The good German; Gerhard Richter's triumphant sorrow.(Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York)

The German painter Gerhard Richter, who is the subject of a magnificent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, is famous for severity, hermeticism, and all-around, intimidating difficulty. His range of styles -- from Pop to minimal to photo-realist and several varieties of abstract -- has seemed perversely promiscuous, as if he were heaping obloquy on the very idea of style. An old friend of the artist, the prominent critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, used to insist that Richter's work was a calculated demonstration of painting's bankruptcy as a viable art. (In a celebrated interview with Buchloh, Richter flatly rejected the notion.) Even longtime admirers of Richter's ...