Painting Richter.

There are as many GERHARD RICHTERs as there are people who care about contemporary art; no matter how illuminating a particular presentation of his work, it will inevitably be partial. The honor of organizing the German painter's first full-scale American retrospective, which travels this month to the Art Institute of Chicago, fell to Museum of Modern Art curator Robert Storr. We called on three critics and three artists to tell us what, in their estimation, was mastered and what missed.

ALIEN ENCOUNTER

IN CONCEPTUAL SUPPLENESS and complex beauty, Gerhard Richter's work strikes his supporters as offering a parallel to that of Jasper Johns. This gives a sense of the avidity with which they were waiting for the Museum of Modern Art retrospective curated by Robert Storr. It also provides a measure of their disappointment. To gauge this we have to imagine something like bringingJohns to Dusseldorf through a wholly inadequate selection of objects (how about leaving out all the maps and targets as well as According to What?) and installing them in tiny galleries in a more or less random order (say, a flagstone work next to Diver or a flag next to a numbers painting).

The curator's role is to find a thread through work that may be diverse and a development that may be complex. Each stage needs to focus on the strongest examples it enables (in Johns's case, Watchman as the outcome of the Souvenirs). Without such an armature, viewers are left confused. Storr's failure to find or present such central ideas in the Richter retrospective is monumental, and the result is a series of cramped corridors without progression toward those culminations in the career that articulate its development and manifest its rewards (these culminating works include the breathtaking two-thousand-centimeter-long Streak, 1980; the generative Atlas; and the squeegee abstractions).

To my way of thinking, Richter's work presents the viewer with an extraordinary thought experiment: How would Western culture appear to someone from Mars? Or someone parachuted into the West with no preparation whatever? Richter is that someone--trained in East Germany on a diet of socialist realism and utterly unprepared for the complex developments of the twentieth-century avant-garde. When he came to the West in the early '60s he ended up in Dusseldorf, the capital of Germany's modernist art world, and was exposed to the full display of all those phenomena that seem so obvious to us--Pop art, Photorealism, collage, abstraction--but would strike an outsider with a special force of uncanniness.

One of the aspects of this sudden immersion was that Richter saw all cultural production processed through the intervening layers of the media--illustrated magazines, newspapers, television, etc. It's as though he were a permanent snorkeler experiencing everything on earth through gallons of undulating water. The gray color and blurred surface of many of the paintings are the equivalent of this mass of water--the distancing, alienating business of promotion and interpretation. The few paintings in which such intervention is absent (such as Betty, 1988, or the series of candle images) are able to take on a particular force and glow, producing a strong sense (in distinction to their fellows) of what immediacy, its sharp focus and searing color, looks like.

To get to the details of the thought experiment is to see how Richter was struck by paradigms of modernism for which he had no precedent. For example, what would monochrome painting look like to a total outsider? Richter's answer--produced in his monochrome gray panels--is a mirror: a materially uniform surface broken by random interventions as the viewers in the galleries are reflected in the gray fields. This was also Rauschenberg's interpretation, with his white monochromes, which John Cage called landing strips for shadows. But Richter's reading (which I am inferring from the analysis made by his most important critic, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh) is, in its literalness, more transgressive.

Further, how would the outsider see Frank Stella's paintings? Richter saw them as surfaces of water into which a stone is thrown, causing concentric rings to spread outward. The idea of deductive structure, with its emphasis on the framing edge as origin of the resulting pattern, simply fell away, as in Grauschlieren (Gray streaks), 1968. In fact, the importance of the framing edge within the whole of modernist painting is more or less absent from Richter's pictorial identikit.

Another example: What about the novice who encounters Manet's Olympia and sees in that brazen stare the echo of so many postwar targets and chevrons? Would the response be Betty, the young innocent who can reveal herself to the viewer only by turning away?

