responses to these paintings, which take their cue from Richter’s comments, see, for ex
ample, “Aufblitzendes, farbensprühendes Feuerwerk,” Westfalen–Blatt, August 1, 1982:
A16; Winter, “Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder, 1976–1981”: 65; and Bernard Blistène,
“Gerhard Richter ou l’exercise du soupçon,” in Gerhard Richter (St. Etienne: Musée d’Art
et d’Industrie, 1984), 5–8.
83 Nancy Princenthal, “Gerhard Richter: Sperone, Westwater Fischer,” ArtNews, vol. 82,
no. 3 (March 1983): 160.
84 Phyllis Derfner, “Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman and Sperone Westwater,” Art in
America, vol. 73, no. 9 (September 1985): 138. For readings of the Abstrakte Bilder as
parodic paintings, see Gary Indiana, “Living with Contradictions: Gerhard Richter,” The
Village Voice, March 26, 1985: 91; and Claire Peillod, “Gerhard Richter, musée d’art et
d’industrie,” Art Press 79 (March 1984): 56. For a more earnest assessment, see Kate
Linker, “Gerhard Richter, Sperone Westwater Fischer,” Artforum International, vol. 21,
no. 8 (April 1983): 71.
85 Richter, quoted in Coosje van Bruggen, “Gerhard Richter: Painting as a Moral Act,”
Artforum International, vol. 23 no. 9 (May 1985): 91.
92 Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 185. From the late
1970s onward, Richter consistently denied any interest in making paintings about other
paintings. When asked by Bruce Ferguson in 1978 if ‘your painting calls into question the
art style which it resembles or acts as a form of art criticism?,’ he demurred: ‘I can’t say
yes,’ he responded, ‘…art criticism. I don’t believe so.’ (Richter, “Interview with Bruce
Ferguson and Jeffrey Spalding, 1978,” in Writings, 111.) Talking with Coosje van
Bruggen five years later, he spoke of wanting to recapture the standards of the Old
Masters in his classical Foto-Bilder, though not as a form of commentary or critique: ‘I
want to paint that way, but not just as a quotation,’ he insisted. (Richter, van Bruggen,
“Gerhard Richter: Painting as a Moral Act”: 83.)
93 Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 186. For a later,
more extensive discussion of Richter’s comments to Buchloh on this issue, and on the
‘expressive’ but not ‘Expressionist’ nature of the Abstrakte Bilder, see Richter, “Interview
with Robert Storr,” in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), 178-181.
94 Helmut Klages, “Wertewandel in Deutschland in den 90er Jahren,” in Wertewandel.
Herausforderung für die Unternehmenspolitik in den 90er Jahren, eds. Lutz von
Rosenstiel (Stuttgart: Schäffer-Poeschel Verlag, 1993), 6–7.
95 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1996
[1976]); Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, “Die Stille Revolution,” Allensbacher Jahrbuch der
Demoskopie, 1976–77: VII–XXXIX.
96 Helmut Kohl, cited in Wolfram Bickerich, “A German Giant: The Political Legacy of Helmut
Kohl,” Der Spiegel, June 16, 2017. Available online at http://www.spiegel.de/international/
germany/former-german-chancellor-helmut-kohl-dies-at-87-a-1152601.html. Following his
re-election, Kohl also joined Reagan and Thatcher in calling for greater personal freedom
from government regulation: ‘We don’t want more government, we want less; we don’t want
less personal freedom, but more,’ he announced in an early policy statement. (Kohl in
“Helmut Kohl. Der Anti-Ökonom,” Die Zeit 27, 2017. Available online at https://www.zeit.
de/2017/27/helmut-kohl-wirtschaftspolitik-anti-oekonom.)
97 Data gathered as a part of the European Values Survey, initiated in 1980 and repeated every
decade thereafter, pointed to a moderate growth in tolerance of homosexuality and support
for abortion rights in West Germany in the 1980s (for an analysis, see Jacqueline Scott and
Michael Braun, “Individualisation of Family Values?,” in Globalisation, Value Change, and
Generations. A Cross-National and Intergenerational Perspective, eds. Peter Ester, Michael
Braun and Peter Mohler (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2006), 73.). The same survey data confirmed a
more significant drift toward an individualisation of religious values during the same period
(see Loek Halman and Thorleif Pettersson, “A Decline of Religious Values?,” in Ester, Braun
and Mohler, Globalisation, Value Change, and Generations, 35–38.). Data and an appraisal
of changing household makeup in the early eighties appears in Wolfgang Zapf with Sigrid
Breuer and Jürgen Hampel, Individualisierung und Sicherheit. Untersuchungen zur
Lebensqualität in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1985),
22–25. See also Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, The Normal Chaos of Love
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press; Cambridge, MA, USA: Blackwell, 1995), 15. On the pro
liferation of youth cultures in both Germanys in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the
relationship of this phenomenon to the values shift and individualisation, see Knud Andresen,
“West- und ostdeutsche Jugendszenen in den 1980er-Jahren — ein Individualisie-
rungsschub?,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 55 (2015): 445–475. Increasingly permissive par
ental attitudes during the sixties and early seventies, coupled with a growing emphasis placed
on raising children to be independent, were hypothesised by several commentators as one
factor underlying the increase in individualistic values among young West Germans at this
time. (For two sets of data and analyses of this change, see Helmut Klages,
Wertorientierungen im Wandel: Rü ckblick, Gegenwartsanalyse, Prognosen [Campus Verlag:
Frankfurt am Main, 1984], 19; and Noelle-Neumann, Die Stille Revolution, XXII.)
98 For an overview of the many studies confirming the growing urge for greater self-
determination among West Germans between the early 1980s and the early 1990s, see
Ulrich Beck, “The Debate on the ‘Individualisation Theory’ in Today’s Sociology in
Germany,” in Sociology in Germany. Soziologie, Special Edition 3, ed. B. Schäfers
(Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1994), 192.
99 As outlined in Ulrich Mückenberger, “Die Krise der Normalarbeitsverhältnisse?,”
Zeitschrift für Sozialreform, vol. 31, no. 7 (1985): 415–434.
100 Zapf with Breuer and Hampel, Individualisierung und Sicherheit, 17.
101 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992),
130–132.
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“Aufblitzendes, farbensprühendes Feuerwerk.” Westfalen–Blatt, August 1, 1982: A16.
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Beck, Ulrich. “The Debate on the ‘Individualisation Theory’ in Today’s Sociology in
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Musée d’Art et d’Industrie, 1984, 5–8.
Brougher, Kerry, et al. Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900. London:
Thames and Hudson, 2005.
Busche, Ernst. “Van Gogh an der Mauer.” Kunstforum International 47 (December 1981/
January 1982): 108–116.
Crowther, Paul and Isabel Wünsche, eds. Meanings of abstract art: between nature and theory.
New York: Routledge. 2012.
Danoff, I. Michael. ArtNews 77 no. 4 (April 1978): 151.
Derfner, Phyllis. “Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman and Sperone Westwater.” Art in
America 73 no. 9 (September 1985): 138.
de Wilde, Eliane. Fundamentele schilderkunst = Fundamental painting. Amsterdam: Stedelijk
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Ellis, Stephen. “The Elusive Gerhard Richter.” Art in America 74 no. 11 (November 1986): 186.
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Faust, Wolfgang Max. “‘Du hast keine Chance, Nutze sie!’ With it and against it: Tendencies
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5 Elective Affiliation
During the mid-1980s, Richter achieved widespread recognition in the English-

speaking world for the first time, an achievement that marked the start of the final
phase of his search for belonging. In the wake of this success, his Abstrakte Bilder
moved more closely into line with his classical aspirations, becoming simpler, calmer
and more orderly. The Informel remained a lurking presence in the series, but he now
controlled it more emphatically, a change suggesting, among other things, that the
growth in self-assurance, which had made its presence felt in the late seventies, had
continued. As he persisted in this more settled vein, he began making Foto-Bilder and
works in other media that ratified a further shift in his public persona: his self-styling
as a bourgeois conservative. By this stage, he had shed any lingering ambivalence
about embracing the traditionalist leanings that had always been a feature of his art.
More surprisingly, he was also embracing forms of collectivity from which he had felt
estranged since his youth: the family, in its most traditional bourgeois incarnation,
religion, and national identity, each a noted touchstone for conservatives. With this
unexpected change in his social outlook, he was able to obtain the sense of personal
and social belonging that had proven elusive to him since his childhood.
Richter achieved this resolution on the same elective basis as he had managed to
attain professional belonging in his art. In so doing, he had proven the utility of
elective affiliation as a means of balancing freedom with security in a highly in
dividualised society like that into which the Federal Republic had developed by the
time of the Wende. His works attesting to the success of this process in other areas of
his life thus acquired an important social resonance in the 1990s and the early 2000s,
as the economic insecurity that had made its presence felt in the West during the
1980s intensified substantially. Artistically, these works were also noteworthy, for it
was during this same period that the increasingly globalised art world of which
Germany was one important centre, showed signs via the rise of participatory and
archival art practices of a growing preoccupation with the insecurities occasioned by
a now triumphant neoliberal individualism.
Richter was not affiliated with either trend and did not comment on the socio-
political changes of the period. He remained hopeful, however, that his work could
serve as a source of comfort and reassurance for its viewers. Responding in this spirit
to his public commissions for the reopened Reichstag and Cologne Cathedral, this
chapter concludes with an assessment of the merits of elective affiliation with tradi
tional social institutions, as Richter modelled it in each of these projects.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003266198-6
Success and social equilibrium
After earning acclaim in West Germany in 1982 with early showings of the Abstrakte
Bilder, demand for Richter’s work in New York, which had hitherto been modest,
begin to escalate, a process that culminated in a sell-out two venue show at Marian
Goodman Gallery and Sperone Westwater in 1985.1 With this event, he was pro
pelled into the top tier of the international art world and a discernible shift in his
public persona set in. As collectors and public institutions throughout the
Anglophone world clamoured to acquire his work, and preparations for major survey
exhibitions in Düsseldorf and North America progressed, he grew discernibly more
forthcoming in his interviews and more forthrightly conservative in his demeanour.
Already, in the early 1980s, initial intimations of this shift had been apparent. It
was while speaking with Peter Bode in 1983, for example, that he first revealed details
of his upbringing and discussed aspects of his training in the East.2 That same year, in
an extended conversation with Coosje van Bruggen, he shared his thoughts on the
role of the classical in his art for the first time.3 Finally, in 1985, he held interviews
with Dorothea Dietrich and Benjamin Buchloh, which were comfortably his longest
to date, in which he acknowledged the personal dimension of his painting. In addition
to his exchange with Dietrich on the role of self-expression in his work (discussed in
the previous chapter), he admitted to Buchloh that his choice of subject-matter for his
early Foto-Bilder was anything but random or indifferent.4 He did not refer to spe
cific works, but he stressed that his posture of indifference had been just that. It had
been enacted, as he later put it, ‘in order not to have to say what I might have been
thinking at that point, not to pour my heart out. That would have been embarras
sing.’5 That same year, in the catalogue for his survey exhibition at the Städtische
Kunsthalle für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, organised by Jürgen
Harten, he allowed reproductions of his East German work to appear for the first
time, along with images from the 1940s and an example of his Informel painting from
the early 1960s.6
It was during his exchange with Buchloh on the acknowledged conservatism of his
choice of medium (also discussed in the previous chapter) that he began to display his
new willingness to openly identify as bourgeois. As time progressed, he made similar
remarks elsewhere, most extensively in two studio notes from 1989, which, in a
further indication of his growing openness7, he published in the early 1990s:
The word ‘bourgeois,’ formerly a term of distinction, now negative in its

connotations, often used, always in a loose and polemical way, vacuously and
baselessly. ‘Bourgeois’—means tidy, educated, law-abiding, as opposed to wild,
colourfully dressed, ostentatiously nonconformist…
Just as conformity is not the same thing as security—the word denotes a
deference to prevailing fashions, and to the prevailing climate or system, which
springs from stupidity, cowardice, laziness, and baseness—nonconformity is not
necessarily its opposite, but often springs from a courage born of stupidity and
blindness. Nonconformist laxity often originates in the confined, retarded
structure of mindless insolence.8
Although alert to the dangers of a mindless and reactionary conservatism, from which
he was at pains to keep his distance, Richter nonetheless made it clear that his
Elective Affiliation 153
Figure 5.1 Gerhard Richter, Jugendbildnis [Youth Portrait], 1988, oil on canvas, 67 × 62 cm.
© Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253). From the series 18. Oktober, 1977 [October
18th, 1977].
sympathies lay in a conservative direction. In the process, he voiced a typically

conservative concern with the maintenance of law and order, a topic that had been on
his mind of late as he completed a series of paintings that further burnished his in
ternational reputation, 18. Oktober, 1977 [October 18th, 1977] (1988).
The subject of this now-famous eighteen painting cycle was the Red Army Faction
[RAF], a militant group that in the late 1960s and 1970s had staged a campaign of
bombings and assassinations throughout West Germany in a bid to foment socialist
revolution. By the mid-1970s, the leading members of the group, Andreas Baader,
Gudrin Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Jan-Carl Raspe, and Holger Meins, had been arrested
and imprisoned in a specially-constructed wing of Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart, where
they remained throughout their trial. Shortly after the trial’s completion, on the date
Richter’s title commemorates, Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were found dead in their cells,
apparently having committed suicide. Since Meins had died on hunger strike in 1974 and
Meinhof had been found dead in her cell a year earlier, the key founding members of the
group were now deceased, leading many on the left, including Genzken and Buchloh,
with whom Richter was at odds on this issue, to suspect foul play. Despite a subsequent
report confirming suicide, those who doubted the government’s integrity remained un
convinced, leaving the matter publicly unresolved.9
Working from archival photographs, Richter returned to his black and white photo
painting idiom for the first time since the early 1970s, producing a group of images
that offered a fragmented and elliptical treatment of its subject. The cycle’s sole
unambiguous quality was its melancholic tone. From a school photograph of an
innocent-looking Meinhof (see Figure 5.1) to hazy images of Baader’s body on his cell
floor, to a painting of the cell itself, whose streaming surface seems to be weeping (see
Figure 5.2), sadness is the one persistent feature of the series, a quality that led to
accusations by American conservatives that Richter was a terrorist sympathiser.10 He
himself insisted, however, that he was mourning the tragic outcome of the group’s
overzealous idealism: of their misplaced faith in ‘the illusion,’ as he put it in 1989,
‘that unacceptable circumstances of life can be changed by [the] conventional ex
pedient of violent struggle….’11
Figure 5.2 Gerhard Richter, Zelle [Cell], 1988, oil on canvas, 240 × 100 cm. © Gerhard
Richter 2021 (0253). From the series 18. Oktober, 1977 [October 18th, 1977].
For obvious reasons, he had not shared the goals of the terrorists, nor did he
support their methods. As he explained in his notes for a press conference held for the
cycle’s unveiling in February 1989: ‘Having come from the GDR in the early 1960s, I
naturally declined to summon up any sympathy for the aims and methods of the Red
Army Faction [RAF]. I was impressed by the terrorists’ energy, their uncompromising
determination and their absolute bravery; but I could not find it in my heart to
condemn the state for its harsh response. That is what States are like, and I had
known other more ruthless ones.’12 Although no eager advocate for any form of
government, he was committed to the maintenance of liberal democracy, regarding it
as the least objectionable of the several social systems he had known.13 In siding with
the government, he was therefore opting for the best system he knew for maintaining
law and order at the smallest cost to liberty.
Order, abstraction, and assurance

