[.ca] Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (ISBN 0870703579)

From Amazon.com:
The beautiful catalog Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting accompanies the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of this prolific and important German artist. Richter's many artistic achievements vacillate between pure abstraction and a kind of realism. His realistic paintings, based primarily on personal photographs and images from newspapers, range in subject matter from the banal, like rolls of toilet paper, to the extremely potent, such as famous Nazi "doctor" Werner Hyde. The paintings have in common an emotional remove; the re-creating of photographic images points us toward our own possible emotional detachment to the influx of images in the world. A blurred chair, Jackie Kennedy, burning candles, family portraits--Richter lays them all out before us as if to say, Here, they are all the same. The insightful text by MoMA curator Robert Storr provides an in-depth look at Richter's life in postwar Germany, tracing the influences and environment that made his work possible. The book includes a revealing interview with the artist and a detailed chronology of his life and work, plus 138 color illustrations and 165 duotones. --J.P. Cohen

A great artist thumbs his nose at high art:
A lot of words been written lately about the _unexpected revival of painting_ fueled by the current Gerhardt Richter painting retrospective captured in this book. It seems, according to some influential art scribes writing in the trail of this traveling exhibition, that the much heralded demise of painting, much like Mark Twain_s death, has been greatly exaggerated. Showcasing about 120 works over a 40-year period, this book is one of the most comprehensive retrospectives ever mounted about a contemporary painter in recent memory, and that by itself is a strong enough reason to buy it. However, it is what has been proven by Richter_s career and accomplishments, and unexpected stature in the art world (Sotheby_s recently dubbed him the _most influential living artist in the world_) and now driven home here, that makes this a-once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn some lessons about the contemporary art world. You see, Richter doesn_t fit the formula for success that many art curators and influential critics and other art powers-that-be have carefully crafted in the rarified atmospheres of the upper crusts of the art world. In fact, Richter breaks every _rule_ that often starts being pressed upon 18-year old art students and then is hammered home in reviews and lectures by many contemporary art critics and curators. Rules like _you better have your own recognizable style!_ or _only new is good_ and the oddest rule of all: _painting is dead!_ But Richter is not only a painter in an era forced to focus on video artists, performance stars and PhotoShop wonders, but also Richter wanders from style to style with an ease and speed that makes this book a lesson on half a dozen art movements of the last century beautifully continued onto the current one. Thumb through the pages here and you_ll soon discover that Richter is as much as ease with photorealism _ some ultra sharp and some foggy in detail -- as he is with pure abstraction and with romantic paintings of pretty clouds and scenic waterfalls. This is an artist who is not just happy with thumbing his nose at the well-enforced rule that a good artist has to have a clearly identifiable style and do something _new_, but who also seems intent on destroying the other forced formulas of the modern art world: he copies other artists_ works, works directly from photographs, blah, blah, blah _ all sins that would make all my art professors and most art critics sigh in disgust. But above all, Richter paints, and he paints in a time when painting has been dismissed as _ailing_ and _ancient._ New is good, technology is good_ painting is dead._ Why does Richter paint? Doesn_t he get it? NOPE!! It_s because it is all about painting! And managing to make fools of critics who forget that their job is to follow the artist _ not to lead the arts. What those who consider painting an _ailing_ form will never understand (mostly because they are not painters), is that Richter can_t and won_t stop painting, because through his veins runs the same intoxicating venom that fueled their ancestral kin in the caves of Altamira and which will continue to drive painters long after today_s critics and curators are forgotten dust. This book shouts: Art does not have to be _new_ to be good, and technology is not the only venue to deliver great new contemporary art - it also continues to prove that painting will never die.

beautiful pictures, questionable text:
This was a gorgeous show, but kind of conservative -- made Richter into the new "master" of painting, sidelines all his weirder and more "conceptual" work. And why does Robert Storr have to try so hard to put himself at the center of everything?? I saw the Richter show in SF around 1990, so no, this is NOT "the frist American retrospective." And Storr's dismissive (and often really uninformed) treatment of other critics (especially German critic Benjamin Buchloh, who's written on Richter for like, decades) shows what a limited writer and scholar Storr really is. But for better or worse, the pictures are great, and a lot of the other material is really good.

Fine Art, Well Published:
Gerhard Richter is one of the finest Pop artists of the 20th century. ("Pop" because he is highly non-ideological, even depicting ideological subjects in a completely neutral fashion. His works are plain-old nice to look at.) This book is a beautiful representation of his work, chock-full of his painting, from his earliest works to his most recent, printed nicely in full color. It is specifically the catalog for the exhibit of his works at MOMA in early 2002 (which this reviewer attended, with great delight), but the exhibition was so broad, with a wide range of paintings across Richter's full career, the number of paintings in this book is satisfyingly broad. Richter has dabbled in many styles, and continues to produce works to this day, but most often works with abstraction or semi-abstraction. His sense of color is wonderful, and his sense of vision is superb, by which I mean his paintings force you to stop and stare for long periods of time. Many of his paintings are like photographs taken just slightly out of focus. (He uses a projector, but modifies the image just enough to make you know a human did the work.) Their beauty truly makes you look long at them, and their skill makes you wonder how a person can achieve such subtle effects of lighting in painted oil on canvas. This book also contains good explanations of Richter's work, but these can become tiresome at times. The worst is that the reviews and the plates are not indexed very well, so it is frustratingly difficult to find a given work, either in the list of plates, or in the various texts. This is a major disappointment, but never mind. The reason to purchase this book is the art. The text is explanatory enough to teach the reader about Richter's career and work, and serves its purpose well enough. It is not clear whether the reader unfamiliar with Richter's work, or who has not seen it in person, can enjoy this book on its own merit, but for the reader even slightly aware or curious of Richter's career, this is a welcome volume for the library.

Amazing Retrospective:
Richter has garnered a lot of attention this past season in New York with a retrospective, and judging from this book, quite deservedly so. There is a wealth of examples from Richter's work from the past forty years, and the quality of the prints are uniformly excellent. Storr's critical stance and biographical introduction run about 70+ pages, and they are very helpful for a person who is just learning about Richter's work, and still remain informative for his old fans. The interview included is enlightening, too. This is one of the better artist retrospectives to have come out in the past few years. Highly recommended.

the unblinking blur:
Behold, German painting! In a country whose artists tend to lay the paint on blut and thick, Richter is a notable contrast. He represents, along with Sigmar Polke, the best of a school of European painters who assimilated the American Pop Art scene. Don't expect the blazing cartoon colors of Lichtenstein though, Richter is a painter's painter, who has more depth and soul than Warhol ever could (surely by his own admission). But Richter's subject matter also comes from the mundane: a faded family snapshot, a clipping from a newspaper. Bits of emphemera blown up a hundred times and immortalized in oil paint. Clement Greenberg might abhore Richter's work more than the American Pop Artists: here is grand kitcsh by the hand of a master painter. *note that I speak mostly of Richter's representative work, of which the book mostly focuses on. Also, the large Richter retrospective, having left N.Y., is still touring America for those interested