“Art is the highest form of hope“

Gerhard Richter is a contemporary German painter considered among the most influential living artists. Richter’s experiments with abstraction and photo-based painting greatly contributed to the history of the medium. Culling from his vast image archive known as the Atlas, Richter’s paintings reference images of his daughter Betty, flickering candles, aerial photographs, portraits of criminals, and pastoral landscapes. “Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form,” he reflected. “And the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context.” Born on February 9, 1932 in Dresden, Germany during the rise of the Nazi regime. After World War II, living in East Germany under Soviet rule, Richter learned to produce of highly realistic Socialist Realist murals. In 1961, Richter fled to West Germany, where he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alongside Sigmar Polke. During this time, the artist first began producing blurred photo-paintings. The works explore the conflicting nature of an image’s formal make up and the content it contains. Richter introduced abstraction to his repertoire in the following decades, analyzing painterly expression through a technique of squeegeeing paint over the canvas. In 2012, Richter set a record auction price for a painting sold by a living artist, with his Abstraktes Bild (809-4) (1994) which went for $34 million. He broke this twice again, first in 2013 with Domplatz, Mailand (Cathedral square, Milan) (1968) selling for $37.1 million, then in 2015 by the sale of Abstraktes Bild (1986) for $44.52 million. The artist currently lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Albertina in Vienna, among others.

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden on 9th February 1932, the first child of Horst and Hildegard Richter. A daughter, Gisela, followed four years later. They were in many respects an average middle-class family: Horst worked as a teacher at a secondary school in Dresden and Hildegard was a bookseller who liked to play the piano. In an interview with Robert Storr, Richter described his early family life as ‘simple, orderly, structured – mother playing the piano and father earning money.’

In 1935, Horst accepted a teaching position at a school in Reichenau, a town which today is known as Bogatynia in Poland, at the time located in the German province Saxony. Settling in Reichenau was a drastic change for the family, which was accustomed to the vivid cultural life of the larger Dresden. Yet, it was also a move which would keep the family largely safe from the coming war. In the late 1930s Horst was conscripted into the German army, captured by Allied forces and detained as a prisoner of war until Germany’s defeat. In 1946, he was released and returned to his family, who had again relocated, this time to Waltersdorf, a village on the Czech border.

The post-war years caused difficulties for the Richter family, as for many others. Horst’s return was not that of a war-hero. Commenting on this period in later life, Richter reflected: ‘[Horst] shared most father’s fate at the time […] nobody wanted them. In an interview from 2004, he added: ‘[we] were so alienated that we didn’t know how to deal with each other. Horst’s former membership of the National Socialist Party, which all teachers had been obliged to join under the Nazi regime, made it difficult for him to return to teaching. He eventually ended up working in a textile mill in nearby in Zittau, before finding a post as an administrator of a distance learning programme for an educational institution in Dresden.

Richter has remarked on his early years with a mixture of fondness and frustration, sadness and excitement. He reminisced about the house in which he was born, on Grossenhainer Strasse in Dresden: ‘[it] was not far from the original Circus Sarrasani building, where – as a young boy – I could see the elephant stalls through the cellar windows. I remember my great-grandmother’s sewing box, made of armadillo skin, and a man falling from a ladder – something that, according to my parents, only I had seen. Not much is documented about Richter’s time in Reichenau, but he has talked about his experiences of Waltersdorf: ‘we had moved to a new village, and automatically I was an outsider. I couldn’t speak the dialect and so on. In 1942, because he turned 10 years old, Richter was required to join the ‘Pimpfen’, a mandatory organisation for children that prepared them for the Hitler Youth. Later, Richter attended grammar school in Zittau but eventually dropped out. He has been described as ‘a highly gifted child but notoriously bad in school, with Dietmar Elger noting that ‘he even got poor grades in drawing. He ended up attending a vocational school instead, studying stenography, bookkeeping, and Russian.

While too young to be drafted into the German army during the Second World War, the war nonetheless had a deep impact on Richter. The family experienced economic hardship and personal loss: Hildegard’s brothers, Rudi and Alfred, and sister, Marianne, all died as a consequence of the war. ‘It was sad when my mother’s brothers fell in battle. First the one, then the other. I’ll never forget how the women screamed,’ Richter recalls. Marianne, who suffered from mental health problems, was starved to death in a psychiatric clinic.

