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“Mr. Heyde” (1965), taken from a news
photograph of the concentration-camp
psychiatrist Werner Heyde being arrested,
in 1959, after fourteen years of maintain-
ing a false identity. (He hanged himself
in prison in 1964.) Richter wouldn’t have
expected viewers to recognize those sub-
jects readily, and he was at no pains to
explain them. Their meaning stayed per-
sonal, with roots in his boyhood, when
he was enlisted in the junior auxiliary of
the Hitler Youth and his father served
in the Wehrmacht. Not until “Birkenau”
would he palpate the wound again.
It feels heavy-handed of me (though
on this occasion Richter quite asks for
it) to be zeroing in on some specific con-
tent of his art, which always shades sub-
jects with undecidable intention. That
goes for early images of tabloid sensa-
tions, such as yearbook-style portraits of
eight nurses who were murdered on a
single night in Chicago, in 1966, and forty-
eight deadpan copies of photographs of
famous artists and intellectuals. The lat-
ter served, perhaps, as marmoreal father
figures for a largely fatherless generation.
(It’s estimated that more than four mil-
lion German men died in the war.) Un-
certainty clings, as well, to later works,
including jittery cityscapes that may be
bombed ruins or simply indistinct views
of an intact metropolis; landscapes that
could be either sarcastic or sincere revis-
itations to German Romanticism (I vote
for wistful); funereal paintings of candles
and skulls; and ravishing photo-realist
pictures, true to the hues of color film, of
subjects including members of his fam-
ily. One of these last, from 1988, portray-
ing his daughter Betty from behind, seems
to me the single most beautiful painting
made by anyone in the last half century.
It is not in the present show. Nor is “Oc-
tober 18, 1977,” Richter’s famous series
drawn from photographs of the Baader-
Meinhof terrorist gang, in life and, as sui-
cides in prison, death. Those darkling
images will always tug at our general as-
sessments of Richter. Whatever his rea-
son for taking on a subject that was
charged, at the time, with conflicting po-
litical passions, I believe that the work
asserts an artist’s license to transcend par-
tisan judgment, independent of opinions
that may even include his own.I
rony blankets Richter’s career. He is a
darling of the contemporary art market,
with his works selling at auction for tens
of millions of dollars. But his longtime
best friend, and a co-curator of this show,
is the critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, a
hard-bitten apostle of Frankfurt School
anti-capitalist, all but anti-aesthetic, po-
litical theory. In a notorious interview, in
1986, Buchloh insisted on interpreting
Richter’s art as historical critique skew-
ering the bourgeois decadence of paint-
ing, and Richter placidly declared his
wholehearted allegiance to Western paint-
ing’s grand tradition. Richter said, “The
reason I don’t argue in ‘socio-political
terms’ is that I want to produce a picture
and not an ideology.” He declines to claim
any subversive intent, even for his occa-
sional work in odd formats, such as stark
charts of random colors and the use of
transparent glass in place of canvas—two
predilections that came together in his
successful commission, in 2007, of an im-
mense stained-glass window for Cologne
Cathedral, proving that the experiments
had been exploratory rather than ten-
dentious. I like to imagine Buchloh as a
negative conscience perched on Richter’sshoulder, amusingly scandalized as the
artist hews again and yet again to ancient
values of meaningfulness and pleasure.
While never forsaking representation—
as seen at the Met Breuer in portraits of
his third wife, Sabine Moritz, and their
three children, which radiate Titianesque
color—Richter took up chromatic ab-
straction in the seventies, overlaying
brushed, slathered, and scraped swaths
of paint. I remember hating those on my
first sight of them, circa 1980. They seemed
to me sloppy travesties of Abstract Ex-
pressionism, and pointless: inferior coals
to the Newcastle of Willem de Kooning.
Gradually, I caught their drift as prag-
matic explorations of painterly phenom-
ena: ur-paintings. Not only condoning
but soliciting accident, Richter attends
to the multifarious effects of layered paint
that has been repeatedly smashed and
dragged, wet-in-wet. He appraises the
results with an exercise of taste, deciding
what to keep and what to efface. In this,
his true predecessor is Jackson Pollock,
who, dripping paint, collaborated with
chance and monitored the results.
At last I saw, as I still see, Richter’s
abstractions as miraculously, often stag-
geringly, beautiful, with an air of hav-
ing come into being through a will of
their own, happening to—rather than
issuing from—their creator. They pro-
vide the chief pleasures of the show,
which excludes the more brazen of his
subjects—there are none of his early
borrowings from pornography, for ex-
ample—and the most seductive of his
color-photograph transformations, in-
cluding floral still-lifes. The selection
favors eerie minor keys, as seems appro-
priate for being a retrospective bathed
in the terrible resonance of “Birkenau.”