In 2017, Gerhard Richter announced that he’d completed the last of his paintings, prompting some to say that he was retiring altogether. This wasn’t the case; he continued to produce drawings, other works on paper, and even sculpture. Recently unveiled examples completed in 2022 suggest that he had simply turned his attention to work that was more modestly scaled and less arduous to produce than the full-size canvases for which he’d become known—understandable, given that he’s now 93. All the same, the change was astonishing for someone whose 60-year commitment to the medium of paint is summed up by the title of his book of philosophical musings: The Daily Practice of Painting.
Still, one could argue that Richter, as the greatest living artist of the postwar era, had nothing left to prove. That much will certainly be made clear in a massive Richter retrospective opening this month at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Comprising some 250 objects, it is the largest survey of his work to date, exceeding MoMA’s landmark Richter show in 2002.
“My paintings are wiser than I am,” Richter once said. To be sure, his work has judiciously distilled, as no other postwar oeuvre has, the dialectic between violence and culture that’s marked the 20th century. But he may be too modest: As a German artist who’s lived through Hitler, Communism, the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s been acutely attuned to the deleterious effects of ideology on art.
Spanning mediums that include sculpture and photography as well as painting, Richter’s pieces number in the thousands, jumping between abstraction (both minimalist and expressionistic) and elusive, photo-based representations ranging from grainy newspaper imagery to natural vistas worthy of the German Romanticist painter Caspar David Friedrich.
This multifarious approach could be construed as evidence of a profound suspicion of singular aesthetic strategies, leading many to complain that his efforts look like they were done by multiple artists. Richter, however, has managed the neat trick of conjuring a signature style out of a plethora of them.
The resulting cerebral whole has struck some as too chilly and devoid of feeling. But this misses the point Richter has been making throughout his career: that feeling is vulnerable to the numbing effects of historical trauma, which in turn casts doubt on the efficacy of art.
