Look up Richter in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Richter may refer to:

• the Richter magnitude scale, a scale measuring the strength of earthquakes
• Richter (electro rock), an electro-rock band from Buenos Aires, Argentina

Richter as a surname[link]

• Richter (surname)

Also appears in[link]

• Richter Abend, character from the game, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World
• The Richter tuning scale developed in 1825 to which harmonicas are commonly tuned
• Gedeon Richter Ltd., a Hungarian pharmaceutical company, listed on the Budapest Stock Exchange
• Richter (toy company), a German toy manufacturer from the early 20th century
• Richter Belmont, a character from the Castlevania game series
• Owen Von Richter (born 1975), Canadian medley swimmer
• "Goin' Richter," a song by The Ziggens

See also[link]

• Richter's transformation or Richter's syndrome, a complication of blood-related neoplasms

This page or section lists people with the surname Richter. If an internal link intending to refer to a specific person led you to this page, you may wish to change that link by adding the person's given name(s) to the link.

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Sviatoslav Teofilovich Richter (Russian: Святослав Теофилович Рихтер Sviatosláv Teofílovich Ríkhter, Russian pronunciation: [svʲjətəsˈlaf tʲɪəˈfʲiləvʲɪtɕ ˈrʲixtər], Ukrainian: Святослав Теофілович Ріхтер; March 20 [O.S. March 7] 1915 – August 1, 1997) was a Soviet pianist well known for the depth of his interpretations, virtuoso technique, and vast repertoire.^[1] He is widely considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.^[1]

Biography[link]

Childhood[link]

Richter was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. His father, Teofil Danilovich Richter (1872–1941), was a German expatriate pianist, organist, and composer who had studied in Vienna. His mother, Anna Pavlovna (née Moskaleva; 1892–1963), was from a landowning Russian family, and at one point had been a pupil of her future husband.^[2] In 1918, when Richter's parents were in Odessa, the Civil War separated them from their son, and Richter moved in with his aunt Tamara. He lived with her from 1918 to 1921, and it was then that his interest in art first manifested itself, although he first became interested in painting, which his aunt taught him.

In 1921 the family was reunited, and the Richters moved to Odessa, where Teofil taught at the Odessa Conservatory and, briefly, worked as organist of a Lutheran church. In early 1920s Richter became interested in music (as well as other art forms such as cinema, literature, and theatre) and started studying piano. Unusually, he was largely self-taught. His father only gave him a basic education in music, and so did one of his father's pupils, a Czech harpist.^[3]

Even at an early age, Richter was an excellent sight-reader and regularly practiced with local opera and ballet companies. He developed a lifelong passion for opera, vocal and chamber music that found its full expression in the festivals he established in Grange de Meslay, France, and in Moscow, at the Pushkin Museum. At age 15, he started to work at the Odessa Opera, where he accompanied the rehearsals.^[4]

Early career[link]

On March 19, 1934, Richter gave his first recital, at the Engineers' Club of Odessa; but he did not formally start studying piano until three years later, when he decided to seek out Heinrich Neuhaus, a famous pianist and piano teacher, at the Moscow Conservatory. During Richter's audition for Neuhaus (at which he performed Chopin's Ballade No. 4), Neuhaus apparently whispered to a fellow student, "This man's a genius". Although Neuhaus taught many great pianists, including Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu, it is said that he considered Richter to be "the genius pupil, for whom he had been waiting all his life," while acknowledging that he taught Richter "almost nothing."

Early in his career, Richter also tried his hand at composing, and it even appears that he played some of his compositions during his audition for Neuhaus. He gave up composition shortly after moving to Moscow. Years later, Richter explained this decision as follows: "Perhaps the best way I can put it is that I see no point in adding to all the bad music in the world".^[5]

Behind the Iron Curtain[link]

By the beginning of World War II, Richter's parents' marriage had failed and his mother had fallen in love with another man. Because Richter's father was a German, he was under suspicion by the authorities and a plan was made for the family to flee the country. Due to her romantic involvement, his mother did not want to leave and so they remained in Odessa. In August 1941 his father was arrested, and on 6 October 1941 was shot by the Soviets as a spy. Richter didn't speak to his mother again until shortly before her death nearly 20 years later in connection with his first US tour.

In 1945, Richter met and accompanied in recital the soprano Nina Dorliak. Richter and Dorliak thereafter remained companions until his death, although they never married. She accompanied Richter both in his complex life and career. She supported him in his last sickness, and died herself a few months later, on May 17, 1998.

