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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 04-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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 work, including me, have more or less assumed that it speaks to arcane, insider concerns and tastes. But what do you know? Surveyed in depth for the first time in the United States, his forty-year career comes off as a resounding hosanna of piquant, good, and great paintings, with something for everyone.

Richter is a philosophical artist, not a philosopher of art. That's the verdict of the show, which has been brilliantly installed by the artist and Robert Storr, a senior curator in MOMA's Department of Painting and Sculpture. Richter has taken on the big critical issues in painting since the nineteen-sixties. He has seemed close...

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