A growing emphasis on order was also evident in the Abstrakte Bilder Richter painted in
the late 1980s, as his success continued internationally. At a time when many of his
colleagues, most notably the Neue Wilde, saw their sales and their careers collapse fol
lowing the stock market crash of 1987, demand for his own work increased unabated,
providing him with further reassurance concerning his position in the art world.14 This
growing public affirmation, which continued into the early 1990s, correlated with a shift
within his abstract work toward more orderly and calm compositions.
Prior to the late 1980s, the Abstrakte Bilder had been tenuously composed—so much
so, that it felt as if the forces of disarray could overwhelm them at any time. As the
decade reached its close, however, Richter began using squeegees to give his imagery a
firmer sense of structure. His initial employment of these rigid, plastic scrapers, which he
used on an occasional basis in the early eighties and favoured increasingly thereafter,
most likely took its impetus from Götz, who used flexible rubber blades, along with rags
and brushes, to form his swirling, vortical compositions.15 Richter’s blades lacked the
pliancy of Götz’s and were typically far longer, ranging in length from around 50 cm to
over two metres (compared with roughly 30 cm for Götz). Richter also deployed his
squeegees at much slower speeds than Götz and aimed for very different results.16 Instead
of using them to cut through wet pigment and expose the canvas weave beneath, Richter
used them to blend and layer colours in surprising ways. After first applying paint to a
squeegee’s blade, he pushed—and sometimes pulled—it across the picture’s surface.
When traversing dry paint, the blade might torque and jump unexpectedly, producing
stuttering striations and flecks. Crossing wetter pigment, the colours that bled off it ran
together with those they moved through on the canvas, creating bleary, marbled trails.
Such is the viscosity of oil paint that this process could be physically demanding, again
allowing for the prospect of uncontrolled torquing and wavering. When the viscosity of
pigment on the blade exceeded that of the paint that is traversed, it was liable to tear up
underlying layers of colour, creating ragged, shallow cavities on the painting’s surface.
The full range of these pictorial effects is evident in Abstraktes Bild (710) (1989) (see
Figure 5.3), a work whose rutted, paint-choked surface is typical of entries to the series
from the late 1980s. As with prior Abstrakte Bilder, Richter began this work by using
brushes to lay down a mosaic of freeform colour. He then used squeegees to smear trails
of thicker pigment across and through this patchwork arrangement. While his initial
traversals of the squeegee might run in any number of directions, the last was vertical and
crossed the full expanse of the canvas. With this concluding gesture, he imposed a
measure of clear, geometric structure on the accumulated strata underneath.
Initially, this structure was tenuous, due to the break-up of his final coats of colour
into flecked and stippled trails. In the early 1990s, however, it became more robust
and rigorous. Paintings from this period, like Abstraktes Bild (771) (1992) (see
Figure 5.4), not only possess a firmer sense of order than those of the late 1980s, they
also feel calmer by virtue of their smoother surfaces and blended colouration. To
make Abstraktes Bild (771), Richter dragged his squeegee sideways across the canvas
as he neared the end of his painting process, applying pressure firmly to strip accu
mulated pigment from its surface. He then scraped thin, upright charcoal trails across
this sideways-streaming, glossy expanse to establish a striated composition. Not only
do the softly melded colours of this image moderate the harsh juxtapositions that had
remained a feature of the Abstrakte Bilder throughout the 1980s, but the charcoal
blended through the composition further lowers its chromatic intensity, a device he
employed often at this time. Gone were the shrill synthetic hues that he had favoured
a decade earlier, along with the unmixed primaries by which these had been sup
planted. In their place were gentler screeds of colour that modulated unpredictably
between extremes of light and dark.
In these orthogonally structured images, chaos was more firmly brought to order
than it had been in his works of the 1980s, but never in a manner that felt anxious or
belaboured. Disorder remained the medium from which their regularity was con
jured, but the facility with which this structure was established suggested a con
tinuation of the process of pushing back against the Informel that Richter had begun
in the Skizzen. If those works had given notice of his rising determination to confront
the challenges he faced instead of fleeing them, then—by the terms of his living
method—the calmer, simpler, and more orderly Abstrakte Bilder of the early 1990s
suggested that his sense of self-assurance had grown stronger in the interim, as well it
might in view of his success. Not only had his choice to break with minimalism and
conceptualism and reorient his work toward the past long since been vindicated, but
his international breakthrough had brought him greater recognition than he had ever
hoped to gain when he arrived in Düsseldorf. At that stage, the prospect of making
work on his own terms had been uppermost in his mind, with any public recognition
he received for doing so a welcome bonus.17 To have found himself at the peak of his
profession decades later was thus immensely gratifying, all the more so because he
had, indeed, been rewarded for going his own way in his art, a path on which he had
continued in his more orderly Abstrakte Bilder of the early nineties.
By this stage, he was no longer juxtaposing elements of gestural abstraction and
colour field painting, as he had in the first Abstrakte Bilder, but rather brokering a
more complex synthesis of not only these two styles but geometric abstraction also.
Via the disciplined traversals of his squeegee, all three paradigms were fused. His
achievement of this sophisticated merger meant that now more than ever, he was
speaking the language of abstraction’s history, but in his own voice. As never before,
moreover, he was making it look easy. Instead of strenuously striving to construct a
finely balanced composition, which barely withstood the forces of disarray, as he had
in the early eighties, he now fashioned stronger and simpler zones of order in the
midst of tumult. And while this tumult still pervaded his compositions at a local level,
globally they had never come closer to embodying his classical ideal of calm, order,
and simplicity. As always, the Informel remained the medium of his painting and his
existence alike, but his capacity to subdue it appeared to have substantially increased.
Throughout the remainder of the decade and on into the new millennium, he would
continue making calm, compacted surfaces of randomly distributed colour, smeared
into a state of cohesion along vertical or horizontal axes. The colour and texture of
these works would vary greatly, running the gamut from parched to pastoral,
washed-out to darkly smouldering, powdery to fluid and aquatic. For the most part,
they would be lushly harmonious, to a degree seldom witnessed in his previous ab
stract work (see Figure 5.5). Periodically, however, they would exhibit signs of dis
sonance, as if his process of contending with his life’s vicissitudes had struck trouble
at the time that he produced them, something that is known to have been the case on
at least two occasions. His habit of scraping ragged channels into many of his
compositions of the early nineties, which he likened to an act of wounding or ag
gression, coincided with his separation from Genzken, whom he divorced in 1993.18
The works that he produced in 1999 and later described as ‘tired,’ ‘resigned’ and
‘plaintive’ were the first he made following a stroke he had suffered a year earlier (see
Figure 5.6).19 But these periods of disruption notwithstanding, he would continue to
enact his living method in a more easeful manner than he had in the 1980s as if an
abiding sense of equilibrium continued to anchor him throughout.
Psychologistic claims, such as this, must of course be weighed with care and
guarded against a range of potential errors. Richter’s distinction between his art’s
expression of his own feelings and its embodiment of emotions belonging to the work
itself must, of course, be kept in mind in this connection, lest the latter be mistaken
for the former. So too must the threat of projecting feelings onto the paintings where
Figure 5.5 Gerhard Richter, Fuji (839–42), 1996, oil on Alu Dibond, 29 × 37 cm. © Gerhard
Richter 2021 (0253).
none (or at least none that were inherited from the artist) are to be found. More
fundamentally, it may be wrong at the outset to assume that the formal and atmo
spheric shifts that occurred in the Abstrakte Bilder between the 1980s and the 1990s
can be explained via recourse to biography.
Such concerns must be acknowledged, but so too should the fact that these changes
are unlikely to have been random. Since no other explanation has been ventured, it is
hard to see how else they might have happened other than in responses to changes in
Richter’s life circumstances. His own propensity to psychologise his abstract works
not only provides a platform for this hypothesis but also makes it reasonable to posit
further links between the Abstrakte Bilder and events in his personal life, along the
lines he has already suggested. We could, of course, reject his psychologising claims
(and with it any recourse to biography) on the grounds that they are false or mis
taken; but this choice would be difficult to justify, especially in light of his account of
his living method. This was admittedly rather broad, but it is precisely in virtue of its
generalised character that, in tandem with his thinking about the Informel and the
classical, it licenses an interpretive approach to the series as a whole, which correlates
broad shifts in his approach to it with broad changes in his living situation.
In the early 1990s, advancing age was no doubt among these. So too was financial
security, which allowed Richter to retire from the Academy in 1994. A third factor,
relating not only to the Abstrakte Bilder but also to other works of the period, was a
change in his relationship with several forms of collectivity, from which he had formerly
been estranged. The first and most immediate of these was family, which he affirmed as a
newfound source of happiness in a series of paintings of his third wife Sabine Moritz
(whom he had married after leaving the Academy) and their infant son Moritz.
Late family pictures