My impulse would have been to articulate this set of encounters by way of wall labels referring to the paradigms of avant-garde painting, such as Monochrome, Deductive Structure, Aura, Simulacrum. Grouping all the Gray Mirrors under the rubric "Monochrome" would instantly telegraph the fact that this is the paradigm they reinterpret; spreading them throughout the exhibition makes them look like faceless interruptions. Placing Gray Streaks under Deductive Structure would key it to Stella's work as a reinterpretation; grouping the abstractions, particularly the most mechanically produced ones, like the squeegees, under Aura would bring out the irony. The implication is that Richter's work is in constant dialogue with that of other major artists and that this dialogue needs to be articulated (for example, as Buchloh has often argued, Richter's 48 Portraits seems antiquated without this massive collection's being placed in its Warholian context). That Richter in fact collaborated with other modernists--an import ant example being Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo, his 1971 project with Blinky Palermo--underscores his need continually to test his understanding against the example of others. I would also have included the most important of Richter's installations, such as his "painting cabinet" for Documenta IX, 1992. These are works in which Richter has served as his own curator, producing the comparative constellations that reflect on and summarize his own trajectory though the landscape of the avant-garde.

The necessary articulation of Richter's development on this continent will have to await further exhibitions, ones that can offer broader samplings of the work and better fill out the picture than the MOMA retrospective did. Book-length analysis equal to the complexity of the artist's oeuvre will also help fill this gap. Nothing short of this will bring Richter's work into clarity for a public whose appetite has now been whetted.

Rosalind E. Krauss is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modem Art and Theory at Columbia University, New York. (See Contributors)

DAVID REED OFF THE CHARTS

LIKE MOST RETROSPECTIVES, the Gerhard Richter exhibition curated by Robert Storr was organized chronologically. What was revisionist about the show was the way the installation emphasized seeing paintings either individually or in one-to-one comparisons. Seemingly unlike works were installed in proximity, with the apparent intention of bringing out specific kinds of content--personal, psychological, and iconographic--that had been latent in previous considerations of Richter's painting. This approach worked well for the photographically based figurative paintings. Portraits of the artist's uncle and father appeared psychologically deeper and more historically painful than ever before. The selection and placement highlighted oedipal tensions and complicated our view of Richter's relation to painting traditions and to other artists such as Duchamp and Beuys. Toward the end of the exhibition, portraits of Richter's wife and young child suggested a narrative resolution of these conflicts. This "story," however, p ut to rest too easily many open issues in the artist's work.

Richter is well-known for working in groups of paintings. Two galleries installed with related works--the "October 18, 1977" cycle followed by the three large abstract diptychs November, December, and January--were the best in the show. Other rooms containing individual selections and comparisons lacked this unity and thus lost Richter's mood of thinking and self-criticality. Instead, his comprehensive vision was simplified and reduced to choice examples, encouraging judgment rather than analysis. For instance, the several gray paintings in one gallery were too inconsistent in size, marking, and facture. In this hanging, viewers could not discover the subtle differences among examples of this body of work, and the importance of these paintings as a turning point from hopelessness to new possibility was not apparent.

Notably absent from the show were works from a group of forty-nine color-chart paintings from 1966, 1971, and 1973-74. A large color-chart painting from 1974 was exiled--out of chronological order--to a hallway, while the other inclusion seemed out of context. Without others from the series, what color there was in the exhibition seemed less integral and thoughtful than it should. In its cataloguing of colors in a manner analogous to the ordering of photographs in Atlas, this series begins Richter's systematic thinking on the subject. As Richter avoids aesthetic decisions by using readymade sources, these paintings, although very different in appearance from the photo-based paintings, share their philosophical underpinnings. Richter absorbs aspects of photography into painting rather than relying on the appearance of the photograph per se.

In relation to this, it's unfortunate that there was no space for many of Richter's investigations as a painter outside painting. For example, 4 Panes of Glass, 1967, suggests how painting as a way of thinking and perception can be experienced beyond the medium's traditional format. To audiences unfamiliar with his work, this show introduced Richter as a traditional painter, which he certainly is not. The exhibition ignored dialogues about expanded definitions of painting--expansions of which Richter is a pioneer.

David Reed is a painter based in New York.