It was rumored that Richter was homosexual and that having a female companion provided a social front for his sexual orientation, because in the Soviet world homosexual behavior was illegal.^[6][7] Richter had a tendency to be private and withdrawn and was not open to interviews. He never publicly discussed his personal life until in the last year of his life filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon convinced him to be interviewed for a documentary.

In 1949 Richter won the Stalin Prize, which led to extensive concert tours in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. He gave his first concerts outside the Soviet Union in Czechoslovakia in 1950.^[8] In 1952, Richter was invited to play Franz Liszt in a film based on the life of Mikhail Glinka, called Kompozitor Glinka (Russian: Композитор Глинка, "The Composer Glinka"; a remake of the 1946 film Glinka). The title role was played by Boris Smirnov.

On February 18, 1952, Richter made his debut as a conductor when he led the world premiere of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto for Cello and Orchestra in E minor with Mstislav Rostropovich as the soloist.^[9]

In 1960, even though he had a reputation for being "indifferent" to politics, Richter defied the authorities when he performed at Boris Pasternak's funeral.^[10] (He had played Prokofiev's Violin Sonata No. 1 at Joseph Stalin's funeral in 1953, with David Oistrakh.)

Having received the Stalin and Lenin prizes and become People's Artist of the RSFSR, he gave his first tour concerts in the USA in 1960, and in England and France in 1961.^[11]

Tour in the West[link]

The West first became aware of Richter through recordings made in the 1950s. One of Richter's first advocates in the West was Emil Gilels, who stated during his first tour of the United States that the critics (who were giving Gilels rave reviews) should "wait until you hear Richter."^[12]

Richter's first concerts in the West took place in May 1960, when he was allowed to play in Finland, and on October 15, 1960, in Chicago, where he played Brahms's Second Piano Concerto accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Erich Leinsdorf, creating a sensation. In a review, noted music Chicago Tribune critic Claudia Cassidy, who was known for her unkind reviews of established artists, recalled Richter first walking on stage hesitantly, looking vulnerable (as if about to be "devoured"), but then sitting at the piano and dispatching "the performance of a lifetime".^[13] Richter's 1960 tour of the United States culminated in a series of concerts at Carnegie Hall.^[14]

Richter, however, claimed to dislike performing in the United States.^[15] He also claimed to dislike the high expectations of American audiences. Following a 1970 incident at Alice Tully Hall in New York City, when Richter's performance alongside David Oistrakh was disrupted by anti-Soviet protests, Richter vowed never to return.^[12] Rumors of a planned return to Carnegie Hall surfaced in the last years of Richter's life, although it is not clear if there was any truth behind them.^[16]

In 1961, Richter played for the first time in London. His first recital, pairing works of Haydn and Prokofiev, was received with hostility by British critics. Notably, Neville Cardus concluded that Richter's playing was "provincial", and wondered why Richter had been invited to play in London, given that London had plenty of "second class" pianists of its own. Following a July 18, 1961, concert, where Richter performed both of Liszt's piano concertos, the critics reversed course.^[17]

In 1963, after searching in the Loire Valley, France, for a venue suitable for a music festival, Richter discovered La Grange de Meslay several kilometres north of Tours. The festival was established by Richter and became an annual event.

In 1970, Richter visited Japan for the first time traveling across Siberia by railway and boat as he disliked airplanes. He played Beethoven, Schumann, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Bartok and Rachmaninov, as well as works by Mozart and Beethoven with Japanese orchestras. Richter visited Japan eight times.

Later years[link]

While he very much enjoyed performing for an audience, Richter hated planning concerts years in advance, and in later life took to playing at very short notice in small, most often darkened halls, with only a small lamp lighting the score. Richter claimed that this setting helped the audience focus on the music being performed, rather than on extraneous and irrelevant matters such as the performer's grimaces and gestures.^[18]

In 1986, Richter embarked on a six-month tour of Siberia with his beloved Yamaha piano, giving possibly as many as 150 recitals, at times performing in small towns that did not even have a concert hall. It is said that after one such concert, the members of the audience, who had never before heard classical music performed, gathered in the middle of the hall and started swaying from side to side to celebrate the performer.^[19] It is said that in his last years Richter contemplated giving concerts free of charge.^[20]

An anecdote illustrates Richter's approach to performance in the last decade of his life. After reading a biography of Charlemagne (he was an avid reader), Richter had his secretary send a telegram to the director of the theater in Aachen, Charlemagne's favoured residence city and his burial place, stating "The Maestro has read a biography of Charlemagne and would like to play at Aquisgrana (Aix-la-Chapelle)". The performance took place shortly thereafter.^[21]