Since making his initial family portraits in the mid-1960s, Richter had returned to this
subject on a number of occasions. In 1977, he painted two small portraits of Betty,
followed by a third, larger work in 1988. Thereafter, in the early 1990s, he had twice
painted images of Genzken. Like his works of the 1960s, all had been pervaded by a sense
of distance. His first Betty portrait depicts his daughter as a cool-eyed and attractive young
woman, whose red lips suggest she is wearing lipstick (see Figure 5.7). The painting’s
source photograph reveals that this is not the case, but also throws up a more striking
discrepancy between the two images: Betty appears to be a teenager in the painting, but in
the photograph, she is evidently younger (see Figure 5.8), as was in fact the case when it
Figure 5.7 Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1977, oil on canvas, 30 × 40 cm. © Gerhard Richter
2021 (0253).
Figure 5.8 Gerhard Richter, Atlas sheet 394, 1978. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253). Includes
source photograph for Figure 5.6.
was taken.20 This inconsistency suggests that, in her father’s eyes, she was already be
coming an adult, and thus slipping—all too swiftly and prematurely—from his grasp. Her
blank stare and the matte, lifeless quality of Richter’s paintwork increase this sense of
separation, an effect in keeping with their real-life relationship. Having chosen to focus on
his career during Betty’s childhood, he had not been an ideal father. As a consequence, the
two were not particularly close.21 His second and third Betty portraits feel equally remote.
In the former work, she recedes into a foggy haze. In the latter, she twists away from the
camera as if refusing to meet her father’s gaze.
Richter’s images of Genzken were painted near the end of their relationship and
waver in their treatment of their subject. In three initial canvasses from 1990, she
appears in close-up, looking directly at the camera. This proximity and her open
facial expression in all three images make these works feel notably less distant than
his prior family pictures. Their extreme indistinction undercuts their immediacy,
however, as do the unnatural white backdrops of two of the three compositions.
Richter’s subsequent nude studies, painted at the time of the couple’s separation in
1993, intensify this remoteness by anonymising Genzken completely. Depicting her
from behind in a range of studied poses, they withhold her identity so firmly that in
some cases she is readily mistaken for a boy (see Figure 5.9).
By the standards of his prior family pictures, the S. mit Kind paintings from 1995
(see Figure 5.10) feel warmer and more intimate, and this is in spite of Richter’s
efforts to confound such an impression. Each of the eight compositions shows Sabine
cradling Moritz in soft focus, the slight confusion of their bodies befitting the clo
seness of their union. The gentle aspect of this blurring further evokes the sense of
Richter’s own loving gaze cast upon them. But these sentiments are jarringly dis
rupted, by the raw and intrusive alterations to which he subjected six of the eight
images. After finishing these works, he returned to them to smear, streak or scrape
Figure 5.9 Gerhard Richter, I. G., 1993, oil on canvas, 72 × 102 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021
(0253).
Figure 5.10 Gerhard Richter, S. mit Kind [S. with Child], 1995, oil on canvas, 52 × 62 cm.
aside their imagery, distorting his original compositions or cloaking them in a layer of
abstract paintwork. Both interventions are disconcerting. Not only do they introduce
a distance at odds with the tenderness of their subject, but their aggressively dis
figuring impact raises the unsettling prospect of a surge of violent feeling on Richter’s
part, directed toward his family.
Richter’s own account of his reasons for ‘attacking’ the paintings stresses other
motivations. The first was his failure to match the standards of painters like Vermeer
and Ingres, who were his chief artistic touchstones for the series.22 Frustrated by his
technical ineptitude, he sought, in paradoxical fashion, to rescue the works by
‘butchering’ them.23 His hope was to make them less legible and explicable and thus
more enigmatic and intriguing. The second motivation he has offered was a wish, as
he had in paintings past, to reduce the emotional transparency of his images.
Reluctant, as always, to place his private life on view, he set out to transform his
compositions into something more than mere depictions of his wife and child.24
Both accounts are credible, but it is telling that in relation to the latter his efforts at
emotional camouflage were less thorough than they had been in the past. In the 1960s
and early 1970s, he had allowed the apparent randomness of his subjects and the
impersonal connotations of copying from photographs to deflect attention from the
personal aspects of the Foto-Bilder. In the 1980s, he had used abstraction’s inherent
opacity, together with his half-blind painting process, to obviate the risk of self-
exposure in the Abstrakte Bilder. His attempts to detach the S. mit Kind works from
his private life were, by contrast, less extensive and convincing, as became apparent at
the time of their debut.
In a turn of events that is revealing in its own right, Richter unveiled the series in
the pages of Der Spiegel, Germany’s best-selling news magazine with a readership of
millions. In a four-page profile of Richter, Spiegel writer Jürgen Hohmeyer described
seeing the S. mit Kind works in Richter’s home before they had been exhibited.25 This
encounter, which the artist had facilitated, became the basis for Hohmeyer’s article.
Its focus was Richter’s growing willingness to allow the private dimensions of his
practice to remain visible. At first glance, the series had struck Hohmeyer as another
of Richter’s forays into history, this time exploring the mother and child genre. But
having recognised their sitters, he revised his opinion and took the works to be pri
marily concerned with the artist’s familial contentment. Despite Richter’s effort to
obscure most of the images, Hohmeyer judged this depersonalising tactic to be ‘half-
hearted,’ a slipping of the veil that left no doubt about his current state of happi
ness.26 While Hohmeyer did not provide his reasons for this assessment, it is readily
substantiated by the paintings. Richter’s streaks, scrapes, and smears may disrupt
their idyllic atmosphere, but they never suppress it. Regardless of how heavily he has
obscured them, his initial compositions remain legible, as do their emotional dy
namics. The series thus keeps his feelings toward his family on open view, while
simultaneously revealing his reluctance to have them register too plainly. With his
prior family pictures, there had been no such equivocation. His relationship with his
subjects had either been securely effaced or marked unambiguously by an atmosphere
of distance and detachment. The S. mit Kind paintings were thus more open and
more intimate than their predecessors, a quality that was equally apparent in a work
like Kleine Badende [Small Bather] (1994) (see Figure 5.11), a nude painting of
Sabine he had painted shortly before the S. mit Kind series.27
This atmospheric shift confirmed that, at the age of sixty-four, Richter had at last
achieved the feeling of familial belonging to which he had aspired for several decades.28
After a first marriage that had foundered over his reluctance to assume the responsi
bilities of fatherhood, and a second in which he had had no children, he had embarked
belatedly on a third, in which he was determined to correct both his own prior missteps
and compensate for the shortcomings of his childhood. With his career now in hand and
Figure 5.11 Gerhard Richter, Kleine Badende [Small Bather], 1994, oil on canvas, 51 × 36 cm.
his professorship relinquished, he could make himself available to his new family, with
few concerns about financial security. Using land that he and Genzken had purchased in
the well-to-do suburb of Hahnwald on the edge of Cologne, he had a modernist white
villa constructed. Much like his abstract paintings of the period, the building, which he
himself designed, was orthogonally structured, its symmetrical plan consisting, in a fit
tingly classical manner, of an equilateral cross. Surrounded by an ample garden, and in
time supplemented by a studio in a separate building at the front of the property, which
screened it—and thus his personal life—from the street, this simple, spacious home al
lowed the family to live in comfort and independence in line with the ideals of middle-
class familial normality instilled in him in his youth by his mother and any number of the
novels he absorbed. As in the classic bourgeois scenario, limned vividly in works like
Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, his family home could become a protected enclave and
a closed world of its own. Within its confines, he could serve as a doting and attentive
patriarch, able to give his children the best in life and concerned to instil in them the
values he held dear.
A photograph that Richter commissioned in 2002 from the photographer Thomas
Struth, distils this aspiration with acuity (see Figure 5.12). The commission came
about when the New York Times Magazine requested a photograph to illustrate a
profile of Richter, to be published in connection with his survey exhibition that same
year at the Museum of Modern Art.29 Rather than supply an existing image, or work
Figure 5.12 Thomas Struth, Familie Richter 1, Köln [Richter Family 1, Cologne], 2002,
Chromogenic print, 135 × 193.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman
Gallery © Thomas Struth.
with a Times-supplied photographer, he took charge of the process himself, calling on

Struth, a former student, to do the work.
Struth presents the family in their living room, seated on the two halves of an
Eames recliner. Each parent is paired off with a child, Richter with Moritz on the left,
Sabine with his younger sister Ella on the right. The room is sparsely furnished and
neatly organised. In the background a skull painting is visible, perhaps alluding to
Richter’s near-death experience three years earlier when he had suffered his stroke. A
vase of lilies placed behind the family and a splash of foliage visible outside help to
emphasise the cool and steely quality of the home’s interior.
Amid this field of order and restraint, the family present a picture of affluent, up
standing normality. Betraying no hint of the ostentatious nonconformity against which
Richter railed in his 1989 studio note, their demeanour is subdued and they are formally
attired. Their poses too are highly formalised, with the deep ‘v’ that separates the two
figure groupings echoing the splayed arrangement of the lilies in the vase behind them.
Clearly, this composition took some work, for although the family members are posed in
a manner that suggests domestic ease, their body language offers stray hints of dis
comfort. Ella broods, as if resentful of the need to remain still for the camera. Sabine,
who does not quite meet the camera’s gaze, appears to be restraining her. In another of
the picture’s many acts of doubling Richter has his fingers outstretched in the same way
as his wife. His hand is thrust against the table as if to hold himself erect and his foot is
planted firmly on the carpet for additional stability. Only Moritz, who perches with
drooping shoulders on the edge of his father’s chair, looks at ease. Certainly, there are
other, more relaxed and candid photos of the family that Richter has made public, but
none come close to Struth’s in capturing the strength of Richter’s wish to live up to his
traditional ideal of family life.
Quite what had brought him to this level of resolve in the mid-1990s is unclear,
although again advancing age—both in terms of accrued life experience and the di
minishing span of years that lay before him—is likely to have been a central factor.
What is clear is that Richter had achieved familial belonging on the same terms as he
had accomplished it professionally in the Abstrakte Bilder. After first looking to
tradition to give him an established set of standards and conventions with which he
could identify, in this case, the norms and values of bourgeois family life as these had
been passed down to him in his childhood, he used them to guide and orient himself
in the present, though only to the extent that he deemed them worth preserving. To
the extent that they were not to his liking or were outmoded, like the moral prohi
bition against divorce (which would have prevented his marriage to Sabine in ad
vance), or the preclusion of women from having a career, he and Sabine (who is
herself an artist) disregarded them. As in his painting, therefore, his approach to
family was one of elective affiliation with tradition, an attitude he also adopted in
revising his relationship to two other forms of collectivity at this time: the nation and
the Catholic church.
Faith in frailty
In the mid-1990s, as part of an extensive program to install art in Berlin’s federal gov
ernment buildings, Richter was awarded a commission for the foyer of the Reichstag.
Originally built in 1894, to house the diet (legislative assembly) of the German Empire,
the building had continued in this role during the Weimar Republic, before being da
maged in a fire in 1933. After remaining unused by the Nazis and East Germans, it was
restored in the 1990s, at which point, after reopening to great fanfare in 1999, it resumed
its former function as the parliament of the reunified republic.
Mindful of his nation’s calamitous track record throughout much of the 20th century,
Richter initially took a critical approach to his commission. To this end, he drew up
plans for photographic tableaux addressing Jewish persecution during the Holocaust.
But after laying out initial designs, he deemed this approach too controversial and opted
for a less confrontational proposal.30 Since the late 1970s, he had made been making
works from painted panes of glass, a format to which he now returned.
His first designs were reminiscent of his final Farbenbilder from the early 1970s,
but successive iterations saw him move toward a simpler palette and a more
straightforward composition (see Figure 5.13). The finished work, entitled Schwarz,
Rot, Gold [Black, Red, Gold] (1997, installed 1999) (see Figure 5.14), comprises six
enormous panels arranged to form an elongated German flag. The rear side of each
panel is coated in a smooth and glossy coat of acrylic. Mounted high on a sidewall of
the building’s foyer, the work’s 20×3 metre expanse hovers over those who cross the
floor below. With its lush colour and inviting sheen, it is worlds apart in feeling from
his first planned group of images.
Richter’s pivot from critique to affirmation of the state offered further evidence of
his growing conservatism, which had seen his instinct to support the existing order
win out against his first inclination to memorialise historical atrocities. It also sig
nalled an evolution in his relationship with his national identity, which, like his
Figure 5.13 Gerhard Richter, Atlas sheet 652, 1988. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253). Studies
for Figure 5.13.
Figure 5.14 Gerhard Richter, Schwarz, Rot, Gold [Black, Red, Gold], 1999, glass covered
with coloured enamel, 2050 × 300 cm, Deutscher Bundestag, Berlin. © Gerhard
Richter 2021 (0253).
relationship with family, had improved in recent years. As Erschießung (see