THOMAS STRUTH SNAP JUDGMENT

I SAW THE GERHARD RICHTER EXHIBITION before it had been fully installed, but one of the things that struck me when I walked through it had to do with the fact that some people say the artist produces only beautiful, perfect images. I think, on the contrary, that he really wrestles with himself, the outside world, and the problematics of perception. He is indeed incredibly refined, a perfectionist, but he is also a vulnerable person. When I recently photographed him with his family, I realized it was not self-evident that he would involve them in his paintings. But he did just that, which represents a risk and thus should not be understood only as an art-historical gesture or reference. When I see Richter's paintings of his wife and young child, I do not think simply of the classical Madonna and child but about an immediate emotional reality, whatever that is for him--and about family snapshots.

I like the fact that in the exhibition's first rooms, which presented a selection of the early work, the paintings seen today looked humorous and earnest at the same time. The surprising use of the staircase to punctuate the introductory spaces covering the first decade of Richter's career and the manner of lining up one mini-exhibition of the artist's work after another in the third-floor galleries spoke to the curator's masterful presentation--and to what was particular to Storr's curatorial idea. But it also made me aware of how this humor has faded. Over time Richter has become exceedingly earnest and completely serious. Now that we are overwhelmed by photography and it has become ubiquitous in contemporary art, one might perhaps look to these paintings qua paintings for a kind of truth. I still find it striking that all of Richter's work is related to photography. Imagine his series of gray paintings as sheets of accidentally exposed photographic paper, or think of the parallels between his abstractions and Man Ray's experiments. Yet the incessant layering by which Richter develops these abstract images seems to mark a journey, a complex psychological struggle to understand the world. What he displays in these paintings is finally the search itself.

Excerpted from an interview with Daniel Birnbaum.

Thomas Struth is a Dusseldorf-based photographer. A retrospective of his work opened in May at the Dallas Museum of Art.

KATY SIEGEL

BLURRED VISIONS

EVERYBODY LOVES GERHARD RICHTER--artists, critics, art historians, theorists--but not for the same reasons. While the standard critical take on the German artist focuses on the medium's bankruptcy as demonstrated by his early gray paintings, his use of photography, and his color-chart works, the version Robert Storr offered at the MOMA retrospective explored the potential that painting still holds. The curator emphasized the artist's representational efforts and the abstractions of the '90s to the detriment of the more conceptual work. Even the awkward, often difficult abstractions of the '70s and early '80s were represented by unusually weak choices. But whatever the polemical intentions and the omissions they occasioned, the conjunction of early representational paintings and beautiful late abstractions highlighted some of the key visual issues Richter has been thinking through over the past four decades.

One of the first paintings the visitor encountered, Stag, 1963, provided a clue. The animal, a smear of gray oil paint, moves through or against a thicket of sharply linear woods outlined in black. The deer is a blur because it moves while the trees stand still. (By contrast, many works, such as Uncle Rudi, 1965, appear fuzzy, and the lack of clarity becomes a sign of temporal fade, loss of focus, and the emotions such conditions might connote.) Other early paintings followed, depicting increasingly various and complicated relations between fixity and motion. Fighter jets rush across the picture plane at sharp angles, some trailing vectors of smoke; a moving car freezes against an even faster, blurrier background; a racing speedboat is photographed by a camera positioned on the bow; a diver somersaults in two consecutive images.

Across the room, the masterpiece Ema (Nude on a Staircase), 1966, obviously echoed Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, one of the first paintings to depict the kind of moving image found in film. Richter captures Ema in a downward motion, each stair another step in her imagined progress. Another homage to Duchamp's painting, Woman Descending the Staircase, 1965 (taken from a newspaper clipping), catches a society lady in a blurry leap down the stairs at a gala. The blur is doubly indexical, pointing to the artist's hand as much as the figure's descent. Over the course of Richter's oeuvre, the action shifts increasingly from image or subject matter to material, particularly in some of the earliest abstractions. In Red-Blue-Yellow, 1972, a swirling, twining gesture of paint becomes a frozen image.