Even though Waltersdorf was spared the extensive bombing that nearby Dresden was exposed to, it was not sheltered. Speaking to Jan-Thorn Prikker, Richter has said: ‘the retreating German soldiers, the convoys, the low-flying Russian planes shooting at refugees, the trenches, the weapons lying around everywhere, artillery, broken down cars. Then the invasion of the Russians […] ransacking, rapes, a huge camp where us kids sometimes got barley soup. As a child, the military had fascinated Richter: ‘When the soldiers came through the village, I went up to them and wanted to join them.’ He explained to Storr: ‘when you’re twelve years old you’re too little to understand all that ideological hocus- pocus.’ Richter remembers playing in the woods and trenches with his friends, shooting with forgotten rifles which they found lying around: ‘I thought it was great. […] I was fascinated, like all kids.’ The bombings of Dresden made an enduring impression on Richter: ‘in the night, everyone came out onto the street of our village 100 kilometres away. Dresden was being bombed, ‘now, at this moment!’

Following the Potsdam agreement at the end of the war, the area in which Richter lived fell under Soviet control. The Second World War profoundly changed the face of the country that Richter had been born into, which had a lasting effect on Richter’s education and later artistic practice.

Richter’s interest in art and culture began to take shape in the aftermath of the Second World War. He receives a simple plate camera as a Christmas gift from his mother. Werner Jungmichel, a camera shop owner in Waltersdorf teaches the young Richter how to develop photographs, a skill that will prove useful throughout his career. 

As the eastern part of Germany became the GDR (German Democratic Republic), political uncertainty was accompanied by a shifting cultural status quo: ‘It was very nasty, [but] when the Russians came to our village and expropriated the houses of the rich who had already left or were driven out, they made libraries for the people out of these houses. And that was fantastic.’14 Richter has recalled suddenly being able to access books that had been forbidden under Nazi rule: ‘Cesare Lombroso’s Genius and Madness, Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Feuchtwanger, all that middle-class literature. It was a wonderful, care-free time … made it easy to forget the dark side of things.”15 Richter’s mother encouraged her son’s interest in literature, and, as Dietmar Elger has noted, it was this ‘endless supply of illustrated books that prompted his own first drawings.’16 In an interview with Jeanne Anne Nugent, Richter described how he learnt about art ‘from books and from the little folios with art prints that you used to get then – I remember Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer, Lovis Corinth […] It was simply a matter of what was around, what we saw and bought for ourselves.’

Around the age of 15, Richter started to draw regularly. One of his early sketches, from 1946, was a nude figure copied from a book, which his parents reacted to with both pride and embarrassment. He also created landscapes and self-portraits, working mainly with watercolours. In a 2002 interview with Robert Storr, Richter describes a watercolour showing a group of people dancing, drawn in Waltersdorf: ‘I was at a club, watching the others dance, and I was jealous and bitter and annoyed. So in the watercolour, all this anger is included, at 16. It was the same with the poems I was writing – very romantic, but bitter and nihilistic, like Nietzsche and Hermann Hesse.’

In 1947, while still studying in Zittau, Richter started taking evening classes in painting. Little has been documented about these first painting lessons, although Elger notes that before completing the course, Richter felt he gained enough skill to match his instructors. Yet, on completing his bookkeeping studies in 1948, Richter was still not considering becoming a professional artist.

Instead, Richter left Waltersdorf for Zittau to become an apprentice, a common route into a career during the 1940s. He mulled over an array of professions, including forestry, dentistry and lithography, eventually finding employment with a company that produced banners for the GDR government. Here, his main task was cleaning old banners and readying them for being painted again. Storr recounts that during his five months in this post, Richter never had the opportunity to actually paint any of the banners himself. In February 1950, he was taken on as an assistant set painter for the municipal theatre in Zittau. During his few months there, he worked on productions for Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s William Tell. His career in the theatre ended abruptly however, when Richter refused to do a wall painting on the theatre’s staircases and was promptly dismissed.

Soon after leaving the theatre, Richter applied to study painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden [Dresden Art Academy]. It is unclear whether he had been planning to do so, or whether his dismissal prompted him to consider a fresh start. But it was clearly a decision to which he remained committed, even after his first application was rejected. The examiners advised him to find a job with a state-run organisation, as state employees were given preferential treatment in applications at the time. During the following eight months Richter worked as a painter at the Dewag textile plant in Zittau. In the summer of 1951, he returned to his birth city Dresden, ready to begin his formal art studies.