Figure 2.5) had made apparent in 1962, he had arrived in the West ashamed and
angry about the war. A few years later, his first family pictures had attested to the
trauma it had inflicted on him during his childhood. Several subsequent projects had
seen him continue processing these feelings—covertly, at first, and then with growing
candour. His Stadtbilder from 1968 (see Figure 3.11) were based on contemporary
aerial photographs of European cities. In painting these images, however, he used
coarse and choppy brushwork that reduced their buildings to a ruined-looking state.
At the time, it seemed like this technique was simply one of the many variations of his
photo painting process that he explored in the late sixties. Decades later, however, he
linked it to his memories of the bombed-out heart of Dresden in the 1950s.31 In 1972,
he again returned covertly to the war and its legacies, when he showed 48 Portraits at
the Venice Biennale, a group of Foto-Bilder depicting a self-assembled pantheon of
cultural figures reaching back to the 19th century. Although the all-male line-up of
this pantheon was seen as sexist by some viewers, Buchloh later offered a persuasive
rationale for Richter’s patriarchal focus, which Richter seconded. Just as he had lost
his father figure Uncle Rudi to the conflict and saw his stepfather return from the
front a broken man, so too did an entire generation of Germans see their fathers
destroyed by the war. Against this backdrop, 48 Portraits can be seen as an attempt
to offset this loss, if only symbolically.32
Following a lengthy hiatus, Richter had revived his engagement with national
history in 18. Oktober, 1977, this time tackling the subject explicitly. On this oc
casion, his two major concerns were socialism’s failings and the wartime generation’s
refusal to take responsibility for their actions. Like many radicals in the late 1960s,
the RAF had been outraged by this disavowal. In their eyes, it offered evidence of
enduring fascist leanings within the state. They responded to the violence unleashed
by the older generation with violence and terror of their own. Richter’s decision to
paint the RAF cycle in the late 1980s evinced his continued preoccupation with the
still unfinished legacies of the war, as well as his own lingering ambivalence con
cerning his national identity. As he explained to the Dutch journalist Anna Tilroe in
1987: ‘It’s not that I’m always ashamed, but history does concern me. What exactly
happened, did we do that, what did the Russians do? This discussion is being carried
on here all the time. I applaud that. There are still too many people older people who
say that none of it is true.’33
Elsewhere in his interview with Tilroe, he noted his regret over ‘hav[ing] to live in a
divided country,’ an aspect of German history concerning which his feelings were un
equivocal: both the division itself and the persistence of socialism in the East were causes
for anger and disappointment.34 When the Wall fell in 1989, his pent up rage against the
East German authorities surged to the fore, along with doubts about the prospects for
reunification: ‘The events in the GDR,’ he wrote in his studio notebook , ‘the so-called
historic, democratic revolution. Moved though I am by it, in spite of the briefly flaring
hopes of a happy future, a reunited Germany, I am overwhelmed by scepticism and
pessimism, almost grief, sometimes rage. Rage at the shamelessly opportunistic politi
cians, and at the intellectuals who spouted for decades in their fanatical Marxist blind
ness and now sulk, unable to let go of their conceit of knowing better.’35 By the mid-
nineties, however, reunification had become a reality and his anger had receded. With his
support for the West and its institutions now vindicated by the passage of history, he
chose to publicly affirm this position, instead of dwelling on the failings of the past. In so
doing, he opted for the first time to stress his feeling of belonging to the German nation,
instead of his alienation or ambivalence. He did so, moreover, with a work that, contrary
to Buchloh’s suggestion that it ‘merely decorates’36 the foyer, was intended to encourage
others to consider their own commitment to democracy.
As the expansive, mirrored surface of Schwarz, Rot, Gold reflects back the struc
ture that surrounds it, viewers are encouraged to reflect on the democratic structures
that enframe their own lives as German citizens. In the absence of any guidance from
the work itself, which merely signifies the nation’s standing as a democracy, these
reflections are free to run in any number of directions, an openness that is one of the
work’s strengths. While a series of Holocaust-themed images averring a legacy of
guilt and shame would have proven more effective in imparting an explicit message,
an open invitation to reflect on the question of German democracy is itself a more
democratic proposition, which leaves the question of the nation’s standing in the
hands of Reichstag visitors.
Richter’s faith in the country’s capacity to leave behind its past had strengthened
since the Wende, as it had for many of his compatriots. Yet as his use of glass in
Schwarz, Rot, Gold to make a surface he described as ‘big but simultaneously fragile’
suggests, and his initial, fragmented layouts for the work had indicated more ex
plicitly, he remained mindful of the enduring frailty of democratic institutions.37
Unlike the other social systems he had known, in which openly coercive practices had
been used to maintain the cohesion of the national collective, democracy, despite its
own coercive practices, was a form of voluntary collectivity requiring the continued
commitment of its members to endure. Just as his fragmented designs could be read as
coalescing on the wall, like citizens—or once divided territories—fusing to form a
national body, so too did the completed commission attest to the frailty of this body
when it is founded on the principle of free association. To the degree that this elective
affiliation succeeds, however, it provides a greater number of its citizens with a
chance to reconcile freedom with collectivity than any fascist or socialist alternative.
Although content to label Western politicians ‘gangsters,’38 like many who seek political
authority, and mindful of the insecurities to which Western-style freedom gives rise,
Richter accepted these shortcomings as a price worth paying for the benefits of his life in
the West. Fittingly, Schwarz, Rot, Gold folds aspects of this experience into its viewing
dynamics. Just as its coloured panels hover over those who pass below them, so too do the
state and its institutions wield power from above over the populace. Yet the work also
reminds us that this power originates from below, in the acts of deliberation and
consensus-building among those who are reflected in its surfaces. In this sense, the work
incorporates within itself the dynamics of a democratic social structure, in which top-
down authority is obliged to remain responsive to calls for change from below. The final
design of Schwarz, Rot, Gold, which Richter described as the most ‘elegant,’39 speaks
equally to the success of this process. This, the most classical of his layouts, is the one that
offers the most stability and assurance, remaining poised, lucid, and implacable as it re
flects its ever-changing environment. A second major public commission that he received a
few years later modelled religion and its supporting institutions in a similar fashion.
Religion made-to-measure
The most surprising aspect of Richter’s late-career values shift was his profession of
growing sympathy toward religion in the 1990s, though as with his changing views
toward the state, early signs of this realignment had been evident a decade earlier. In
1986, as his conservative turn was setting in, he had entered a design competition to
make a painting for a church in Frankfurt, a project that in the 1960s he would have
deemed unthinkable.40 A year later he made two paintings of a shaded corner of
Cologne Cathedral illuminated by a falling shaft of sunlight. These works are by no
means openly religious, but in hindsight can be seen as offering an indication of his
growing appreciation for the church as a source of worldly comfort, an opinion he
began voicing openly after marrying Sabine.
As few commentators have failed to observe, several of the S. mit Kind paintings
echo the Madonna and Child, a fitting resonance in view of the fact that the couple
chose to have their children baptised in ceremonies held at Cologne Cathedral.
Recalling these events in 2004, Richter remarked: ‘When we had our two children
christened here in the cathedral my attitude toward the church had already radically
changed, and I had slowly begun to realise what the church can offer, how much
meaning it can convey, how much help, comfort and security [it can provide].’41 This
comfort and security did not stem from any newly formed belief in the existence of a
deity, but rather from the church’s capacity to give him a sense of worldly reassurance
through its rituals, traditions and teachings: ‘I can’t believe in God,’ he remarked
during the same conversation, ‘but I think the Catholic Church is marvellous.’42
Two years later, while speaking with Hans Ulrich Obrist, he elaborated on this
statement:
[A]t 20 I left the evangelical Church and later realised that I wasn’t ready to believe
in the Christian image of God and everything that accompanies it. Nonetheless, I
find everything that the Church—especially the Catholic Church—represent and
does, what it asks for and provides, to be precious and familiar like nothing else.
This has to do, in the first case, with Christian culture, with all the wonderful works
that have accompanied me my entire life, and also with my growing insight into the
superiority of the Christian teachings, which are so much cleverer than ideologies
that promise us heaven on earth. And I see another link to the Church in the
readiness to believe, which for me is a quality as necessary as eating and drinking.
Irrespective of whether it is useful or harmful to do so, we always believe.43
As these remarks make evident, Richter supports religion on the same conservative
grounds as he supports bourgeois family values and liberal democratic government:
all are beneficial social institutions that offer him collective reassurance. In 1997, he
made a multiple in the form of a crucifix (see Figure 5.15) that was informed by this
Figure 5.15 Gerhard Richter, Kreuz [Cross], 1995, steel, surface treated with hard wax
oil, 19.5×19.5 × 1.5 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
sentiment. He did not reveal this initially, but the work had been conceived in part as
a protest against new legislation, which had banned the display of crucifixes in
schools. Disheartened by what he saw as the denigration of a core aspect of the
nation’s history and culture, he conceived his own cross as ‘a symbolic gesture ex
pressing the highest respect for our Christian culture, which stretches back two
thousand years. That’s my home, those are my roots, it’s a tradition I have the highest
regard for and which is far more complex than its critics could ever fathom.’44
Yet as his steadfast refusal to adopt the central tenet of religious belief makes
apparent, and the unusual appearance of his crucifix underscored, his respect for this
tradition was no more orthodox and no less individualised than his relationship to
family or abstraction’s history. Instead of making a conventional crucifix, he gave his
cross the proportions of his body, extending it horizontally to accommodate his arm
span and raising its point of intersection to conform to his head’s height above his
shoulders. Like his faith, his cross was made-to-measure—formed as much in his own
image as in the image of orthodox Catholicism. A decade later, he reaffirmed this
stance in the Kölner Domfenster [Cologne Cathedral Window], a stained glass
window for Cologne Cathedral, which he was asked to design in 2002.
The original, 19th-century window had been destroyed during the war and had not
yet been replaced. Initially, the church authorities requested designs honouring
German martyrs of the 20th century. After fruitlessly attempting to fulfil this request,
Richter resorted to an abstract solution, something he had done for a previous re
ligious commission in Italy in 1998. On that occasion, his red rhomboidal abstract
paintings had been rejected as unsuitable for their context, but in Cologne, his ab
stract work in glass was accepted.45 His final proposal, modelled on his Farbenbilder
of the early 1970s (see Figure 3.18), involved mounting small squares of colour be
hind the window’s complicated tracery.46 Once accepted, his design passed through
several iterations before being manufactured and installed. The Domfenster, com
prising 11,500 squares of glass in 72 colours, each with 5 to 10 separate shades, was
unveiled to the public in August 2007 (see Figure 5.16).47
The finished window is visually indistinguishable from its painted, pixellated
predecessors. Semantically, however, the Domfenster was a different proposition,
both by virtue of its location and the dramatically improved personal circumstances
in which he had produced it. In the early seventies, he had created the Farbenbilder in
a despondent state of mind. Beset by feelings of disempowerment, he imagined their
chance compositions as embodying the blind workings of nature, for which he
himself was nothing but a passive conduit. Here then were images that epitomised his
materialistic worldview.48 Three decades later, in a mood far removed from his
earlier state of helplessness, he returned to the Farbenbilder idiom and in a seemingly
contrarian gesture redeployed it in a house of worship. From a conventional Christian
standpoint, this decision could be seen as impertinent, even openly subversive—an
insistence upon meaningless material confusion in a space erected in support of the
conviction that meaning is divinely assured. It was, however, a sincere expressive
statement, proffered in accordance with the made-to-measure terms of his own faith.
From the outset, Richter was mindful of the challenge of inserting modern art into a
750-year-old building. Fearful of creating a design that, in his words, looked ‘inhibited,
wrong, ludicrous or kitschy,’ he focussed as pragmatically as possible on formal and
functional concerns. Leaving overt religious imagery to one side, he sought merely to
create ‘a beautiful, radiant window’ that would not look out of place in its context and
Figure 5.16 Gerhard Richter, Kölner Domfenster [Cologne Cathedral Window], 2007,
mouth-blown antique glass, 2300 × 900 cm. © Gerhard Richter 2021 (0253).
would be open to a range of readings.49 The path he took in doing so was in keeping
with his approach to beauty in his Abstrakte Bilder, as this had developed since the
1980s. At the beginning of that decade, he had made paintings that unified diversity in a
tenuous and tautly energised fashion. Thereafter, his compositions had grown calmer
and more orderly. Much the same could be said of the Domfenster in comparison to the
original Farbenbilder. Since the squares of the Farbenbilder were painted using lacquer,
they have a crisp, eggshell smoothness and a high degree of colour saturation. While this
sheen and fullness add intensity to the works, they also bring tension to their vibrancy.
The translucent squares of the Domfenster are, by contrast, softer and more diffuse. The
result is a softly winking tapestry of light, whose impact is more soothing than the taut
grids of the Farbenbilder.
Richter’s design decisions supported this shift in sensibility. In a bid to maximise the
window’s luminosity, he searched for a technical solution that would alleviate the need for
opaque metal framing between its tiles. His technicians eventually achieved this by
binding the tiles together using silicone gel, thereby creating a continuous field of colour.
As with the Farbenbilder, the colours of the Domfenster were arranged by chance, this
time with the help of a computer. But while the computer chose and placed colours at
random, it worked within constraints intended to ensure a balanced and harmonious
composition. A genuinely random distribution could conceivably place clusters of
similarly-coloured squares together, creating points of focus and stasis in a layout in
tended to be non-hierarchical and dynamic. It could also result in an excess of one colour
throughout the window as a whole. Having the algorithm choose from a fixed pool of
tiles containing an even number in each colour helped alleviate these problems, as did
some manual tinkering following the algorithm’s execution.50 With the design thereby
rendered as pure and as pleasing as possible in its evident confusion, he made one final,
substantial alteration to its layout. Dividing the arch of the window vertically along its
midpoint, he mirrored his adjusted composition around this central axis, such that its left
and right sides became identical. In the six lower bays he also used effects of mirroring,
but of a more complex kind. Here, it is a case of three matched pairs of bays, with the first
bay mirroring the third, the fourth mirroring the sixth, and the second mirroring the fifth.
These effects of symmetry bring balance to the window’s disorder, in a manner akin to the
structure introduced to the Abstrakte Bilder by the squeegee’s orthogonal traversals.51
Unlike those striations, however, the Domfenster’s mirroring is intended to operate
subliminally, so as not to undermine perceptions of its thoroughgoing randomness.
The calmness of the window’s all-pervasive randomness was a new quality in Richter’s
work, which suggested a further turning of the screw in his relationship to disorder in his
life. Although the Abstrakte Bilder had grown more settled since the late 1980s, they still
played host to dissonant dynamics, typically in the form of uneasy colour clashes.
In addition, their chaos was a largely microscopic phenomenon, with a clear sense of
order prevailing at a global level. In the Domfenster neither of these conditions obtained.
Not only had Richter worked extensively to make the window as harmonious as pos
sible, but he had done so without restricting its disorderly appearance. Procedurally
speaking, making planned alterations to a random composition so as to make it look and
feel more random was contradictory. But at an existential level, this gesture made perfect
sense, for what his wish to enhance the window’s disarray made evident was a further
increase in his sense of self-assurance vis-à-vis reality’s disorder. To make a work appear
as chaotic as possible was to imply, by the terms of his living method, that he no longer
felt the need to insulate himself against the chaos of existence by bringing order to its
disarray. The reason for this growing confidence was the sense of reassurance he derived
from his connection to the Church, the institution that enframes his window both spa
tially and existentially.
The Domfenster’s calmness stems not only from Richter’s compositional decisions
but also from the contrast between the window and its surroundings. Cool, dark, and
implacably monumental, the church interior constrains the window’s chaos, in much
the same way as religion shields Richter from the vagaries of existence. In contrast to
the Abstrakte Bilder, however, in which he himself fashioned order out of chaos, in the
Domfenster he transferred this function to the church. With the Cathedral providing a
secure environment in which to contemplate reality’s complexity, he was no longer
required to assert himself against this condition. Instead, he could parade it as a warm
and inviting spectacle that had been wholly deprived of its sting. Here, then, was his
strongest statement yet about his changing relationship to collectivity, which, like his
faith in family and the nation, he had developed on his own terms. Through this
process of elective affiliation with several different forms of collectivity, he had at last
found a way to balance his desire for freedom with his need for the comforts of shared
experience across each of the areas of his life in which it had previously been absent,
adding religion to the list for good measure. After trying, in the early 1970s, to flee the
challenges of his life as a liberated individual, he had by stages successfully knit to
gether a set of mutually reinforcing sources of collective reassurance. Together with the
recognition he now received for his work and the financial security it had brought him,
his connection to these sources of security had allowed him to put his past concerns
behind him, a situation that in the 1990s and the early 2000s, again placed him on a
firmer footing than many of his compatriots, who harboured similar aspirations but
were seldom as well-placed as he was to strike such an advantageous balance between
autonomy and collective reassurance.
Church and state between authority and anomie

