The first full-scale monographic study in English of one of the most important artists of the
second half of the twentieth century. In this first full-scale monograph in English on the
German painter Gerhard Richter the distinguished art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh maps the
unfolding of Richter’s ever more complex and contradictory lifework. A painter in an age that
disdains painting a German confronting the impossibility of representing the historical trauma
inflicted by his country upon the world between 1933 and 1945 a European artist in dialogue
with his American counterparts Richter (b. 1932) is shown by Buchloh to be a unique and
singular artist outside and beyond every other formation contemporaneous with his own
development and evolution. What emerges from Buchloh’s detailed analysis of Richter’s key
works is a far more complex set of painterly strategies than has been previously assumed
strategies that have inverted and relativized all the principles of the modernist and even the
postmodernist painterly aesthetic. In a series of essays that proceeds chronologically Buchloh
begins with Elbe (1957) seeing it as a foundational moment in Richter’s confrontation with
Socialist Realism and goes on to consider such works as October 18 1977 (1988) the series of
representational photo-based paintings of Baader-Meinhof members Richter’s glass works and
the late group of Birkenau Paintings (2014). Richly illustrated in color dense with insights
that represent half a lifetime of engagement with Richter’s work this book will stand as the
definitive essential examination of a major contemporary artist.