As late as 1995, Richter continued to perform some of the most demanding pieces in the pianistic repertoire, including Ravel's Miroirs cycle, Prokofiev's Second Sonata and Chopin's études and Ballade No. 4.^[22][23]

Richter's last recorded orchestral performance was of three Mozart concerti in 1994 with the Japan Shinsei Symphony Orchestra conducted by his old friend Rudolf Barshai.^[24]

Richter's last recital was a private gathering in Lübeck, Germany, on March 30, 1995. The program consisted of two Haydn sonatas and Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Beethoven, a piece for two pianos, which Richter performed with pianist Andreas Lucewicz.^[25]

Richter died at Central Clinical Hospital in Moscow from a heart attack, after he suffered from a depressed state of mind caused by his inability to perform in public. At the time of his death, he was rehearsing Schubert's Fünf Klavierstücke, D. 459.^[26]

Repertoire[link]

As Richter once put it, "My repertory runs to around eighty different programs, not counting chamber works."^[27] Indeed, Richter's repertoire ranged from Handel and Bach to Szymanowski, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith, Britten, and Gershwin, although the works he did not play are curious (they include Bach's Goldberg Variations, Beethoven's Waldstein and Moonlight sonatas and Fourth and Fifth piano concertos, Schubert's A-major sonata D. 959, Prokofiev's Third piano concerto, Chopin's first piano concerto and second sonata and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3).^[28]

Richter worked tirelessly to learn new pieces. For instance, in the late 1980s, he learned Brahms's Paganini and Handel Variations, and in the 1990s, several of Debussy's études and Gershwin, and works by Bach and Mozart which he had not previously included in his programs.

Central to his repertoire were the works of Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, J. S. Bach, Chopin, Liszt, Prokofiev and Debussy.^[28] He is said to have learned the second book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier by heart in one month.^[29]

He gave the premiere of Prokofiev's Sonata No. 7, which he learned in four days, and No. 9, which Prokofiev dedicated to Richter. Apart from his solo career, he also performed chamber music with partners such as Mstislav Rostropovich, Rudolf Barshai, David Oistrakh, Oleg Kagan, Yuri Bashmet, Natalia Gutman, Zoltán Kocsis, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Benjamin Britten and members of the Borodin Quartet. Richter also often accompanied singers such as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Schreier, Galina Pisarenko and his long-time companion Nina Dorliak.^[30]

Richter also conducted the premiere of Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra. This was his sole appearance as a conductor. The soloist was Rostropovich, to whom the work was dedicated. Prokofiev also wrote his 1949 Cello Sonata in C for Rostropovich, and he and Richter premiered it in 1950. Richter himself was a passable cellist, and Rostropovich was a good pianist; at one concert in Moscow at which he accompanied Rostropovich on the piano, they exchanged instruments for part of the program.

Approach to performance[link]

Richter explained his approach to performance as follows: "The interpreter is really an executant, carrying out the composer's intentions to the letter. He doesn't add anything that isn't already in the work. If he is talented, he allows us to glimpse the truth of the work that is in itself a thing of genius and that is reflected in him. He shouldn't dominate the music, but should dissolve into it."^[31] Or, similarly: "I am not a complete idiot, but whether from weakness or laziness have no talent for thinking. I know only how to reflect: I am a mirror . . . Logic does not exist for me. I float on the waves of art and life and never really know how to distinguish what belongs to the one or the other or what is common to both. Life unfolds for me like a theatre presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart."^[32]

Richter's belief that musicians should "carry ... out the composer's intentions to the letter", led him to be critical of others and, most often, himself.^[31] After attending a recital of Murray Perahia, where Perahia performed Chopin's Third Piano Sonata without observing the first movement repeat, Richter asked him backstage to explain the omission.^[33] Similarly, after Richter realized that he had been playing a wrong note in Bach's Italian Concerto for decades, he insisted that the following disclaimer/apology be printed on a CD containing a performance thereof: "Just now Sviatoslav Richter realized, much to his regret, that he always made a mistake in the third measure before the end of the second part of the 'Italian Concerto'. As a matter of fact, through forty years -- and no musician or technician ever pointed it out to him -- he played 'F-sharp' rather than 'F'. The same mistake can be found in the previous recording made by Maestro Richter in the fifties."^[34]

Recordings[link]

Despite his large discography, Richter disliked the recording process,^[35] and most of Richter's recordings originate from live performances. Thus, his live recitals from Moscow (1948), Warsaw (1954 and 1972), Sofia (1958), New York City (1960), Leipzig (1963), Aldeburgh (multiple years), Prague (multiple years), Salzburg (1977) and Amsterdam (1986), are hailed as some of the finest documents of his playing, as are other myriad live recordings issued prior to and since his death on labels including Music & Arts, BBC Legends, Philips, Russian Revelation, and more recently Ankh productions.