It is one measure of how permissive and pluralistic German society had become by the
early 2000s that the Domfenster attracted little criticism. Aside from brief remarks by
Jochim Meisner, the Cardinal of Cologne, expressing his concern that the window was
too abstract for its context and thus better suited to a mosque or a non-denominational
house of prayer than to a Christian cathedral, there was no public outcry.52 Instead, and
as Richter had hoped, viewers found within the window an array of meanings. Werner
Spies’ suggestion that its status as a matrix of all possible images enabled it to function as
a ‘parable of Genesis,’ and Hubertus Butin’s claim that its admission of coloured light
into the church interior could transform the space into an image of the heavenly
Jerusalem, were compatible with Catholic theology.53 Other readings, like Stephan
Diederich’s construal of the window’s randomness as affirming Sosein—existence as it is,
in all the beauty of its abundant disarray, were more diffusely spiritual.54 So too was
Navid Kermani’s alignment of the window’s abstraction with, on one hand, the ani
conism of Islamic art (thereby giving substance to Meisner’s complaint), and on the other
a biblical aniconism, which holds that God is omnipresent as illumination.55 All re
mained in keeping, however, with the evolution of religious practice since the 1960s,
which perhaps more than any other aspect of social life had grown more individualistic.
As studies from the 1990s indicated, the marked decline in Church attendance since the
1950s had been offset to some extent by a rise in private forms of spirituality that al
lowed individuals to define their religious convictions as they saw fit and have few ob
ligations toward any religious community.56 This shift toward a new norm of ‘believing
without belonging,’ as one researcher termed it, meant that Richter’s made-to-measure
attitudes were by no means atypical.57
In the realm of family life, similar but less pronounced dynamics could be observed.
By the late 1990s, non-traditional family arrangements had become sufficiently
widespread that only 25% of households consisted of a married, heterosexual couple
with children, a decline of 10% since 1972.58 While the importance ascribed to fa
mily remained high, understandings of what a family was were broadening, with
permissiveness toward a plurality of living arrangements increasing also.59 Not all
household living situations were freely chosen, of course, but the capacity, for ex
ample, to divorce or to establish a blended family by bringing together parents and
children from two former partnerships had by now been normalised. As an artist and
thus a member of one of the most tolerant social enclaves, Richter could have spurned
the conventional arrangements for which he opted more readily than most. That he
did not underscores just how elective his embrace of bourgeois ‘normality’ was.
To a greater extent than in the 1980s, Richter was atypical by virtue of his wealth and
the security this gave him, especially in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, when the
German economy suffered greatly. The decade started brightly with a brief boom spurred
by the demand for goods and services in the former East. This surge had quickly faded,
however, as the costs of reunification took their toll. By the middle of the decade, a
combination of low growth and massive public spending, both on modernisation of
Eastern infrastructure and on welfare payments to growing numbers of unemployed, had
transformed the nation from a global powerhouse into the so-called ‘sick man’ of
Europe.60 With unemployment rising and productivity declining, the country confronted
economic challenges of a scale unseen since the reconstruction era.
This discouraging scenario was used to explain two findings in a number of values
surveys from the turn of the millennium.61 The first was a revival of collectivistic
attitudes for the first time in two decades, even as the value placed on individual
freedom remained high. Survey respondents continued to see personal fulfilment as
the prime goal in life, as opposed to the collectivistic aim of fulfilling one’s social
duties and obligations. They also prized their autonomy at levels comparable to or in
excess of those recorded in the 1970s and 1980s. Compared to previous respondents,
however, they placed greater importance on finding a life partner, committing to
one’s family, and instilling in their children communal values like politeness, obedi
ence, and the importance of fitting in. The second, more starkly registered finding was
an increase in the value placed on achieving security in life, financially and through
close links to friends and family. Since these changes were most firmly in evidence in
younger Westerners, who were struggling more than prior generations to transition
securely to adulthood, they were ascribed to a desire for stability in an environment in
which this was much harder to come by, and not only for economic reasons: since the
1980s (and in some cases earlier), a number of additional social trends pointed to a
further loosening of social bonds as well. From declining levels of volunteering, and
shrinking union and political party rolls, to the shorter duration of intimate re
lationships, a range of indicators were at hand to suggest that interpersonal com
mitments were becoming less intense and less enduring, a shift that could only
weaken the ability of communal ties to offer stable feelings of belonging.
In the art world of the period, the same drift toward a growing preoccupation with
collectivity was evident, even as individualism remained as pronounced as ever. As
Neo-Expressionism faded into history in the late 1980s and painting’s fortunes once
again declined, the pluralising and de-traditionalising impulses of the sixties had re
sumed and then intensified. In the decade that followed, the transition to a post-
medium condition that had commenced in the 1960s was completed and the phe
nomenon of shared styles and movements continued to retreat. As these dynamics
strengthened, the artistic landscape of the 1990s became larger and more diffuse than
ever, mutating into a vast and open territory of singular practices, within which na
tional boundaries became increasingly irrelevant and across which an array of passing
trends arose, but never with the consciously conceived coherence of a movement and
never on the basis of a stable set of markers encompassing a unitary style. Notable
among these trends was the rise of participatory art practices throughout the course
of the decade, and the turn toward archival and mnemonic practices that set in toward
its end.
By virtue of his interests in historical painting genres, his works relating to the war
and its legacies, and his practice of collating his source photographs into his Atlas,
which he had now begun exhibiting, Richter was seen as a forerunner of some of the
archival art practices of the 1990s.62 His preoccupation with the past was not linked
to advancing individualism, however, or to the erosion of collective solidarities since
the war. Instead, it was related to painting’s loss of standing in the era of mechanical
reproduction and German failure to assume responsibility for the Holocaust.63 That
his work might be meaningfully affiliated with participatory art practices of the
period was not considered, but this perceived lack of affinity with contemporary
trends notwithstanding, his investment in collectivity as a bulwark against the in
securities of late capitalist individualism was more resonant in the 1990s art world
than it had been at any point since the late sixties.
Claire Bishop has observed that the growth and growing prominence of participatory
art practices in the 1990s was conditioned, on one hand, by the collapse of socialism
and, on the other, by the ensuing rise of global free-market capitalism and the attendant
individualising pressures it had generated.64 Together, these events had led to ‘a re
newed affirmation of collectivity and a denigration of the individual, who becomes
synonymous with the values of Cold War liberalism and its transformation into neo
liberalism, that is, the economic practice of private property rights, free markets, and
free trade.’65 Some German-speaking artists responded to this climate of intensified
individualism with work that was avowedly political. Thomas Hirschhorn’s memorials
to philosophers like Baruch Spinoza (1999) and Georges Bataille (2002), for instance,
incorporated kiosks and libraries. He conceived these as sites of learning and social
organisation for the communities in which they were installed.66 The WochenKlausur
collective in Austria adopted a similar approach, but by-passed the creation of physical
artworks. Through consultation and discussion with disenfranchised communities, like
the residents of a small town in Germany (Intervention in Community Development
[1997]) or drug-addicted women in Zurich (Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted
Women [1994–5]), they sought to strengthen the community’s internal solidarity and
enhance its social agency.67 Other participatory projects, like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s well-
known cooking events (early 1990s–), which were echoed by any number of related
undertakings that took the form of social gatherings, sought merely to foster convivial
communal encounters.68 But like their more avowedly political counterparts, informal
projects such as these were driven by a wish to foster meliorative social connections in
contexts where closeness and cohesion were perceived to be lacking.
In light of the growing feeling among artists in the 1990s that the triumph of
capitalist individualism had come at the expense of collectivity, it is unsurprising that
some of the many archival projects of the period and the years that followed looked
back with a sense of mourning and nostalgia to lost forms of solidarity and com
munal aspiration from the industrial modern era.69 Typical in this regard was Jeremy
Deller’s re-staging of the battle between striking British miners and police in the early
1980s (The Battle of Orgreave [2001]), which aimed to promote reflection on the
changes that had taken place in Britain as a result of Margaret Thatcher’s embrace of
neoliberal economics, and—in closer proximity to Richter—Tacita Dean’s film
Fernsehturm [Television Tower] (2001), which evokes the fading and lost promise of
the East German socialist project from within the revolving restaurant of its most
visible and enduring monument: the television tower erected in East Berlin in the late
sixties. It is indicative of the subsequent advances individualism had made, however,
that in contrast to the collectively-oriented art projects of that period, artists working
on either side of the new millennium were more sanguine concerning art’s capacity to
effect social change than their predecessors. Rather than aspire to wholesale systemic
transformation, they sought more circumspectly to establish their own micro-
collectives within the confines of existing social structures, or merely to promote
reflection on past events as a means of shedding light on present circumstances.
Uncertainty concerning what could feasibly replace existing structures, however
unsatisfactory they seemed, was one reason for this lowering of ambition. As Marion
Strunk has noted in this connection, many collective projects of the nineties posited
the forms of shared experience they promoted ‘not as alternatives to the existing
order, but rather as experimental orders in their own right…,’ erected on a provi
sional basis with little expectation of achieving lasting or scalable social impact.70
As in the 1960s, Richter did not engage in collectivistic practices. Nor did he at
tempt to foster new and more progressive modes of collectivity with his art. As ever,
his work was not avowedly political, even if he did now voice his social views more
openly. Yet, at base, his elective traditionalism was a response to the same dilemma
with which many archival and relational artists were preoccupied: that of obtaining
security through collectivity in circumstances where this had grown challenging. It
was also a response that echoed widely outside the art world, among the many
Germans who were also looking for the comforts of collectivity in the nineties,
without relinquishing their individual freedoms.
As Helmut Klages, one of the pioneering German values researchers, observed in
response to this development, the revival of collectivistic values in the 1990s was
centred on an increase in the importance placed on close friends and family rather
than on larger forms of collectivity.71 Between the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the
importance accorded to religion by those who took part in Klages’ surveys declined
sharply. The already low importance placed on political engagement had also slipped
further. A sense of the value of tradition had, by contrast, increased markedly, but
was still deemed of minimal significance in comparison to close personal relation
ships, which were valued much more highly than they had been in the early 1960s.72
It is not that collectivity had become less important in the interim, but rather that
Germans had displayed a growing tendency to invest in small-scale collectives in
which their influence was greater and they, therefore, stood the greatest chance of
maximising their own liberty. Large-scale forms of shared experience had, by con
trast, become less significant. To the extent that they were engaged with by in
dividuals, it was on terms that did not constrain their freedom.
A crucial difference between relations with friends and family and those on the scale of
the church and state is the degree to which identification with the latter institutions is
imaginary. In contemporary, liberal societies, where their impact on everyday experience is
often minimal, this imaginary aspect is especially pronounced and encourages the plur
alisation of relationships toward them—the kind of ‘make-of-it-what-you-will’ approach
to national identity and religion that Richter promoted in his public commissions. To
achieve this, he withdrew, in practised fashion, to a level of extreme semantic openness
that made both works into mirrors of their viewers’ attitudes toward their commissioning
institutions. In conversation with the author, he conceded that this openness allows for
responses to both works that are flagrantly at odds with his own—a chauvinistic na
tionalist reading of Schwarz, Rot, Gold, for instance; or a reading of the Domfenster as a
nihilistic, anti-Catholic screed.73 Yet this reality notwithstanding, he approached both
commissions in the same hopeful spirit as his Abstrakte Bilder of the 1980s. In those
works, he had aspired to distil some essential insight concerning the current social climate
and to offer an intimation of a better future. By the late 1990s, he had retreated from these
lofty ambitions and was claiming, as he did with the Domfenster, that he wished only to
fashion beautiful images that could impart a feeling of aesthetic reassurance to their
viewers. This may well have been the case, but in light of his investment in Catholicism
and the democratic state, not simply as sources of personal security but also as beneficial
social institutions, it is clear that one aspect of the hope he invested in his commissions was
social also. If these projects could encourage others to conceive of church and state on
terms equivalent to his own, then his faith in art’s social potential would be repaid.
With no data to draw on for confirmation, it is impossible to judge whether either
work has moved its viewers in the direction of Richter’s outlook, or indeed determine if
either has had any social impact whatsoever. The fact that he delivered both projects to a
Germany in which elective affiliation was now the norm, at a time when interest in
tradition was reviving, does suggest, however, that there were many in the country who
already shared his values and his approach toward securing belonging. After struggling
with the dynamics of freedom and collectivity in the West during the early part of his
career, his shift to an elective engagement with tradition as a means of redressing the
shadow aspects of individualism had borne fruit, and others were now looking to tra
dition for security in growing numbers in response to their own insecurities.
Subsequent trends, however, have made it clear that this espousal of traditional values
did not translate into traditional behaviour. Since the early 2000s, marriage rates have
fallen further. Unmarried cohabitation and isolated living have, correspondingly, in
creased, the latter sharply. The great majority of children are still born to married par
ents, but this figure continues to decline.74 The trend toward a privatised approach to
religion with minimal involvement in religious community has also been sustained, as has
the high number of Germans whose worldview is entirely secular.75 So diffuse have
religious beliefs become that the more closely they are surveyed and interpreted, the more
difficult it becomes to determine if the country as a whole has become more or less
religious in the past twenty years.76 It is clear, however, that identification with the
Catholic and Protestant churches has trended further downward and where still present
has become more individualised.77 The democratic state remains intact, of course, but in
recent years has shown greater signs of the fragility that Richter was concerned to evoke
in his Reichstag commission. Despite the fact that the economy has recovered phe
nomenally since the nineties, it has done so unevenly, in part due to a package of anti-
unemployment measures that were enacted in the early 2000s. Known as the Hartz
Reforms, these were intended to incentivise job-seeking by limiting welfare entitlements
and making labour laws more flexible. As in other countries where neoliberal measures
such as these have been enacted, the result has been a marked growth in inequality, rising
poverty levels, and a further increase in economic insecurity, not only for the poor but
also for more affluent workers whose job protections have been weakened.78 More than
ever, the fate of the individual has been placed in the individual’s hands.
Also on the increase in recent years, in part because of these conditions, is precisely the
kind of chauvinistic nationalism to which Richter is opposed. Uneven economic devel
opment has seen the East continue to trail the West by most social and economic mea
sures. Among former Easterners, nostalgia for the securities of socialism has yet to
disappear but has lately been overtaken by a new concern.79 With the arrival of up to half
a million refugees from the Syrian civil war between 2014 and 2016, perceived threats to
the integrity of German culture and identity prompted a revival of right-wing nationalism,
which is strongest in the East but also well in evidence elsewhere. At its fringes, this
political movement shades into fascistic xenophobia that continues to grow in strength in
some areas.80
The intensifying pressures of economic individualism that the Hartz Reforms en
gendered, and the increase in authoritarian collectivistic tendencies among German na
tivists means that the twin forces that always threaten efforts to balance freedom with
belonging in democratic states have been on the ascendant of late. By placing greater
onus on individuals to resolve their economic problems on their own initiative, and
concomitantly reducing the social obligations of taxpayers and employers, the former
have pared away provisions dating back to the 1950s that, together with strong families
and Christian values, were intended to constrain the adverse effects of competition in the
market. With its bellicose calls to safeguard German values and identity by protecting the
state from corrupting outside influence, the latter attempts to maintain collective unity
through scare-mongering and, where possible, through legislative force. Richter knows
all too well that such efforts to enforce homogeneity can perhaps bring a measure of
stability, and a sense of belonging in the short term, but only in conjunction with a loss of
liberty that will erode the latter feeling soon enough.
For now, neither tendency can be said to have pushed the more even-handed model of
belonging that he favours to a point of crisis. His espousal of a flexible retention of
traditional values and institutions as a soft means of maintaining social order does,
however, place him in a clear social minority, consisting mainly of those of his own
generation.81 For the past several decades, he has also belonged to the tiny segment of the
population which is not exposed to the economic vagaries that are a principal driver of
current social anxieties. It is this security, funded mainly by sales of his work to those
who share his privilege, that allowed him to arrange his life on terms that suited him.
Elective affiliation, with or without commitment to tradition, remains the norm in
Germany, but the former approach to obtaining the benefits of collectivity continues to
decline. Although the country is by some measures much wealthier than it was during his
first years in the West, economic conditions are more challenging than those he was
obliged to negotiate in the 1960s. In coming years, the meanings that will attach to works
like Schwarz, Rot, Gold and the Domfenster will reflect these conditions and the ob
stacles to—and opportunities for—belonging they present. He himself, however, was
among those who were fortunate enough to have resolved them, an improbable scenario
when the adverse circumstances of his early life and career are considered. To some
extent, he can be given credit for this outcome—for skillfully managing his career and for
risking financial security for the sake of his creative autonomy on more than one oc
casion. On a personal level, he can, perhaps, also be credited with having learned from
his mistakes. To a large extent, however, luck simply ran in his direction. From his good
fortune in fleeing to the West just prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall, to the
unexpected turning of the tide of art world fashion in painting’s favour in the late 1970s,
to possessing demographic advantages, like being male, middle class, well-educated, and
of European descent, which allowed him to be freer than most, while also being freer
than most to cultivate his group affiliations, fate came to his assistance more often than it
left him in the cold. ‘Chance is cleverer than I am,’ he has been fond of saying over the
years, and in the matter of his search for belonging this was undoubtedly the case.
Notes
1 Dietmar Elger, Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting (London and Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009), trans. Elizabeth M. Solaro, 263.
2 Peter M. Bode, “Immer Anders, immer er selbst,” Art. Das Kunstmagazin (May 1983): 60.
3 Coosje van Bruggen, “Gerhard Richter: Painting as a Moral Act,” Artforum International,
vol. 23 no. 9 (May 1985): 82ff. (This article containing Richter’s comments was not
published until 1985.)
4 Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 1986,” in Gerhard Richter, Writings:
1961–2007 (New York: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), eds. Dietmar Elger and
Hans Ulrich Obrist, 170, 173. See also Doris von Drathan, “Gerhard Richter: les pouvoirs de
l’abstraction,” Les cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, no. 40 (Summer 1992): 283.
6 See Jürgen Harten, “Der romantische Wille zur Abstraktion,” in Gerhard Richter: Bilder
1962–1985, in Jürgen Harten, Gerhard Richter: Bilder/Paintings, 1962–1985 (Köln:
DuMont Verlag 1986).
7 When asked by Jan Thorn-Prikker in 1989 why he chose to publish his notes (which he did
for the first time in 1987), Richter replied that it was out of a ‘wish to be unconditionally
known’ (Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn-Prikker,” in Writings, 234.)
8 Richter, “Notes, 1989,” in Writings, 212. [Translation revised by the author.] Text:
Schriften und Interviews, the first edition of Richter’s collected writings and interviews, was
published in German in 1993. This was followed in 1995 by an English language trans
lation, The daily practice of painting: writings and interviews 1962–1993.
9 In a 1989 interview with Jan Thorn Prikker, Richter refers to the RAF members as having
‘probably’ killed themselves. Due to a lack of conclusive evidence, however, he held no firm
opinion on the subject. (Richter, “Conversation with Jan Thorn Prikker concerning the
cycle ‘October 18th, 1977,’ 1989, “ in Writings, 239.) On Richter’s differences of opinion
with Genzken and Buchloh concerning the RAF, see Robert Storr, “Gerhard Richter: 18.
Oktober, 1977,” reprinted in Storr, Gerhard Richter: Doubt and Belief in Painting, 271: n.
11. Buchloh has written of the ‘murder’ of the RAF members in Stammheim prison in his
“A Note on Gerhard Richter’s 18. Oktober, 1977,” October 48 (Spring, 1989): 88. https://
doi.org/10.2307/778953.
10 See Hilton Kramer, “MoMA Helps Martyrdom of German Terrorists,” The New York
Observer, July 3–10, 1995: 1, 23; and David Gordon, “Art Imitates Terrorism,” Newsweek,
August 14, 1995.
11 Richter, “Notes, 1989,” reprinted in Writings, 213.
12 Richter, “Notes for a press conference, November–December 1988 (held at Museum Haus
Esters, Krefeld, February 1989),” Writings, 202. [Translation revised by the author.]
13 As Richter explained in 2002: ‘For me the government was the smaller evil because it
believed the least. They were merely gangsters of the sort that are always around in any
period. But those who were full of beliefs, they were dangerous. I was convinced that the
government had no ideology whatsoever, whether it was [left-leaning] Helmut Schmidt or
[right-leaning] Helmut Kohl.’ (Richter, “MoMA Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in
Writings, 437.)
14 On the escalating demand for Richter’s work in the late eighties and early nineties, see
Elger, A Life in Painting, 320.
15 Richter first used squeegees in two Abstrakte Bilder from 1980: Abstraktes Bild (456-1)
and Abstraktes Bild (456-2). He recalls feeling encouraged to go on working with the tool
when Joseph Beuys responded positively to the works. When asked by the author if his use
of squeegees owed anything to Götz, Richter granted that this was ‘perhaps’ the case, albeit
unconsciously. (Richter, conversation with the author, June 30, 2010.) He reiterated this
opinion regarding Götz’s ‘not so conscious’ influence in a 2015 interview with Franziska
Leuthäußer (Richter, in Franziska Leuthäußer, ed., Café Deutschland 2. Im Gespräch mit
der ersten Kunstszene der BRD [Frankfurt: Städel Museum, 2018], 1243.)
It is worth noting, in addition, that one of Richter’s small abstract compositions from 1959
(see Figure 1.10), which he produced following his visit to II. documenta, features wavering
scraped-back channels of the kind that appear in the Abstrakte Bilder of the early 1990s. Here
again is an example of Richter reaching back to the 1950s to give the series impetus, but this
time to his own work rather than to the painting movements of the period.
16 Götz used pliant squeegees of several sizes throughout his career, none larger than the size
of a hand-held window wiper. On this point, see Karl Otto Götz, Karl Otto Götz im
Gespräch: “Abstrakt ist schöner” (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 1994), 33.
19 Richter, quoted in Julian Heynen, “Februar/März 2000,” in Gerhard Richter: Bilder 1999
(Krefeld: Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, 2000), n.p.
20 Although the photograph is part of Richter’s Atlas (Sheet 394), it is undated. But since the
painting was completed in 1977, when Betty (born in 1966) was either ten or eleven years
old, she cannot have been older than eleven.
21 On this point, see Richter’s comments on fatherhood in David Galloway, “Quick-Change
Master,” ARTnews, March 1, 2002: 104.
22 As Richter explained to Uwe Schneede in 1997, the paintings initially struck him as ‘ter
rible’ ‘unbearable’, ‘kitschy’ and ‘dead’. ‘I wanted to make a Vermeer out of each photo
graph,’ he added, ‘but I never succeed, never.’ [Author’s translation.] (Richter, in Uwe M.
Schneede, Gerhard Richter in der Hamburger Kunsthalle [Hamburg: Hamburger
Kunsthalle, 1997], 28–29.)
23 Richter, “Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 382, 392.
24 For Richter’s explanation of his efforts to make the S. mit Kind works more ‘attractive’ by
overpainting them, see “Interview with Astrid Kasper, 2000,” in Writings, 365.
25 Jürgen Hohmeyer, “Selbstentblößung in Schmelz und Wut,” Der Spiegel 13 (1996): 218.
The S. mit Kind paintings were shown for the first time at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, a few
months after this article appeared.
26 Hohmeyer, “Selbstentblößung in Schmelz und Wut,” 216.
27 Comparing this painting to Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) in 2002, Richter described it as
more intimate and direct. (Richter, “Interview with Robert Storr, 2002,” in Writings, 437.)
28 Not everyone has been convinced by Richter’s claim that the S. mit Kind series is a sincere
celebration of his familial happiness. Shortly after its appearance, Stefan Germer suggested
that it was too idealistic to be credible. In his view, Richter was continuing his practice of
veiling the private aspect of his work by other means. (Stefan Germer, “Familienanschluß.
Zur Thematisierung des Privates in neueren Bildern Gerhard Richters,” Texte zur Kunst 26
[Nov. 1997]: 133–116.) Idealised the paintings may well have been, but this does not imply
that they had no basis in a positive experience. That Richter and Sabine’s marriage has
endured further militates against Germer’s argument.
Rachel Haidu’s reading of the series offers a more credible and satisfying response to the
question of how it relates to Richter’s life. Like all his paintings with a personal dimension, they
are neither transparent records of his experience, as their basis in photography might lead us to
believe, nor are they entirely impersonal, as their close resemblance to historical examples of
mother and child paintings suggests. Instead, they move ambiguously between these two po
sitions, in the process raising questions about the relationship between art and life. (Rachel
Haidu, “Arrogant Texts. Gerhard Richter’s Family Pictures,” in Gerhard Richter: October
Files, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009], 155.)
29 Michael Kimmelman, “Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms,” New York Times
Magazine, January 27, 2002. The photo was also used to illustrate a German language
profile in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. (Hanno Rauterberg, “Ein bürgerlicher Rebell,”
Die Zeit 7 [7 Feb 2002]: 33.)
30 ‘Perhaps it was shame or pity or piety that held me back,’ he commented in 2002, ‘I never
figured it out.’ (Richter, in Galloway, “Quick-Change Master,” 107.) In the mid-sixties, he
had also shown an interest in the Holocaust as an artistic subject. Together with Konrad
Lueg he had conceived an exhibition that would have seen photographs of concentration
camp inmates juxtaposed with pornographic images. This inflammatory project did not
come to pass, however. (On this project and its failure, see Christine Mehring, “Richter’s
Collaborations, Richter’s Turn, 1955–1971,” in Gerhard Richter: Early Work,
1951–1972, eds. Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent and Jon Seydl [Los Angeles: J.
Paul Getty Museum, Getty Research Institute, 2010], 95–96.)
31 Richter, in Gerhard Richter (London: Tate Gallery, 1991), 126.
32 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (Ph.D.
thesis, Graduate Center, CUNY, 1994), ProQuest (304113144), 97. Richter addressed the
havoc wrought on a generation of German fathers in a 2002 interview with his daughter
Babette (Betty). (Richter, “Interview with Babette Richter, 2002,” in Writings, 442–443.)
33 Richter, “Interview with Anna Tilroe,” in Writings, 197.
34 Richter, “Interview with Anna Tilroe,” in Writings, 192.
36 Buchloh, “Documents of Culture, Documents of Barbarism,” in Gerhard Richter: Painting
After All (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020), 41.
37 Richter, “Interview with Stefan Koldehoff, 1999,” in Writings, 351.
40 The church in question was Paulskirche. For an overview of the competition, which was
won by a little-known Hamburg painter Johannes Grützker, see Jens Christian Jensen,
“‘Der Zug der Volksvertreter’ in der Frankfurter Paulskirche,” Kritische Berichte. Zeitschrift
für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften, vol. 20, no. 2 (1992): 68–70.
41 Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn Prikker, 2004,” in Writings, 471.
42 Richter, “Interview with Jan Thorn Prikker, 2004,” in Writings, 471.
43 Richter, “Interview mit Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2006,” Gerhard Richter, Text 1961 bis 2007:
Schriften, Interviews, Briefe, eds. Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Köln: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008), 538–539. [Author’s translation. These comments do
not appear in the English edition of Richter’s writings and interviews.]
44 Richter, “Interview with Babette Richter,” in Writings, 447–8.
45 The fate of this project is recounted in Richter, “Interview with Der Spiegel, 2001,” in
Writings, 372.
46 For his initial proposal for the Domfenster, Richter laid a template of the window frame
across a reproduction of his painting 4096 Farben [4096 Colours] (1974). (Richter, “Notes
for a press conference, 28 July 2006,” in Writings, 517). He also looked back to another of
his earlier works, a stained glass window entitled Glasfenster, 625 Farben [Glass Window,
625 Colours] (1989). Executed as a private commission for Haus Otte, a dwelling designed
by Walter Gropius that was undergoing restoration, Glasfenster, 625 Farben served as a
replacement for a stained glass window designed by Josef Albers in 1921, which had later
been destroyed. Like the Domfenster, Glasfenster, 625 Farben also takes the form of a grid
of coloured squares. In this case, however, Richter was following Albers’s precedent, since
his original Haus Otte windows had themselves comprised multi-coloured grids.
47 The history of the Domfenster commission is documented in Stephan Diederich, Gerhard
Richter, Zufall: das Kö lner Domfenster und 4900 Farben (Kö ln: Verlag Kö lner Dom;
Buchhandlung Walther Kö nig, 2007).
48 In 1986, Richter went so far as to call the Farbenbilder as ‘an assault on the falsity and the
religiosity of the way people glorified abstraction, with such phoney reverence. Devotional
art—all those squares—Church handicrafts.’ (Richter, “Interview with Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, 1986,” in Writings, 169.). Wary of the grand spiritual claims made for abstract art
during the prewar and early postwar periods, he preferred, like most artists of his generation, to
approach nonobjective painting on more down-to-earth terms. It was in this spirit, for ex
ample, that he produced the Graue Bilder. By the early 2000s, however, his attitudes toward
religion had changed so substantially that he submitted a Graues Bild to an exhibition called
‘100 Artists See God,’ describing its blank surface as ‘the only possible representation/image of
God.’ (Richter, “Statement for 100 Artists See God, 2004,” in Writings, 454.)
49 Richter, “Interview mit Hans Ulrich Obrist, 2006,” in Text, 538. [Author’s translation.]
50 Belz, Corinna (Dir.), Gerhard Richter - Das Kö lner Domfenster: ein Film von Corinna Belz
(DVD) (Kö ln: Buchhandlung Walther Kö nig, 2008, 13:58–15:28).
51 See the account of this process offered in Richter, “Notes for a press conference, 28 July
2006,” in Writings, 518.
52 Meisner is reported to have made this comment at a meeting shortly after the window’s un
veiling, adding by way of clarification that ‘when we receive a new window, then it should
clearly reflect our beliefs and not any beliefs whatsoever’ [‘Wenn wir schon ein neues Fenster
bekommen, dann soll es auch deutlich unseren Glauben widerspiegeln und nicht irgendeinen.’]
(Joachim Meisner, quoted in Wolfgang Ullrich, “Religion gegen Kunstreligion: Zum Kölner
Domfensterstreit,” Merkur 705 [2008]: 94). His remarks were widely condemned in the art
press. See, for instance: Wieland Schmied, “Unseliger Kirchenmann,” Kunstzeitung 135
(November 2007): 12; and Werner Spies, “Meisners Kunstbegriff. Der Kardinal züchtigt den
Maler,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 18, 2007: 35.
53 Werner Spies, “Gerhard Richters Fenster. Ein Ozean aus Glas im Kölner Dom,”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 25, 2007: Z1; Hubertus Butin, “Ein Lachen des
Himmels,” Stadtrevue, no.9 (2007): 63.
54 Stephan Diederich, “Random occurrence, plan, indisputability?,” in Gerhard Richter:
Zufall (Köln: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2008), 106.
55 Navid Kermani, “Wonder Beyond Belief. On Christianity — Art,” in Christoph
Grunenberg, Eva Fischer-Hausdorf, Verena Borgmann, Andrew Horsfield, Laura Freeburn,
Icons: Worship and Adoration (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2019), 347.
56 Loek Halman and Thorleif Pettersson, “A Decline of Religious Values?,” in Globalization,
value change, and generations: a cross-national and intergenerational perspective, eds. Peter Ph.
Mohler, Michael Braun and Peter Ester (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 34–39, 55.
57 Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World
(London: Darton Longman & Todd, 2002), 5.
58 Heribert Engstler and Sonja Nowossadeck, Families in Germany: Facts and Figures (Berlin:
Federal Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, 2004), 6–7.
59 Scott and Braun, “Individualisation of Family Values?’’ in Mohler, Braun and Ester,
Globalization, value change, and generations: a cross-national and intergenerational perspec
tive, 85.
60 Norbert Berthold and Rainer Fehn, “Unemployment in Germany: Reasons and Remedies,”
CESIFO Working Paper No. 871 (February 2003).
61 Stefan Hradil, “Vom Wandel des Wertewandels—Die Individualisierung und eine ihrer
Gegenbewegungen,” in Sozialer Wandel und gesellschaftliche Dauerbeobachtung, eds.
Wolfgang Glatzer, Roland Habich and Karl Ulrich Mayer (Opladen: Leske and Budrich,
2002), 31–47.
62 On Richter’s Atlas in relation to archival art practices, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard
Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 117–145. https://doi.org/10.
2307/779227. On his work’s status as a forebear to the archival art of the 1990s, see Charles
Merewether, “Introduction/Art and the Archive,” in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether
(London: Whitechapel Art Gallery; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 13.
63 On the counter-mnemonic function of Richter’s work with respect to German failure to
come to terms with the recent past, see, most notably, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Divided
Memory and Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning,” October
75 (Winter 1996): 60–82. His preoccupation with painting’s status in the era of photo
graphy is a running theme of commentary on his work throughout the 1990s.
64 Claire Bishop, Artificial hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London:
Verso, 2012), 193–94.
65 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 12.
66 On the simultaneously pedagogical and socially transformational aspirations of Hirschhorn’s
monuments, see Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2002): 8–10.
67 On the community empowerment activities of Wochenklausur, see Grant H. Kester,
Community and Communication in Modern Art (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2004), 1–3, 99–111.
68 Tiravanija’s gatherings are among the best-known and most emblematic examples of ‘re
lational aesthetics’, a sub-segment of participatory art that, as Claire Bishop has remarked,
placed an emphasis “‘sociability’ rather than social responsibility” (Bishop, Artificial
Hells, 207.)
69 For key assessments of contemporary art’s mnemonic and archival turns, see Mark
Godfrey, “The Artist as Historian,” October 120 (Spring 2007): 140–172; Foster, “An
Archival Impulse”: 3–22; and Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in
Contemporary Art (New York: International Center of Photography; Göttingen: Steidl).
70 Marion Strunk, “Vom Subjekt zum Obkect: Kollaborative Environments,” Kunstforum
International 152 (October-December, 2000): 126.
71 Helmut Klages, “Brauchen wir eine Rückkehr zu traditionellen Werten?,” Politik und
Zeitgeschichte 29 (2001): 8.
72 On the latter point, see Wolfgang Glatzer et. al, Recent Social Trends in West Germany,
1960–1990 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag; Montreal; Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 1992), 61.
74 For the most recent data on German households and families, see the website of the Statistisches
Bundesamt: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Haushalte-
Familien/_inhalt.html
75 Annette Wilke, “Individualisation of Religion,” International Social Science Journal, vol.
64, issue 213–214 (September-December, 2013): 270.
76 Wilke, “Individualisation of Religion,” 269.
77 Wilke, “Individualisation of Religion,” 271.
78 On the impact of the Hartz reforms and disputes concerning their effectiveness in re
medying unemployment, see Christian Odendahl, “Germany After the Hartz Reforms. Can
the SPD Protect German Labour?,” Foreign Affairs, 11 Sep 2017. https://www.
foreignaffairs.com/articles/germany/2017-09-11/germany-after-hartz-reforms.
79 On the persistence of ‘Ostalgie’ [nostalgia for the East] among former East Germans, in
cluding many whose lives improved materially following reunification, see Julia Bonstein,
“Heimweh nach der Diktatur,” Der Spiegel 27, 29 Jun 2009. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/
a-633180.html.
80 The emergence of this wave of neo-nationalism can be dated to the formation of the
Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) [Alternative for Germany] political party in 2013.
Initially a platform for Euroscepticism, it has since mutated into an anti-immigration,
German nativist party, with links to Neo-Nazi organisations. By 2017, it had grown to
become the third-largest political party in Germany and the major opposition party in the
German parliament, the other major parties having entered into coalition to constrain its
influence.
81 Scott and Braun, “Individualisation of Family Values?’’ in Mohler, Braun and Ester,
Globalization, value change, and generations, 86.
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Ullrich, Wolfgang. “Religion gegen Kunstreligion: Zum Kölner Domfensterstreit,” Merkur 705
(2008).
no. 9 (May 1985): 82–91.
von Drathan, Doris. “Gerhard Richter: les pouvoirs de l’abstraction.” Les cahiers du musée
national d’art moderne, No. 40 (Summer 1992): 66–85.
Wilke, Annette. “Individualisation of Religion.” International Social Science Journal 64, issue
213–214 (September-December, 2013): 263–277.
Untersuchungen zur Lebensqualität in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Munich: Beck,
1987.
Index
II. documenta 28–31, 41, 43 Außerparlamentarische Opposition APO