Richter's most powerful vision is of the stillness of death: His eerie 1988 cycle on the Baader-Meinhof faction is contemporary history painting derived from the media--journalistic and evidentiary images from photography and video. Three paintings titled Confrontation show a fragile, alienated-looking Gudrun Ensslin walking past a camera, turning toward and away from us; we fill in her motion, as with the earlier painting of the diver. The movement m Confrontation's three panels is matched by the absolute inertia of the woman in the three paintings titled Dead; here, the sequence records the artist's shifts and adjustments--slight changes in scale and composition--rather than any movement in the lifeless subject.

These two elements, stillness and motion, come together in Richter's great abstractions of the late '80s and '90s. In Blanket, 1988, Richter sweeps white across a version of the Baader-Meinhof painting Hanged, leaving only glimpses of the representational image, like television static fighting with a picture. The monumental November, December, and January (all 1989) develop this theme into complete abstraction, strong reds, blues, and greens flickering through complex stretches of black and white. Not only do the colors contrast; the three paintings feature competing horizontal and vertical scrapes of the artist's huge squeegee. In the following decade, Richter pushes this conflicted aspect in many works: In Abstract Picture, 1999, a mauve curtain drops down over a multicolored horizontal pull of paint. The brilliant, volatile late abstractions feature surprising colors as well as seemingly random changes of direction, contrasting orange and blue, pale and deep tones. Richter has emphasized painting in more than one mood in order to "interrupt" any univocal, simple message a painting might contain; we may see this also in the recent paintings of his wife and their infant son, interrupted by scrapes and smears of the palette knife.

The gestures scraping Sabine and Moritz, like the gray strokes covering the early painting Table, 1962, not only conceal or obliterate the image; they also animate it. In the works of the '90s, Richter complicates his conflict between stillness and movement by confounding image and material, vertical and horizontal, color and black-and-white, or simply passages painted in different moments in time, In the late work, these clashes (so different from the side-by-side juxtapositions of surrealism or postmodernism) of two or more "signals" recall technological phenomena such as flicker, static, and interference: the unstable, material qualities of film, television, and video when they are running but lack a clear, uninterrupted image. Richter's pictures, both abstract and representational, seem to be "on," particularly when placed next to the occasional flawless still life or landscape. They're enlivened by the play of the medium as much as by the image. Storr may have shortchanged the artist's interest in painti ng's limits, but his show, whether intended or not, foregrounded painting's possibilities in responding to contemporary ways of seeing.

Richter is undoubtedly thinking about painting as a medium, and he is one of the artists we use to assess its current conditions. The critics who see him as exposing the inadequacy of painting aren't entirely wrong. This inadequacy, however, is not a feature of the medium's historical obsolescence; the problem is that painting doesn't do justice to a complex reality, one that above all moves and lives. It never did. What Richter shows us is that photography and video do no better; they have interruptions of their own, to which his painting technique subtly alludes. His most recent abstractions face the situation in their utter unpredictability: Pulsing with the impersonal life of the medium, they escape the limits of the idiosyncratic but ultimately habitual gestures of an individual artist. To say that Richter defines the conditions of painting at this late date is to ask not only what painting has lost but what it has gained: life as well as death.

Katy Siegel is a contributing editor of Artforum.

DANIEL SOUTIF

ATLAS, SHRUG

WHAT REMAINS OF AN ARTIST after the MOMA retrospective? We've asked the question time and again upon leaving the venerable Fifty-third Street museum, and in spite of the number of works assembled--as curator Robert Storr points out in the catalogue, it was one of the largest shows the museum has ever devoted to a contemporary artist--the Gerhard Richter retrospective did not escape the query. The throng of tourists in the museum's galleries made it a chore to see two paintings at once, much less get a sense of Storr's hang. Still, it was impossible to miss the point: The artist, embalmed in this New York consecration, is in the end a true painter; better, he is a sort of composite sketch of the painter at once perfect and protean, inasmuch as such a figure can be imagined by a great institution devoted today to the popular celebration of modern art.

