Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #552657 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 340 pages

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

From Library Journal
With this catalog of the first major U.S. retrospective of the remarkably diverse paintings of the German-born Richter, Storr (senior curator of painting and sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, NY; Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977) sets out to increase our understanding of Richter to parallel that of American contemporary post-abstract expressionists (among them, Jasper Johns and Robert Ryman). Storr's fascinating introductory and biographical essay frames the historical, art, and personal movements that have provoked Richter's exploration of painting's place in a world rent by World War II, photography, and abstraction. Among other insights, Storr hits on the distancing discomfort of studying Richter's photo-based paintings when he cites the painter's "calculated discretion" in dealing with catastrophic subject matter, such as aspects of the Holocaust. Over 200 color and duotone images, gorgeously reproduced, firmly document the full range of this vital artist, encompassing everything from his intense, colorful abstractions to his gray-scale photo-reproductions to his highly realistic portraits and still lifes, and more. An interview with Richter fills out the book. This will be the standard on Richter for some time to come, and it is essential for all serious art collections. Rebecca Miller, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Artnet.com, February 21, 2002 – Charlie Finch
Whatever your favorite Richters, this is one exhibition, curated to perfection, which will reward repeated viewings.