IN THE MOOD.(Gerhard Richter's paintings at Marian Goodman Gallery)

The great and sly German artist Gerhard Richter has inserted a rare note of political provocation into a large show of recent mostly abstract works at the Marian Goodman Gallery. It comes in a photograph of his well-known painting of Second World War P-51 Mustang fighter planes. Richter made the painting from an old photograph in 1964, during the early, Pop-art-influenced phase of his multifarious career. In greenish grisaille with a zone of reddish tint, eight of the sinisterly elegant war machines, bearing British insignia, appear to execute a shallow dive above indistinct farm fields. (Actually, they are flying level; the framing point of view has a rakish tilt.) The Mustang (which, perhaps not incidentally for Richter's present purpose, would share its name with the iconic American fun car) was a long-range craft that escorted Allied bombers over Germany. Mustangs played a murderous role in the February, 1945, firestorm attack on Dresden, strafing survivors of the initial bombing who were massed on the city's riverbanks. From some thirty miles away, Richter, as a boy of thirteen, witnessed the glow in the night sky of Dresden's immolation.

All of that, perhaps galvanized in response to current events, may figure in Richter's choice to interrupt with a distant drone of malevolent engines a show that is otherwise devoted to varieties of silent, solemnly lyrical aestheticism. But I have learned from long experience that every attempt to pin this artist down, about anything, is doomed to bafflement. Richter is always emphatically unclear. The critic Sanford Schwartz has called him "the Master of the Blur," citing the one stylistic device common to most of his pictures, whether abstract or realist: a sideways paint smear that destroys sharp visual contours and, implicitly, confident discriminations in thought and feeling. Richter's most politically tinged work, the death-ridden suite of paintings "October 18, 1977" (1988), about the West German Baader-Meinhof terrorists, has generated more discursive heat while shedding less light of common understanding than anything else in the art of the past half century. His elusiveness is a matter of anti-ideological principle, formed in reaction to his childhood in the Third Reich, as the son of a Nazi Party member, and to his youth and training as a Socialist Realist painter, in East Germany. (He defected in 1961, when he was twenty-nine.) Granted, that elusiveness can exasperate. The critic Jed Perl began a now famous review of Richter's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, in 2002, "Gerhard Richter is a bullshit artist masquerading as a painter."

Perl suggests a commonsensical point: why should anyone care what a painter thinks? Thinkers think. Painters should just paint. Would that the world were so orderly. Richter's life and times forced thought upon him, complicating a reverence for painting that stands guard against uses of the medium, even by himself--as propaganda, for example--that would violate its mysterious integrity. Note that the "Mustangs" in this show is a copy of a copy--a quoted quotation that suggests, but hardly imposes, a new or updated, ad-hoc meaning for the image. It's a measure of the artist's usual compunction that so slight a gesture startles. At any rate, Richter wouldn't count if he didn't love painting and didn't paint beautifully, in ways imbued with a melancholy acknowledgment of the medium's historic decline since it last peaked, in Abstract Expressionism. (Go argue with that. Perl really can't. His idea of the right stuff in painting is frankly nostalgic. To prove Richter's obloquy with a comparison, he cites Balthus.) Richter is a master, the best alive, who doubts the present value and future possibility of mastery in painting. In his art, he holds beauty hostage to skeptical intelligence from which the viewer's patience partially, but never fully, ransoms it. I've often left off looking at works by Richter, wearied by their unrelenting irresolution, but I always come back for beauty's sake.

The abstractions at Goodman come in two series: panel-like vertical compositions, about six and a half feet high,in a gross chiaroscuro with swaths of dark colors scraped over a ground of bright ...