Other critically acclaimed live recordings by Richter include performances of Scriabin's selected etudes, preludes and sonatas (multiple performances, different years), Schumann's C major Fantasy (multiple performances, different years), Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata (Moscow, 1960), Schubert's B-flat Sonata (multiple performances, different years), Ravel's Miroirs (Prague, 1965), Liszt's B minor Sonata (multiple performances, 1965–66), Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata (multiple performances, 1975) and selected preludes by Rachmaninoff (multiple performances, different years) and Debussy (multiple performances, different years).^[36]

However, despite his professed hatred for the studio, Richter took the recording process quite seriously.^[37] For instance, after a long recording session for Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, for which he had used a Bösendorfer piano, Richter listened to the tapes and, dissatisfied with his performance, told the recording engineer "Well, I think we'll remake it on the Steinway after all".^[38] Similarly, during a recording session for Schumann's Toccata, Richter reportedly chose to play this piece (which Schumann himself considered "among the most difficult pieces ever written"^[39]) several times in a row, without taking any breaks, in order to preserve the spontaneity of his interpretation.^{[citation needed]}

According to Falk Schwartz and John Berrie's 1983 article "Sviatoslav Richter -- A Discography",^[40] in the 1970s Richter announced his intention of recording his complete solo repertoire "on some 50 discs". This "complete" Richter project did not come to fruition, however, although twelve LPs worth of recordings were pressed between 1970 and 1973 and were subsequently re-issued (in CD format) by Olympia (various composers, 10 CDs) and RCA (Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier).

In 1961, Richter's recording with Erich Leinsdorf and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Performance - Concerto or Instrumental Soloist. That recording is still considered a landmark (despite Richter's claim he was dissatisfied with it),^[41] as are his studio recordings of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, Liszt's two Piano Concertos, Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto and Schumann's Toccata, among many others.^[42]

Honours and awards[link]

This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the Russian Wikipedia.

• Stalin Prize (1950);
• People's Artist of the RSFSR (1955);
• Grammy Award (1960);
• Lenin Prize (1961);
• People's Artist of the USSR (1961);
• Robert Schumann Prize (1968);
• Honorary Doctor of the University of Strasbourg (1977);
• Léonie Sonning Music Prize (1986; Denmark);
• Hero of Socialist Labour (1975);
• Three Orders of Lenin (1965, 1975, 1985);
• Order of the October Revolution (1980);
• Glinka State Prize of the RSFSR (1987) - for concert programmes in 1986, performed in the cities of Siberia and the Far East;
• Order of Merit for the Fatherland, 4th class (1995);
• Russian Federation State Prize (1996);
• Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (France)
• Doctor of Music, honoris causa Oxford University^[43]
• Voted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame in 2012^[44]

In film[link]

Richter appeared in a 1952 Soviet film playing Liszt in a Kompozitor Glinka, (Russian: Композитор Глинка).

Quotations[link]

Memorable statements about Richter[link]

The Italian critic Piero Rattalino has asserted that the only pianists comparable to Richter in the history of piano performance were Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni.^[45]

Glenn Gould called Richter "one of the most powerful communicators the world of music has produced in our time".^[46]

Nathan Milstein described Richter in his memoir "From Russia to the West" as the following: "Richter was certainly a marvelous pianist but not as impeccable as he was reputed to be. His music making was too dry for me. In Richter's interpretation of Ravel's Jeux d'eau, instead of flowing water you hear frozen icicles."^[47]

Van Cliburn attended a Richter recital in 1958 in the Soviet Union. He reportedly cried during the recital and, upon returning to the United States, described Richter's playing as "the most powerful piano playing I have ever heard".^[48]

Arthur Rubinstein described his first exposure to Richter as follows: "It really wasn't anything out of the ordinary. Then at some point I noticed my eyes growing moist: tears began rolling down my cheeks."^[46]

Heinrich Neuhaus described Richter as follows: "His singular ability to grasp the whole and at the same time miss none of the smallest details of a composition suggests a comparison with an eagle who from his great height can see as far as the horizon and yet single out the tiniest detail of the landscape."^[49]

