94 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
Richter’s series “Birkenau,” from 2014, exposes a thread of sorrow and guilt.
THEA RT WORLD
PAINTING HISTORY
The dense layers of Gerhard Richter’s work.
BY PETERSCHJELDAHL
© GERHARD RICHTER 2019 (08102019)
“
B
irkenau.” The dread name—of the
main death facilities at Auschwitz—
entitles four large abstract paintings and
four full-sized digital reproductions of
them in the last gallery of “Painting After
All,” a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Rich-
ter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The
works are based on four clandestine pho-
tographs that were smuggled out of the
concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken
from the shadowed exit of a gas cham-
ber, show naked corpses strewn on the
ground and smoke rising from bodies
afire in a trench beyond them. Men in
uniform stand at ease—two appear to
chat—amid the shambles. Richter first
saw the images in the fifties. He encoun-
tered them again in 2008 and kept the
worst of them hanging in his studio in
Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto
canvas and traced them. As he worked,
they became illegible. The finished paint-
ings exemplify Richter’s frequent style
of densely layered, dragged pigments.
They are unusually harsh in aspect, with
clashing red and green, sickly whites, and
grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by
looking, their awful inspiration.
Richter’s “Birkenau” is a provocation—
who dares take history’s ultimate obscen-
ity as a theme, or even an allusion, for
art?—but one that makes biographical
sense. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter
is haunted, like many of his German con-
temporaries, by memories and associations
from the Third Reich and the Second
World War. Previously indirect in his ref-
erences to the horror, he has reason to
focus on it now, for a show that comes
late in his life, and which he says might
be the last one of his six-decade career
as a chameleon stylist and visual philoso-
pher of painting. (He’s eighty-eight and,
not well enough to travel, did not attend
the opening.) The shock of “Birkenau”
retroactively exposes a thread of sorrow
and guilt through an art of invariably sub-
tle, at times teasing, ambiguities. His pho-
tographic images transposed to canvas
and painterly techniques that exploit
chance have often seemed deliberately
arbitrary, as if to forswear feeling. He
brings to everything an attitude of radical
skepticism. But it has dawned on many
of us, over the years, that plenty of emotion,
like banked fire, underlies his restless ways.
Heretofore, Richter’s only overt ref-
erence to the Holocaust was a suite of
touching illustrations for an edition of
“The Diary of Anne Frank,” picturing
Frank’s face in a range of styles, which
he made in 1957, while he was unhappily
apprenticed as a Socialist Realist painter
in East Germany. (The illustrations are
not in the show.) Having glimpsed free-
world art when he was permitted visits
to exhibitions in the West, he fled via
East Berlin in 1961, shortly before the
Wall went up. He was soon in Düsseldorf,
in the thick of an avant-garde that was
both piqued and excited by Pop art and
the traditions of Dada. “Capitalist Real-
ism,” he and some new friends, including
the brilliant Sigmar Polke, termed their
response, which, among other things, de-
graded the glossiness of advertising ma-
terial to matte grunge. Richter took to
painting copies of banal black-and-white
photographs, smearing the paint to em-
phasize the change of medium. Among
a number of these in the show are paint-
ings from family snapshots that touch on
Richter’s and Germany’s dire past.
One, “Uncle Rudi” (1965), is of a rel-
ative—in uniform and smiling goofily—
who died fighting in the war. Another,
“Aunt Marianne” (painted in 1965 and
rendered as a luminous digital print in
2018), shows a woman cradling baby Ger-
hard in her arms; she was adjudged
schizophrenic, imprisoned, and then
killed in a Nazi eugenics program. Keep-
ing company with those poignancies is