In 1951 Richter returned to his birth-city Dresden to attend the Academy. It was a changed city, having almost been obliterated by the bombing campaigns of the Allied forces in February 1945: ‘Some buildings, or parts of buildings, were still intact, especially in Güntzstrasse where I was first and where all the first-year students studied. What I remember vividly is that very often, practically every day, we would walk through rubble to get from one building to the next, from Güntzstrasse to Brühl’s Terrace and back. The whole city was strewn with rubble.’19 Initially, Richter lived with his aunt Gretl just outside the city, who supported him financially. But soon after enrolling at the Academy, Richter moved to an apartment in Dresden, sharing it with a few friends. The flat was located on the same street as the house of Marianne Eufinger’s parents, a fashion and textile student that Richter had just met. Known as ‘Ema’, she and Richter were to marry in 1957.

Richter was excited to be studying at the Academy: ‘it was something really great to be admitted to the Academy at all, and even the wrecked building on Brühl’s Terrace was very impressive. It was great being part of all that, and the fact that the teachers were real artists.’20 The five-year course was rigorous, with lessons beginning at 8 am carrying on for eight hours every day: ‘It was a very academic, traditional school, where you learned from plaster copies and nude models.’21 Besides daily instruction in life drawing, still life and figurative painting, the Academy had a curriculum that included art history, Russian, politics and economics – subjects Richter found as objectionable as the early mornings.

Although a traditionally conservative institution, in the 1950s the Academy appeared almost liberal in comparison with the Soviet authorities – whose agenda was increasingly imposed on the Academy during Richter’s time there. ‘The goal was socialist realism and the Dresden Academy was especially obedient in this regard.’22 In conversation with Jan Thorn- Prikker, Richter said: ‘It became increasingly ideological. For example, we weren’t able to borrow books that dealt with the period beyond the onset of Impressionism because that was when bourgeois decadence set in.’23 The study of this modern period of experimentation, identified as ‘formalist art’ by the authorities, was not permitted. There were, however, exceptions. Picasso and Renato Guttoso, for example, were tolerated because of their outspoken support of communism. Richter took the opportunity to engage with such artists when he could, being unsatisfied with the Academy’s insistence on socialist realism. Yet he has remained appreciative of his time there, acknowledging that ‘the training I received had a great influence on me.’24

Richter joined the newly established mural painting department, studying under Heinz Lohmar. Robert Storr has pointed out how this department was well known as being less strict in its application of the socialist realist model, probably causing Richter to opt for Lohmar over the more prominent tutors Hans and Lea Grundig. Richter also had a long-standing fascination for mural painting, having met the artist Hans Lillig as a teenager in Waltersdorf. Lillig had been commissioned to paint a mural at the elementary school, and, as Dietmar Elger has commented, Richter had been allowed to sit and observe the artist at work, even showing some of his drawings to him. Further, Richter took a liking to Lohmar, who, ‘although a loyal Communist Party member, remained a comparatively well-informed and cosmopolitan figure.’25

With the Academy clamping down on reference materials and news from the West, Richter found other means of keeping up-to-date. An aunt in West Germany would send him the photographic magazine Magnum every month, and he would obtain books and catalogues whenever he could. With the support of his tutor, Richter was authorised to travel to West Germany and beyond, which he did several times during the 1950s. Organised trips to Berlin granted him access to films, museums, and the theatre. This enabled Richter to stay in touch with developments in contemporary art, complementing the inspiring resources available to him in the GDR, such as “Caspar David Friedrich and other good painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Rococo paintings and pastels,’26 at the museum at Pillnitz Castle.

The students were influenced by the political developments around them. Richter has commented on being shown photographs of the concentration camps for the first time, whilst standing in the courtyard of the Academy. ‘I was in my early twenties. I’ll never forget it. It was like a document, with reportage photos. Awful records […] I remember wondering afterwards why East Germany hadn’t made more of a fuss about it. It was almost like a secret book. It was like irrefutable proof of something we had always half known.’27 There were also uprisings against the Soviet authorities, culminating on 17th June 1953, when Richter and some fellow students gathered at Postplatz in the centre of Dresden.

In his final year at the Academy, Richter was offered a commission as part of his thesis project: to paint a mural for the Deutsches Hygienemuseum [German Hygiene Museum] with the theme ‘joy of life’ [Lebensfreude]. The mural is described by Elger as ‘the celebration of a joyful socialist system liberated from fascism’28 and by Storr as ‘[…] true to its type and period: solidly modeled figures of healthy men, women and children engaged in life- enhancing activities.’29 It was received with considerable praise and enthusiasm by both his examiners and officials at the Hygiene Museum. Bearing none of the hallmarks of his mature works, the mural nonetheless represented a juncture for Richter: ‘Maybe for some short moment I thought this could be a future for me, making big paintings, public paintings [… But] I never really thought that I would have a job in this field, painting murals or as a public artist.’