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote of Richter: "Richter is an extraordinary phenomenon. The enormity of his talent staggers and enraptures. All the phenomena of musical art are accessible to him."^[50]

Vladimir Sofronitsky proclaimed that Richter was a "genius", prompting Richter to respond that Sofronitsky was a "god".^[51]

Vladimir Horowitz said: "Of the Russian pianists, I like only one, Richter."^[52]

Pierre Boulez wrote of Richter: "His personality was greater than the possibilities offered to him by the piano, broader than the very concept of complete mastery of the instrument."^[53]

Marlene Dietrich, who was Richter's friend, wrote in her autobiography, Marlene: "One evening the audience sat around him on the stage. While he was playing a piece, a woman directly behind him collapsed and died on the spot. She was carried out of the hall. I was deeply impressed by this incident and thought to myself: “What an enviable fate, to die while Richter is playing! What a strong feeling for the music this woman must have had when she breathed out her life!” But Richter did not share this opinion, he was shaken".

Gramophone critic Bryce Morrison described Richter as follows: "Idiosyncratic, plain-speaking, heroic, reserved, lyrical, virtuosic and perhaps above all, profoundly enigmatic, Sviatoslav Richter remains one of the greatest recreative artists of all time."^[54]

Memorable statements by Richter[link]

On listening to Bach: "It does no harm to listen to Bach from time to time, even if only from a hygienic standpoint."^[55]

On Scriabin: "Scriabin isn't the sort of composer whom you'd regard as your daily bread, but is a heavy liqueur on which you can get drunk periodically, a poetical drug, a crystal that's easily broken."^[56]

On picking small venues for performance: "Put a small piano in a truck and drive out on country roads; take time to discover new scenery; stop in a pretty place where there is a good church; unload the piano and tell the residents; give a concert; offer flowers to the people who have been so kind as to attend; leave again."^[57]

On his plan to perform without a fee: "Music must be given to those who love it. I want to give free concerts; that's the answer."^[58]

On Neuhaus: "I learned a lot from him, even though he kept saying that there was nothing he could teach me. Music is written to be played and listened to and has always seemed to me to be able to manage without words... This was exactly the case with Heinrich Neuhaus. In his presence I was almost always reduced to total silence. This was an extremely good thing, as it meant that we concentrated exclusively on the music. Above all, he taught me the meaning of silence and the meaning of singing. He said I was incredibly obstinate and did only what I wanted to. It's true that I've only ever played what I wanted. And so he left me to do as I liked."^[59]

On playing: "...I don't play for the audience, I play for myself, and if I derive any satisfaction from it, then the audience, too, is content." ^[60]

Anecdotes[link]

• Richter usually refused to play piano transcriptions in concert, although on occasion he would perform opera transcriptions for his friends. In the 1940s, he apparently performed his own transcription of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde for a group of friends in one sitting. Similarly, after being a witness at Riccardo Muti's wedding, Richter played from memory the entire first act of Puccini's Madama Butterfly for a small group of wedding guests.^{[citation needed]}

• Born in 1915 to a father of German extraction and a Russian noble mother, Richter recounts how he told Herbert von Karajan that he (Richter) was "a German, too", and Karajan replied "then I am a Chinese". Richter commented on Karajan's reaction by saying, "How do you like that?" (Karajan was of part-Greek and Slovenian descent.)

Media[link]

	Wanderer Fantasy noicon In this 1963 studio recording of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy, Richter demonstrates his barnstorming technique and ability to control all aspects of his playing to bring out the structural features of a work as he moves from the end of the third movement into the beginning of the finale.
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Rasmussen, Karl Aage (2007). Svjatoslav Richter - Pianist. Gyldendal, Copenhagen. ISBN 978-87-02-03430-1. 
• Rasmussen, Karl Aage (2010). Szvjatoszlav Richter - A zongorista. Rozsavolgyi es Tarsa, Budapest. ISBN 978-963-87764-8-8. 
• Rasmussen, Karl Aage (2010). Sviatoslav Richter - Pianist. Northeastern University Press, Boston. ISBN 978-1-55553-710-4. 
• Monsaingeon, Bruno (2001). Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-571-20553-4. 
• Monsaingeon, Bruno (1998), Richter, the Enigma. Video interview-documentary. OCLC 41148757
• Rattalino, Piero (2005). Sviatoslav Richter. Il Visionario. Zecchini Editore. ISBN 88-87203-35-0. 

