Gerhard Richter – a book and a movie

Gerhard Richter: Forty years of Painting by Robert Storr is the exhibition catalogue for a MOMA retrospective of Richter’s work, covering the years 1960-2000. Lots of good illustrations of his wide-ranging oeuvre – portraits, landscapes, photography, photo realism, and abstractions. The book concludes with a very interesting interview with the artist who was raised in East Berlin, where he muses on his place in art history and on the act of painting. He has some very interesting things to say about the viewer of art and abstract art. He hates Kandinsky, for example, and collage. Gerhard Richter Painting is a documentary made 10 years after the MOMA catalogue. It covers his whole body of work including archival interviews but concentrates on his squeegee created abstract paintings, which I love.