From Pop to monochromes, with journeys through gestural abstraction and realism; from the modest subjects of genre and landscape painting to great metaphysical meditations on death, not to mention the resurrection of history painting grappling with the most extreme horrors of contemporary society: Almost every artistic possibility was present, but--nota bene--in paint alone, as though, after a fractured century, it were up to oil and brush to glue all the pieces together again on the reconciliatory surface of the canvas. Moreover, the most cultivated viewers won't have missed, just under the surface, a sort of reprise--painted, of course--of the icons of twentieth-century art history. Here, the happy phantom of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase; there, the scandal of Manzoni's insolent can of shit, metonymically cleaned up thanks to two pristine rolls of Toilet Paper. Further on, Klein's blue shaded into the gray of indifference under the hard gaze of the artist's self-portrait, frozen in bronze across fr om the bust of his friend Blinky Palermo. Elsewhere rose an eagle that would not be out of place in the Department des aigles of Marcel Broodthaers's imaginary Museum.

The encyclopedic dimension of the retrospective was in some ways underscored by the strategic placement of 48 Portraits, 1971-72, in the interior stairwell linking the two floors of the exhibition. This work, based on four dozen photographs of illustrious men taken from an encyclopedia, was made by the artist for the German pavilion of the 1972 Venice Biennale. Here it is illuminating to compare 48 Portraits to the pages that refer to the work in Atlas, the artist's extraordinary ensemble of photographs, collages, and sketches. Unfortunately, this fantastic scaffolding, which forms the very basis of Richter's painted work, was nowhere to be found in the exhibition (nor were other important works, such as Panes of Glass, 1967 and 1977, and Mirrors, 1981, that would no doubt have upset the strict pictorial emphasis of the show). True enough, as Storr points out, Atlas was on view fairly recently at the Dia Center for the Arts. Nevertheless, the sketches, preparatory works, and (in this case) photographs of the first installation of the piece in Venice shed considerable light on the nature of 48 Portraits. Rather than a simple set of conventional little pictures that play perversely with photography and the logic of the encyclopedia, the work was in fact initially conceived as a symbolic arrangement largely dependent on the monumentality of a space--the German pavilion--itself symbolically loaded, as another well-known German artist, Hans Haacke, demonstrated in his own way in a subsequent Biennale.

Many other comparisons would be necessary in order to show how reductive it was to present Richter's work in such a way as to extract its quintessence or, if you prefer, to get at what, according to this venerable museum, must remain... Even the numerous Abstract Pictures, whose modernism broke the tranquil thread of representation running through the show with scrapings in which flaunted haphazardness barely conceals the skillful control of superimpositions of color, could have been illuminated by certain passages of Atlas. In its pages, in effect, a process occurs that is symmetrical to that of the early photo-based paintings: We see abstraction give rise, for study after the fact, so to speak, to a photography based on painting that notably relativizes the latter's pure, immediate pictoriality. Similarly, a particularly seductive landscape with clouds is somewhat altered in meaning if, instead of reducing it to its simple status as an autonomous painting, one imagines it, as numerous sketches in Atlas sugg est, integrated in an architectural space controlled by the artist.

In short, if considered in relation to Atlas, this retrospective certainly appeared to be well behaved. And yet it may be that the show stuck perfectly to a single facet of this artist, perhaps the one he prefers today. This ambiguity, as has often been remarked, characterizes Richter's art. By wanting to be a sort of Musilesque "painter without qualities," indifferent to everything but the fact of painting, this "artist-painter" often allows the apparent complexity of his art--the juxtaposition of the types of paintings he brings together as though nothing could be more natural, even though we all know they should be mutually exclusive--to mask another form of complexity, a complexity to be found elsewhere than in the painting itself. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Richter knows that even if the question of the end of painting is bunk, "great painting" is nevertheless behind us, and the virtuosity attributed to his practice is only an appearance, a carefully wrought appearance but an appearance nonethel ess. In other words, Richter knows that the only proper way to make paintings today is to offer painting another purpose, which he did from the start by putting his work in the service of photography, as if canvas, brush, and pigment now had the modest function of making the most common images truly visible.