4 Glasscheiben [4 Panes of Glass] (1967) [extra-parliamentary opposition] 79
75–76, 78–79, 83 Ausschnitte [Details] series 93, 117
8 Rö hren [8 Tubes] (1965/68) 75–76 Ausstellungen bei Konrad Fischer
12 Farben [12 Colours] (1966) 84 [Exhibitions at Konrad Fischer] 78–79, 89,
18. Oktober, 1977 [October 18th, 1977] 95, 126
series 153–154, 168
4096 Farben [4096 Colours] (1974) 94 Baselitz, Georg 131–132
belonging: definition 11; in East Germany 61;
abstract art: in East Germany 15, 22; Neo-Expressionism and 131–132, 145fn60;
Richter’s attitudes toward in East Germany Richter and 1–2, 31–32, 41, 60–63, 81,
22–23, 25–28, 30–31; in West Germany 126–127, 130–131, 136, 151, 162–174; in
28–29; see also Informel West Germany 2, 60–61, 98–103
Abstraktes Bild (398-1) [Abstract Picture Betty (1977) 159
(398-1)] (1976) 116 Beuys, Joseph 80–82, 87, 103, 180fn15
Abstraktes Bild (419) [Abstract Picture blur: definition 57; later development of
(419)] (1977) 117 85–86; meanings of 57, 81, 91, 160; origin
Abstraktes Bild (432-2) [Abstract Picture of 56–60
(432-2)] (1978) 119 Buche [Beech] (1987) 134, 135
Abstraktes Bild (454-2) [Abstract Picture Burri, Alberto 26, 43
(454-2)] (1980) 120
Abstraktes Bild (710) [Abstract Picture Capitalist Realism 50
(710)] (1989) 155 classical: Richter and 20, 86–93, 95, 98,
Abstraktes Bild (771) [Abstract Picture 108fn63, 116, 118, 122, 134–136, 152,
(771)] (1992) 156 157, 163, 169; socialist realism and 16–17
Abstraktes Bild (862-2) [Abstract Picture classicism see classical
(862-2)] (1999) 158 collectivism see collectivity
Abstrakte Bilder [Abstract Pictures] series: collectivity: East German collectivism 1–2,
belonging and 125–26, 130–131, 15, 18, 23, 133; in West Germany 3, 102,
154–159; biographical aspects of 157–159; 175, 177–178
Expressionism and 137–140; first Cologne Cathedral [Kö lner Dom] 151,
examples 119–23; inception 114–15; living 169, 172
method and 123–125 conceptual art 103, 132; Richter and 77–78,
Abstrakte Skizzen [Abstract Sketches] series 90, 99, 117
114–123, 126, 130, 142fn1 counterculture 71–72, 80, 101
Acht Lernschwestern [8 Nurses] (1966) 82
Alpen [Mountains] series 83, 85, 86 Dahn, Walter 128
Andre, Carl 78 destroyed/missing works 10, 22, 40, 46,
Art Informel, see Informel 75, 130
Atlas sheet 394 (1978) 159–160 documenta 2 see II. documenta
Atlas sheet 652 (1988) 165–166 documenta 7 124
188 Index
Dokoupil, Jiri Georg 128 Gartenarbeit I [Working in the Garden I]
Dritte Weg [Third Way] 22 (1966) 54–55, 73
Dubuffet, Jean 43 Gaul, Winfred 47–48
Duchamp, Marcel 79, 87, 135 Genzken, Isa 126, 153, 157, 159–160, 163
Gerasimov, Aleksandr 18
Elbe #20 (1957) 27 Gilbert & George 90, 95–99
Elbe series 10, 26–27, 43 Gilbert & George (1975) 97–98
Elbogengesellschaft [elbow society] 61 Gitterschlieren [Grid Streaks] (1968) 83, 86
Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) [Ema (Nude on a Gö tz, Karl Otto (K.O.) 43–48; influence on
Staircase)] (1966) 73–74 Richter 128–129, 155; Richter’s study with
Erschießung [Firing Squad] (1962) 46, 49, 58–60
51–52, 167 Graue Bilder [Grey Pictures] series 83, 86,
Expressionism 28, 131; in East Germany 15, 89, 94–95
133; Richter and 25, 27, 49, 137–140, Grundig, Hans 17, 19
147fn93 Guttuso, Renato 23, 25, 26
Fallschirm [Parachute] (1977) 117–118 Heftige Maler [Violent Painters] 131