On completing his studies in 1956, Richter was accepted onto a scheme for promising graduates, run by the Academy. In exchange for teaching evening classes to the public, he received a studio and income for the next three years. He was also awarded a number of commissions for murals, including an exotic and fantastical scene for a nursery school, a map and sundial for a school on the Polish border, and a substantial painting for the walls of the Socialist Unity Party regional headquarters in Dresden. The latter has been described as featuring ‘muscular men and women wielding sledge-hammers and paving stones, and waving banners as they confront mounted troops swinging truncheons.’

Despite Richter’s growing career, he was getting increasingly uncomfortable with the restrictions imposed on his work: ‘The thing that was really unbearable was the hopelessness, the pressure to succumb – how shall I say? – to compromise, to fall in line.’ And while he was not willing to associate himself too closely with the underground art scene, whom he thought had developed ‘a kind of haughtiness,’ he was still searching for a viable position and a new aesthetic language. ‘After all, we had this grand illusion of a ‘third way’. That was the promising mixture of Capitalism and Socialism. […] this ‘third way’ was kind of an idealistic dream.’

A turning point came when Richter visited documenta II, taking place in Kassel in 1959. Seeing works by Jackson Pollock, Jean Fautrier, and Lucio Fontana made Richter aware that ‘there was something wrong with my whole way of thinking,’ seeing their work as an ‘expression of a totally different and entirely new content.’36 The exhibition made clear to Richter the creative prohibitions imposed on him, especially in terms of using abstraction as a painterly method. This, and the worsening conditions of the Cold War, led Richter and Ema to decide that they would leave the GDR for West Germany. According to Elger, in March 1961, just a few months before construction of the Berlin Wall began, Richter travelled to Moscow and Leningrad as a tourist, carrying more luggage than he needed. On the journey back, he remained on the train as it went through to West Germany, where he got off and left his bags in storage at the train station. He then returned to Dresden to meet Ema. A friend drove them to East Berlin, where they took the underground train to the West, declaring themselves as refugees on arrival. Soon after his defection, on April 6, 1961, he wrote the following letter to his professor, Heinz Lohmar:

“It is very difficult for me to write to you today. We have left Dresden to start a new life in West Germany. In light of the current political situation, this sort of move (even if only temporarily) is considered an act of desertion and makes us liable to prosecution. I had to take that into account, and therefore for reasons of caution could not speak to anyone about my work. It required a long period of consideration and introspection to find clarity on the pros and cons of my plans and finally to take a decision, which I am convinced is the right one.

The reasons are largely to do with my career […] 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 in the East, I am pointing out the main reason behind my decision. Incidentally, I became completely certain of this during my journey to Moscow and Leningrad.

I don’t wish to expound any further right now on the reasons for my leaving. I just want to tell you that it was very difficult for me to go, even though I knew I had to act; I am aware of what I have left behind, and mine was not a careless decision based on a desire to drive nicer cars. I’m especially sorry to have to send you such an announcement. I do not want to ask you for forgiveness and cannot expect you to condone my actions, but I do want to take the liberty of sincerely thanking you with all my heart for all that you have done for me, for all the trouble you have gone to support me and my work in every way. I will always appreciate that.’

‘Well, after this century of grand proclamations and terrible illusions, I hope for an era in which real and tangible accomplishments, and not grand proclamations, are the only things that count.’75 

At the turn of the century, Richter remained focused on his Abstract Paintings – three paintings of his young son Moritz being the most notable exception . Eight Grey of 2001 heralded a number of works that continued the experimentation with glass. Works such as Pane of Glass , 4 Standing Panes and 7 Standing Panes  demonstrated an interest in pushing wall-based works into the realm of the sculptural. Themes that the artist had worked with for a long time – transparency, translucency, opacity and reflection – took centre stage.

In 2002, MoMA in New York held a major retrospective of Richter’s work, titled Forty Years of Painting. Curated by Robert Storr, the exhibition featured 190 works and was one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of Richter’s oeuvre to date. It was also the exhibition that confirmed his status as one of the leading artists in the world. His introduction to the United States was described by Storr as ‘long overdue’76 in the catalogue.