The obsessive character of Richter's art has often been underscored. Though amply confirmed by Atlas and by the generalized seriality of the works (which is hardly perceptible when they are reduced to an anthology of masterpieces), this libidinal motor was muffled in the MOMA retrospective: Rather than recount the history of a contradiction never resolved and thus always, tirelessly, reworked, the exhibition slipped into the scenario of an exemplary adventure with a happy ending. Opening with the gray images of a Germany still afflicted by the memory of Nazism--Uncle Rudi!--and (in the eastern half, from which the artist hails) under the yoke of Communism, this heroic narrative passed through the somber images of the final days of the Baader-Meinhof faction in order to end, after a good dozen canvases devoted to the artist's baby, on a sumptuous image of the sea bedazzled by a rising sun. A happy ending that was too beautiful (and too happy) to speak the truth of an art whose source has more to do with the w ork of the mental and material processes that engender it than with the smooth surfaces of paintings. Despite everything, it is a bit premature to say that they are already what remains.

Daniel Soutif is an art historian based in Paris.

Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.

PETER HALLEY

SHOCK OF THE OLD

GERHARD RICHTER'S RISE TO HIS PRESENT STATURE is fascinating. I remember that in the early '70s he was seen in the United States as a second-tier Pop artist. His work wasn't considered radical like Warhol's or Lichtenstein's. Even with the "return to painting" in the early '80s, Polke was thought of as a more central figure. It was probably the work of people like Richard Prince and the emerging importance of the photographic image as referent that created a context for Richter. The Baader-Meinhof paintings, first shown in 1989, were a key factor in his upward trajectory. He was already well regarded, but that was the beginning of his apotheosis.

Richter's popularity also reflects an important shift in the art world since 1980: With the rise of the mega-exhibition, art now needs a hook. It needs to be newsworthy, like the spectacular installations of Damien Hirst, Vanessa Beecroft, and Maurizio Cattelan. Even though he has not used particularly sensational subject matter since the Baader-Meinhof series, the belated circulation of his earlier work in the US has caused these older images to become part of his contemporary reputation. With this body of work he is one of the few painters who can compete in the arena of the spectacular.

Someone told me that when the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art building opened a few years ago, large paintings by Richter, Kiefer, and Polke were installed together in the biggest gallery. They had replaced Pollock, Newman, and Rothko as paradigmatic figures of ambitious painting with a wide worldview--painters with ideas. In the US, artists like Richter and Polke have come to represent the newest version of spirituality in a media-dominated culture.

It's important that Richter's work is painterly. Americans want to see subjectivity: paint that appears to be spontaneously applied, the "artist's hand." His work appeals because it celebrates traditional technique, transcending the materiality of the paint. With their subtleties of value, blurred edges, and satin surfaces, Richter's paintings seem to be immaterial apparitions, like Vermeer's. His work constantly references the old masters--Velazquez, Chardin, Manet, you name it. But in the end all of his work is an imitation of traditional painterliness. He uses old-master effects, but not in order to construct three-dimensional form as the old masters did, since he's painting from photographs. Richter plays it from every angle. His abstract works are basically inventories of kitsch painterly tricks--squeegeeing, blotting, impastoing. It's amusing that they have come to be accepted as a model of transcendental abstraction.

Richter's work always has a double edge. It embodies a pervasive estrangement from the culture around him; but paradoxically, his artistic engagement with this estrangement is total. He's ambivalent about modernism's deconstruction of the spectacle, and his tabloid subject matter and shameless effects are themselves spectacular. To a real modernist, that's anathema. But as he makes spectacle, Richter takes it apart. All this requires a very subtle mind.

Excerpted from an interview with James Meyer.

Peter Halley is a painter and writer based in New York.

ROSALIND E. KRAUSS is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University and a founding editor of October magazine. The author of a number of books, including The Picasso Papers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), Bachelors (MIT Press, 1999), and A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (Thames & Hudson, 2000), Krauss co-organized "Formless: A User's Guide" with Yve-Alain Bois at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1996 and cowrote the seminal volume that accompanied the exhibition (Zone Books, 2000). This month Krauss leads off our look at Gerhard Richter's Museum of Modern Art retrospective; joining her in evaluating the show are critics Katy Siegel and Daniel Soutif and artists David Reed, Thomas Struth, and Peter Halley. PHOTO: MARIANA COOK