Faltbarer Trockner [Folding Clothes Dryer] Heimat [homeland] culture 52–53
(1962) 52 Heinze, Helmut: correspondence with
Farbkarten [Colour Charts] (1966) 83–84, Richter 41, 44–45, 63
87–89, 93 Helga Matura mit Verlobtem [Helga Matura
Farbschlieren [Colour Streaks] series 83, 86, with Fiancé ] (1966) 82
89, 93 Hirsch [Deer] (1963) 53
Fautrier, Jean 28, 41, 43 Hochschule fü r Bildende Kü nste [Academy
Fensterbilder [Window Pictures] series of Fine Arts], Dresden 14–17
77–79, 83
Fenstergitter [Window Grids] (1968) 77 I. G. (1993) 160–161
Fetting, Rainer 127, 131 Impressionism 15, 17, 135
Fiktion [Fiction] (1973) 115 Individualisierungsschub [push for
Finitude 82–86, 92, 125 individualisation] see individualism
Fischer, Konrad see Lueg, Konrad individualism: archival art and 176–77;
Flä mische Krone [Flemish Crown] (1965) conservative critiques of 140–141; East
55–56, 73 Germans and 4, 61, 178; families and
Fleck (1961) 43–44 174–175; Frankfurt school and 101;
Flecken [Flecks] series 43–44 Individualisierungsschub [push for
Fluxus 49, 77 individualisation] 3–4, 101–102, 115;
Fontana, Lucio 29 insecurity and 141–142, 174–75;
Formalism: Realismus–Formalismus Streit participatory art and 176–77; religious
[realism-formalism controversy] (East 174; Richter, attitudes to 1–3, 136–138,
Germany) 16; Richter’s attitude to 17 142, 176–178; Selbstentfaltung [self-
Fö rster, Wieland 41; correspondence with development] and 60, 132;
Richter 42, 77–78 Wertewandlung [values shift] and 3–4,
Foto-Bilder [Photo Pictures] series 11, 103, 140; West German art world and 5,
39–40, 82, 85, 93, 125–26, 167–168; and 28, 103, 140, 151, 175–178; in West
belonging 51–56, 62, 72–75, 87, 98; Germany 4, 61, 63, 98–103, 132,
choice of subjects 45; efforts to hide 174–179
personal dimension of 152, 162; origins of Informel 43; Gö tz and 58–60; Richter and
46–49; synthetic 75–78; and tradition 90, 43–45, 58–60, 86–89, 91–95, 98–99,
134–138, 142; see also blur 108fn63, 116–119, 122, 126, 135, 137,
Friedrich, Caspar David 12, 91, 135 152, 156–159
Friedrich, Heiner 73
Fuji (839–42) (1996) 157–158 Jugendbildnis [Youth Portrait] (1988) 153
Galerie Junge Kunst [Gallery of Emerging/ Kiefer, Anselm 131–132

