Page 30 - The MoMA/ Guggenheim issue of World of Art magazine (2001)

MoMA The Museum of Moder Art New York

Richter completed a startling
In 1988 cycle of fifteen black-and-
white paintings titled October 18, 1977, based on
press photographs of the Baader-Meinhof group—a
band of German radicals turned terrorists who
died in a Stuttgart prison on that date in tragic and
highly controversial circumstances. This group of
paintings marks a turning point in Richter’s career,
which had previously been interpreted as detached
and ironic. The most recent work in this exhibition,
from the 1990s to the present, including the Moritz
series (2000–01)—which have not been widely
seen in America—reveals a gentle, occasionally
elegiac sensibility despite the abiding critical
severity of Richter’s painterly identity.
In every aspect of his varied output, Richter has
assumed a skeptical distance from vanguardists
and conservatives alike regarding what painting
should be, choosing instead to test the limits of
what he as an artist can create out of the formal
conventions and contradictory ideological legacy of
the medium. The result, paradoxically, has been the
most thorough dismantling of those conventions
and at the same time one of the most convincing
demonstrations of painting’s renewed vitality to be
found in late 20th- and early 21st-century art.

After its showing at MoMA,
Travel the exhibition will embark
on a national tour to The Art Institute of
Chicago (June 22–September 15, 2002); the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (October 11,
Richter’s professor at the Academy was the Art Informel or of other images such as aerial bombardment (Mustang
gestural painter Karl-Otto Götz, whose influence is seen in Squadron [Mustang-Staffel], 1964) or a smiling Nazi 2002–January 14, 2003); and the Hirshhorn
the artist’s work throughout his career. Joseph Beuys was soldier (Uncle Rudi [Onkel Rudi], 1965) hinted at a more Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
appointed Professor of Monumental Sculpture the same brooding and historically informed sense of contemporary (February 20–May 18, 2003).
year Richter started at the Academy, and while Richter reality. Formally, Richter eschewed the graphic, often
initially avoided him, he appreciated him for his influence cartoonish quality of New York Pop for a painterly The exhibition is
on art, and they became colleagues in 1971, when Richter treatment of his snapshot and magazine-clipping sources Publication accompanied by a
joined the Academy faculty. that resembles Photo-Realism but with opposite effects. comprehensive illustrated catalogue featuring an
Systematically reducing the information transcribed from extensive critical essay by the curator, an interview
Richter also formed ties with other artists of his generation, the source image to an elusive, usually ashen blur, Richter with the artist, chronology, exhibition history,
notably Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo. Richter, Polke, heightened the viewer’s sense of the unnaturalness of both and bibliography. Gerhard Richter: Forty Years
and their friend Konrad Lueg identified themselves as original photographs and their painted renditions. of Paintings contains over 200 color and duotone
German Pop artists, and briefly upheld a satirical variant of reproductions and numerous gatefolds; 336 pages.
Pop they called Capitalist Realism. Richter and his friends s, Richter It is published by The Museum of Modern Art,
viewed the commercial culture of the West from a different In the early 1970went on New York, and distributed by D.A.P./Distributed
perspective than their American and British counterparts to paint spare monochromes that evoked mainstream Art Publishers (see separate release for detailed
as a result of the economic and political situation in Minimalism but with a significantly different intent information).
Germany in the immediate postwar era. and feeling. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Richter’s
brightly colored and boldly delineated canvases This exhibition
with suggested but also diverged from the pyrotechnic Sponsorship is sponsored
Beginning in 1962 gray Neo-Expressionist painting then in full flush. These by Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. Generous
scale paintings that melded newspaper iconography and gestural abstractions continued his methodical yet support is also provided by Mimi and Peter Haas.
family snapshots with an austere photo-based realism magisterial deconstruction and reconstruction of the An indemnity has been granted by the Federal
unlike anything done by the American Photo-Realists, language of painting. Meanwhile, throughout his Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The
Richter set his own course through the tangle of isms that career, Richter has cultivated a subtly romantic and accompanying publication is made possible by the
thrived around him. Although Richter’s subject matter, seemingly antimodernist manner in the landscapes and Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Fund. Additional
such as the amenities of modern living (Toilet Paper the hauntingly beautiful “old master-like” portraits funding is provided by Leila and Melville Straus
[Klorolle], 1965), superficially resembled that of Pop he has intermittently produced even as he has pushed and The Contemporary Arts Council and The
artists like Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, the selection abstraction to new levels of visual intensity. Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

28 WORLD of ART