Richter continued to draw inspiration from current events, as he had done in the 1960s. A series of large paintings titled Silicate were inspired by an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 12 March 2003 about new possibilities of microscopic vision. These paintings are the most biomorphic of the abstract works in Richter’s oeuvre, depicting cell formations and genetic sequences as seen under the microscope.77

A more overt political reference was to be seen in the work September  from 2005, in many ways a stylistic departure at the time, which depicted the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001. In a 2010 publication about the painting Storr wrote: ‘What is the meaning of a single, small, almost abstract depiction of one of the most consequential occurrences in recent world history?’78 The painting shows the two towers against a blue sky, but the point of the impact has been erased by gestures akin of those in the Inpaintings. Through this act of withdrawal, the enormity and significance of the event is shared with viewers through their knowledge of it, much like with the October 18, 1977 cycle. September was described by critic Bryan Appleyard of The Sunday Times as ‘the closest you will get to a great 9/11 work,’79 because ‘it reclaim[ed] the day, leaving it exactly where it was, exactly when it happened.’

2006 saw the creation of a dedicated cycle of Abstract Paintings entitled Cage. These six large-scale canvases, described by Nicholas Serota as ‘magisterial,’81 were named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage, whose work Richter felt had a deep resonance with his own. In a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Richter said that he had been listening to the music of Cage whilst working in his studio at the time. To Jan Thorn-Prikker he stated: ‘That’s roughly how Cage put it: ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it.’ I have always thought that was a wonderful quote. It’s the best chance we have to be able to keep on going.’82 The concluding line in Storr’s 2009 publication devoted to the series, Cage – Six Paintings by Gerhard Richter, references the Cage quote, stating: ‘In his own idiom, and for his own reasons, [the Cage paintings] are Richter’s beautiful way of saying nothing, and as such, of once more declaring his uncompromising independence.’83 In 2008 the Cage paintings were shown alongside the Bach paintings at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, after which they were acquired by Tate Modern, London where they are on permanent display.

In 2007, Richter completed another commission – a large stained-glass window for Cologne Cathedral to replace one that had been destroyed during the Second World War. He had been invited to undertake the commission back in 2002 and devoted considerable time to the project during the five years. In notes prepared for a conference in July 2006, Richter wrote:

“In early 2002, the master builder of the cathedral suggested that I develop a glass design for the southern window. The guiding principle was the representation of six martyrs, in keeping with the period. I was, of course, very touched to have such an honour bestowed upon me, but I soon realised I wasn’t at all qualified for the task. After several unsuccessful attempts to get to grips with the subject, and prepared to finally concede failure, I happened upon a large representation of my painting with 4096 colours. I put the template for the design of the window over it and saw that this was the only possibility.”84

In Richter’s design, 11,000 mouth-blown squares, each measuring 94 x 94 mm, were used, with half of these selected randomly by a computer programme and the other half mirroring the first. As well as an evolution of his Colour Charts from the 1960s and 70s, the Cologne Cathedral Window was also informed by Glass Window, 625 Colours  of 1989. The process of working with the design for the Cathedral has been documented extensively in a film by Corinna Belz released in 2007.85

In 2008, Richter embarked on a significant body of colourful abstract work entitled Sinbad Consisting of 100 small paintings in enamel on the back of glass, Sinbad is the first series of works by Richter to allude to The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). Sinbad was followed in 2010 by Aladdin . That the artist was clearly thinking a lot about the Middle East is illustrated by the related series Baghdad, 2010 and Abdallah , 2010. As his Abstract Paintings of the 2000s had grown more sombre, these works picked up the brighter palettes that Richter had engaged in the abstract works of the late 1970s and early 80s.

The first decade in the new millennium also saw Richter use digital technology in his practice. In the works entitled Strip  from 2011, digital prints mounted between aluminium and acrylic glass, with long horizontal stripes of varying thickness, span a length of 3 meters. The colour of each stripe is based on a digital manipulation of an earlier Abstract Painting, creating another layer to Richter’s experimentation with the painterly gesture, photography, and representation, akin to that of the photo-enlargement paintings of the 1970s.

The 2010s has been a decade of consolidation for Richter. Successful retrospectives and exhibitions have been curated across the globe, including Gerhard Richter: Panorama in London, Berlin and Paris; Gerhard Richter: Survey in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico; and Gerhard Richter: Painting 1992-2017 in Tokyo – alongside exhibitions dedicated to his Atlas, Overpainted Photographs and editions. Being considered one of the most influential living artists of our time, he increasingly participates in the art world dialogue, discussing topics like the future and purpose of art. Turning 80 in 2012 has done little to slow down Richter’s productivity, and he continues to take his practice in new directions.