Page 29 - The MoMA/ Guggenheim issue of World of Art magazine (2001)

MoMA The Museum of Moder Art New York

the years, Richter’s renown in America has grown, with During his five-year stay at the Academy, Richter received
his work featured in galleries, group or thematic shows at traditional studio training under Heinz Lothmar, a minor
museums, and exhibitions devoted to a particular aspect of Surrealist and dedicated Communist who supervised
his work. the mural painting department at the Academy. This
department was known for granting students the greatest
Richter has been enormously prolific and has worked in all freedom to experiment, as mural painting was assumed to
mediums. Painting, however, has always been his primary be a “decorative” form by otherwise strict enforcers of the
concern, and with the exception of one early drawing and Socialist Realist aesthetic. Richter became an accomplished
his sculptural portraits of himself and Blinky Palermo, mural painter and upon graduation executed several
Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting is exclusively successful mural commissions. The steady income and
focused on paintings. Storr states: “Fifty years after Richter success from these commissions enabled Richter to travel to
found his vocation and forty years after making his the West.
first distinctive mark, the accumulated evidence selectively
presented in this exhibition vindicates his faith in an during his second trip west, Richter
art form fewer and fewer of his closest supporters have In 1959 saw Documenta 2, one of a series
believed in and much of the general public has taken for of exhibitions designed to reintroduce Germany to
granted, at high cost to painting’s ability to convey fresh international modernism and the avant-garde that had
meaning. In any event, it is a medium that has come to disappeared during the Nazi regime. This exhibition had
depend for its survival on Richter’s severe scrutiny—and it a profound impact on Richter; most importantly he was
has survived and thrived in large measure because of it.” exposed to the work of artists Jackson Pollock and Lucio
Fontana, whom he credits as helping him open his eyes to
in Dresden, Germany, modernism. Seeing their work was what Storr calls “the
Born in 1932 Gerhard Richter grew turning point of Richter’s artistic life.” In 1961, shortly
up under the Third Reich and National Socialism. He left before the Berlin Wall was erected, Richter moved to
grammar school at the age of fifteen and enrolled in a trade West Germany and began a radically new phase of his
school, where he studied accounting, stenography, and career in the heady artistic milieu that developed around
Russian. Around this time, Richter started to draw, and Cologne and Düsseldorf in the 1960s. He enrolled in the
by the age of sixteen he knew he wanted to be an artist. Academy of Art in Düsseldorf in 1961 and there discovered
Richter’s first arts-related job was as a member of a team Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, Neo-Dada, Fluxus,
that made Communist banners for the government of the and a host of related avant-garde tendencies. Storr states:
German Democratic Republic. He then applied to the Art “Richter the virtuoso was a product of his own re-
Academy in Dresden, but was turned down on his first education as a painter once he arrived in the West rather
attempt; he was finally accepted in 1952. than the strange reincarnation of an accomplished but
conservative technician schooled in the East.”

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