Young Art] 45 Kissen [Pillow] (1965) 75
Galerie Konrad Fischer see Ausstellungen bei Kleine Badende [Small Bather] (1994)
Konrad Fischer 162–163
Index 189
Kleine Landschaft am Meer [Small Seaside nudes 17, 25, 73–75, 160, 162
Landscape] (1969) 91
Kö lner Domfenster [Cologne Cathedral Oberflä chenbilder [Surface Pictures] series 83
Window] (2007) 171–172 Onkel Rudi [Uncle Rudi] (1965) 3
Konstruktion [Construction] (1976) Osterakte [Easter-Nudes] (1967) 73
115–116, 119, 123
Konstruktionen [Constructions] series Palermo, Blinky 87, 88–92, 98–99, 107fn51,
77–78, 82–83, 115 116, 126
Kreuz [Cross] (1995) 170–171 Papst [Pope] (1962) 46, 49, 53
Kü hn Portrait (1971) 95–96 Parkstü ck [Park Piece] (1970) 97
Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Penck, A.R 129
Deutschlands [Cultural Association for the Peredvizhniki [Wanderers] 17
Renewal of Germany] 16–17, 24 Picasso, Pablo 23–25
Kuttner, Manfred 44–45 Plastov, Arkady 15–16
landscapes 12, 20, 27, 90–92, 95–97, Polke, Sigmar 80, 98–99, 103, 126;
134–136 friendship with Richter 44, 50–51, 62, 75
Pollock, Jackson 29
Lebensfreude [Joy of Life] (1956) 19–22 Pop Art 46–53, 71–72; Richter’s departure
Landschaft im Mondlicht [Landscape in from 75, 78, 90, 99
Moonlight] (1949) 12–13, 14, 17, 27 Portrait Ema (1965) 73–74
living method 114, 123–125 portraits 12, 48, 82, 95, 164–65;
Lohmar, Heinz 19–21, 32 see also Richter, Gerhard: family pictures
Lueg, Konrad 44, 47, 50–53, 57, 60, 62, post-medium condition 103, 175
78–79; see also Ausstellungen bei Konrad
Fischer Rana (1981) 119–120, 121–122
Realismus–Formalismus Streit [realism-
Macketanz, Ferdinand 40–44 formalism controversy] 16
Malevich, Kasimir 124–125, 129–130 Red Army Faction [RAF] 153–154, 168
Mann, Thomas 12, 62, 163 religion 12; individualisation of 174; in post-
Mao (1968) 81 war West Germany 80, 101; Richter’s
Materialbild [Material Picture] (1962) 43–44 feelings of separation from 52–54, 133;
Materialbilder [Material Pictures] series Richter’s return to 151, 169–179
43–47 reunification, Germany 32, 168, 174;
Matiè risme 43 see also Wende
Middendorf, Helmut 127, 131 Richter, Betty (Babette) 72–73, 159–160
minimalism 77, 132; Richter’s break with Richter, Ella Maria 164
117, 127–130, 157; Richter’s response to Richter, Ema (née Eufinger) 21, 41,
78–79, 90, 99 73–74, 126
Mondrian, Piet 25, 87, 125, 130, 135–136 Richter, Gerhard: bourgeois upbringing
Moritz, Sabine 159–161, 164 and identity 14, 22, 31, 62, 80–81, 103,
Mü hlheimer Freiheit [Mü hlheim Freedom] 130, 151–52, 163–165, 174; career
128, 132 28–30, 50–51, 71–73, 78, 92–93, 99,
Mund [Mouth] (1963) 53 142; childhood 12–14, 167; conservatism
mural painting: in East Germany 18–19; 28, 71–72, 90–97, 130, 151–153,
Richter and 18–28 169–170; education, Dresden 14, 17–21;
education, Dusseldorf 40–46; Hahnwald
Nach ‘Fallschirm’ [After ‘Parachute’] (1977) house and studio 163; family pictures
117–118 2–3, 20, 48–49, 54–55, 159–163;
Niagarafä lle [Niagara Falls] (1965) 90 fatherhood 99, 160–162, 167–168;
Neo-Expressionism 114, 129, 137, 175; friendships 44–45, 50–51, 60–62, 75, 78,
see also Neue Wilde [New Fauves] 87, 99–100; marriage 72–75, 99, 126,
Neo-liberalism 1, 4, 151, 176, 141, 178 157, 162, 165; national identity 11, 55,
Neue Wilde [New Fauves] 126–132, 165–169; politics 29, 81, 134–136, 154,
137–138, 140, 154; see also Neo- 168–169; see also belonging: Richter and;
Expressionism religion: Richter’s feelings of separation
Newman, Barnett 130 from; religion: Richter’s return to
Nouveau réalisme 43–46, 49 Richter, Hildegard 12–13, 62, 163
190 Index
Richter, Horst 12–13, 54, 62 Sternbilder [Constellations] series 83, 85–86,
Richter, Moritz 159–160, 164 89, 92–93
Rö hren [Tubes] (1965) 75, 76 still-lifes 17, 40, 134, 136
Romanticism 10, 12, 20, 27, 134 Struth, Thomas: Familie Richter 1, Kö ln
Rot-Blau-Gelb [Red-Blue-Yellow] (1972) 93 [Richter Family 1, Cologne] (2002)
Rot-Blau-Gelb Bilder [Red-Blue-Yellow 163–164, 165
Pictures] series 93 Systematisches Objekt [Systematic Object]
Ryman, Robert 89–95, 99, 116, 126 (1962) 45
S. mit Kind [S. with Child] (1995) 160–161 Tachisme, see Informel
S. mit Kind [S. with Child] series Tà pies, Antoni 26, 43
160–162, 169 Tote (1963) 82
Salomé 131 Transavanguardia 126
Schaal, Eric: Gerhard Richter in his studio, Tü ren [Doors] series 77, 82–83
Fü rstenwall, Dü sseldorf (1967) 72 Typenbilder 16–17; Richter and 34fn31;
Schattenbilder [Shadow Pictures] series see also socialist realism
77–79, 83
Schloss Neuschwanstein [Neuschwanstein Umgeschlagene Blä tter [Curling Sheets]
Castle] (1963) 53 series 77
Schoonhoven, Jan 78–79 Untitled (1959) 30
Schwarz, Rot, Gold [Black, Red, Gold] Untitled (1961) 41–42
(1997, installed 1999) 165, 167–169, Untitled (1961) 42
177, 179 Untitled – Worker Uprising, 1958, Socialist
Schwefel [Sulphur] (1985) cover image Unity Party Headquarters, Dresden
123–124 [destroyed] 22, 24–25, 28
Sedlmayr, Hans 133, 135
Seestü ck (bewö lkt) [Seascape (cloudy)] Vermalungen [Inpaintings] series 93–94, 98
(1969) 91–92 Verwaltungsgebä ude [Administrative
Seestü cke [Seascapes] series 91–93 Building] (1964) 55–56
Selbstporträ t [Self-Portrait] (1949) 12 Vorhä nge [Curtains] (1965) 75, 83
Signal Painting 47–48, 77
Sitzende Frau [Sitting Woman] (1957) 25 Waldstü ck [Forest Piece] (1965) 90
socialist realism 14–20, 27–29, 32; New Man Walther, Franz Erhard 44–45, 47–48
16–17, 28, 133; see also Typenbilder Weiche Abstrakte [Soft Abstractions] series
squeegee: Beuys and 180fn19; Gö tz and 128, 117–120, 126
155; Richter and 121–123, 155–157 Wende 4, 151; see also reunification,
Staatliche Kunstakademie Dü sseldorf Germany
[Dü sseldorf State Art Academy] 40–46, 50, Wertewandlung [values shift] 3–4, 103, 140
80, 92, 142, 159 Wolken [Clouds] series 91–93
Stadtbild M8 (grau) [Cityscape M8 (grey)] Womacka, Walter 18–20, 100
(1968) 83–84
Stadtbild Paris [Cityscape Paris] (1968) Zelle [Cell] (1988) 153–154
83, 85 Zweigleisigkeit [living on two tracks] 31,
Stadtbilder [Cityscapes] series 83–86, 167 54, 140

Gerhard Richter, Individualism, and Belonging in West Germany

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Gerhard Richter, Individualism, and Belonging in West Germany

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Gerhard Richter, Individualism,

and Belonging in West Germany

Histories of Conservation and Art History in Modern Europe

ISBN: 978-1-032-20977-7 (hbk)

List of Figures viii

3 The Classical and the Informel 71

4 The Living Method 114

5 Elective Affiliation 151

1.1 Gerhard Richter, Landschaft im Mondlicht [Landscape in

Figure 1.1 Gerhard Richter, Landschaft im Mondlicht [Landscape in Moonlight], 1949,

Socialist education at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts

Abstraction, expressionism, and Richter’s ‘Third Way’

Concerning my most recent commissioned work, a wall painting in the SED

Richter at II. documenta

Looking for belonging in the West

As to the circumstances of my departure, I can offer nothing but

Freedom and isolation in Düsseldorf

Götz, Materialbilder, and Nouveau réalisme

While working on his Materialbilder, Richter became acquainted with Konrad

In light of these remarks, it is not surprising that the Materialbilder continued to

The furious exhibition visitors zeroed in on Richter in particular, who uses

Pop, photography, and ice cream

Photo painting and social belonging I: 1962–1963

Photo painting and social belonging II: 1963–1967

Figure 2.10 Gerhard Richter, Verwaltungsgebäude [Administrative Building], 1964, oil on

The origins and significance of the blur

In addition to these claims, he ventured further accounts of the blur’s significance

When I paint from a photograph conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know

The unbearable lightness of freedom

Time and trouble

compositions from scratch in a photographic manner, a process that inverted pho­

Finitude, helplessness, entrapment

The classical and the Informel

The promise of an abstract classicism

Classicism, nature, and self-extinction

The triumph of the Informel

Gilbert & George

Postwar individualism and belonging in the FRG

consciously, being master of the situation.’7 After sketching the outlines of

The living method

When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we

Chance as theme and as method. A method of allowing something objective to

From abstraction as escape to abstraction as belonging

Elsewhere, he rebuked them for their ‘resignation, a sort of hopelessness: no future.’47

Ambivalent freedom, lost collectivity

Since Expressionism in its original incarnation was itself an assertion of alienation

Statements such as these set up a contrast between abstraction and representation

Dietrich: Are you afraid to make your personal feelings public?

Empowered and disempowered individualism

Growing numbers of people, growing numbers of families, and growing numbers

During the mid-1980s, Richter achieved widespread recognition in the English-

The word ‘bourgeois,’ formerly a term of distinction, now negative in its

sympathies lay in a conservative direction. In the process, he voiced a typically

Order, abstraction, and assurance

Late family pictures

with a Times-supplied photographer, he took charge of the process himself, calling on

relationship with family, had improved in recent years. As Erschießung (see

Church and state between authority and anomie

II. documenta 28–31, 41, 43 Außerparlamentarische Opposition APO

Fallschirm [Parachute] (1977) 117–118 Heftige Maler [Violent Painters] 131

Galerie Junge Kunst [Gallery of Emerging/ Kiefer, Anselm 131–132

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compositions from scratch in a photographic manner, a process that inverted pho