Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting | 
 enlarge | Authors: Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter
Publisher: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Category: Book
List Price: $85.00
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Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 181817
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 5.4
Dimensions (in): 11.7 x 10.3 x 1.6
ISBN: 189102437X
Dewey Decimal Number: 759.3
EAN: 9781891024375
ASIN: 189102437X
Publication Date: February 15, 2002
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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
Product Description
Ranging from photo-based pictures to gestural abstraction, Gerhard Richter's diverse body of work calls into question many widely held attitudes about the inherent importance of stylistic consistency, the inaturali evolution of individual artistic sensibility, the spontaneous component of creativity, and the relationship of technological means and mass media imagery to traditional studio methods and formats. Unlike many of his peers, he has explored these issues through the medium of painting, challenging it to meet the demands posed by new forms of conceptual art. In every level of his varied output--from his austere photo-based realism of the early 60s, to his brightly colored gestural abstractions of the early 80s, to his startling cycle of black-and-white paintings of the Baader-Meinhof group--Richter has assumed a critical distance from vanguardists and conservatives alike regarding what painting should be. The result has been among the most convincing renewal of painting's vitality to be found in late 20th- and early 21st-century art. With an extensive and insightful critical essay by curator Robert Storr, a recent interview with the artist, a chronology, an exhibition history, and nearly 300 color and duotone reproductions, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting marks a significant contribution to the understanding of contemporary art in general, and Gerhard Richter in particular.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 RICHTER May 12, 2008
James R. Cope
Great book.
If you like Richter you will love this book.
Well written and the images are fantastic.
Must have for any art library.
Beautiful Artwork November 29, 2007
Susan Roberts (FL United States)
Richter's work is presently on display at the High Museum in Atlanta. My husband and I enjoyed the pieces displayed there and through the museum located this book. The representations are accurate. The work itself is arresting and the colors are magnificent. In the book the artist discusses his technique and educates the reader. The book is now a permanent addition to our book shelf as both a tool for my artist husband and as a book of gorgeous, stunning paintings for both of us to enjoy.
A great artist thumbs his nose at high art May 2, 2003
F. Lennox Campello (Potomac, MD United States)
30 out of 36 found this review helpful
A lot of words been written lately about the yunexpected revival of paintingy 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 Twainys 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 Richterys career and accomplishments, and unexpected stature in the art world (Sothebyys recently dubbed him the ymost influential living artist in the worldy) 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 doesnyt 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 yruley 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 yyou better have your own recognizable style!y or yonly new is goody and the oddest rule of all: ypainting is dead!y 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 youyll soon discover that Richter is as much as ease with photorealism y 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 ynewy, but who also seems intent on destroying the other forced formulas of the modern art world: he copies other artistsy works, works directly from photographs, blah, blah, blah y 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 yailingy and yancient.y New is good, technology is goody painting is dead.y Why does Richter paint? Doesnyt he get it? NOPE!! Itys because it is all about painting! And managing to make fools of critics who forget that their job is to follow the artist y not to lead the arts. What those who consider painting an yailingy form will never understand (mostly because they are not painters), is that Richter canyt and wonyt 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 todayys critics and curators are forgotten dust. This book shouts: Art does not have to be ynewy 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.
Fine Art, Well Published December 13, 2002
Hovig J. Heghinian (Houston, TX USA)
17 out of 21 found this review helpful
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.
 beautiful pictures, questionable text November 30, 2002
binda (Portland, OR)
23 out of 36 found this review helpful
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.
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