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Richter was brought up in Dresden, among whose ruins he studied at the Kunstakademie until 1962, when he was able to make the move through the Iron Curtain to Dusseldorf in West Germany. His elders, like nearly everyone else's, were good Nazis. The war is featured in much of his early work: we see Allied fighters in formation above a landscape; we see incontinent B-17s excreting their long wobbling sticks of bombs over Germany. We also see the aftermath of the war and signs of reconstruction--those repellently blank official buildings that were the heraldic signs of Germany's Wirtschaftwunder. We see a naked woman (Ema, Richter's first wife) walking down a staircase, and we are reminded of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and of its sheer inadequacy as a trace of human experience. We see the blurs into which the blond head of Richter's daughter decomposes in Lesende (Reading), 1994; we are reminded of the attentive silence, as well as the pose, of a Chardin; and we wonder how much more indeterminate the image would have to be before its attentiveness came to pieces. And in seeing these things we also witness the difficulty of seeing anything. Blur and imperfection: Are they in the paint, or in our eyes? What is the "straight" truth?
Apart from his marvelous qualities as an imagemaker, Richter is a laudably elitist person, skeptical and independent minded, to whom mass anything--thought, feeling, ideology--is the enemy. This is what shows in the 1988 series of 15 paintings titled October 18, 1977, a sort of impersonal collective elegy for the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang members who killed themselves (or, according to another but less plausible version, were murdered by the authorities) in their cells at the Stammheim prison in West Germany. The deaths of the Baader-Meinhofs were for years the hottest political subject in Germany, and Richter chose the coolest imaginable way of dealing with them, so blurred, low toned and oblique that some are almost beyond interpretation (one painting, for instance, merely depicts the plastic record player in which a handgun was smuggled to a gang member).
The images are taken from the most banal police and official photographs. But the profile portraits of the dead Ulrike Meinhof--like the barely perceptible vibration in darkness that is all Richter shows of the hanging body of Gudrun Ensslin--have a deeply haunting intensity about them. This is the kind of unutterable sadness, one imagines, that Andy Warhol would have given his soul to evoke in paint, but Warhol didn't have enough soul.
When the Baader-Meinhof paintings were shown in New York some 10 years ago, they came under clumsy attack from right-wing critics. Here, went the cry, was the pseudoradical art world up to its nefarious tricks, making heroes out of terrorists, blah, blah and blah. Nothing, of course, could have been farther from the truth. Richter is not, and never has been, a radicalism groupie; he's not even a man of the left. He is a remarkably measured and thoughtful painter who despises theatrics, especially the theatrics of violence that play a low, deadly game with human life in the name of idealism, as the Baader-Meinhof gang did.