External links[link]

• Sviatoslav Richter at the Internet Movie Database
• Sviatoslav Richter at Find a Grave
• Website dedicated to Sviatoslav Richter, includes an extensive discography
• RECORDED RICHTER, complete discography that includes currently unavailable recordings and private recordings
• Brief obituary of Nina Dorliak
• Paul Geffen, 1999: Vita of Sviatoslav Richter
• Pete Taylor, 2010: Concert list program with Google Earth maps

Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter, 2005
Born	(1932-02-09) February 9, 1932 (age 80) Dresden, Germany
Nationality	German
Field	Painting
Training	Dresden Art Academy, Dresden Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf
Works	Atlas (1964),[1][2] Baader-Meinhof (October 18, 1977), (1988)[3] Acht Grau (Eight Grey), 2002[4]

Gerhard Richter (born February 9, 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.^{[citation needed]} Richter is regarded as the Top-Selling Living Artist. In 2011, Richter's works achieved prices higher than any other living artist. His works sold for more than $200 million, topping auction result totals for Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti, and Mark Rothko combined.^[5]

Early life[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (October 2011)

The son of a schoolteacher^[6], Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau, Lower Silesia, and in Waltersdorf (Zittauer Gebirge) in the Upper Lusatian countryside. He left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1948 he terminated the higher professional school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, was trained there in writing as well as in stage and advertising painting.^{[citation needed]} In 1950 his application for membership in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Dresden University of Visual Arts, founded in 1764) was rejected.^{[citation needed]} He finally began his study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1951. His teachers were Karl von Appen, Ulrich Lohmar and Will Grohmann.

Early career[link]

In these early days of his career he prepared a wall painting ("Communion with Picasso", 1955) for the refectory of this Academy of Arts as part of his B.A. A further mural followed within the Hygiene-Museum (German Hygiene Museum) with the title "Lebensfreude" ("Joy of life") for his diploma.^{[citation needed]}

Gerhard Richter c. 1970, photograph by Lothar Wolleh.

Both paintings had been painted over for ideological reasons after Richter escaped from East to West Germany (two months before the building of the Berlin Wall); after German reunification, the wall painting Joy of life (1956) was uncovered in two places in the stairway of the German Hygiene Museum, and after the millennium these two uncovered windows with a look at the Joy of Life had been newly recovered. From 1957 to 1961 Richter worked as a master trainee in the academy and took orders for the former state of the GDR. During this time he worked intensively at murals (Arbeiterkampf, which means Worker fight), on paintings in oil (e.g. portraits of the East German actress Angelica Domroese and of Richter's first wife Ema), on various self portraits and furthermore on a panorama of Dresden with the neutral name Stadtbild (Townscape, 1956).

When he arrived in West Germany, Richter began to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz together with Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg and Gotthard Graubner. With Polke and Lueg he introduced the term Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalistic Realism)^[7] as an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial shorthand of advertising. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as Socialist Realism, then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union, but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art doctrine of western capitalism. Later, Lueg founded the gallery Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf.

Richter taught as a visiting professor at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and returned in 1971 to Düsseldorf Art Academy as a professor for over 15 years.

Personal life[link]

In 1983, Richter resettled from Düsseldorf to Cologne, where he still lives and works today.Gerhard Richter Guggenheim Collection.</ref>

Richter married Marianne Eufinger in 1957; she gave birth to his first daughter. He married his second wife, the sculptor Isa Genzken, in 1982. Richter had a son and daughter with his third wife, Sabine Moritz after they were married in 1995.

Controversy[link]

In 2005 Richter, in an interview by the German political magazine Der Spiegel, wondered why citizens of Salzburg did not protest against a sculpture by Markus Lüpertz, and described the work as expressing the deprivation of public art sponsorship in Germany. The sculpture, declared as a homage to Mozart by its creator, was promptly attacked by a right-wing art activist from Austria and badly damaged.^[8] The statue depicted a grotesque nude figure with both male and female features [2][3] and was characterized as pornography by the two elderly men prosecuted for the vandalism during which they painted over it and stuck feathers onto it.^[9]

Art[link]

Nearly all of Richter’s work demonstrates both illusionistic space that seems natural and the physical activity and material of painting—as mutual interferences. For Richter, reality is the combination of new attempts to understand—to represent; in his case, to paint—the world surrounding us.

Photo-paintings and the Blur[link]

Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: from newspapers and books, sometimes incorporating their captions, as in Helga Matura (1966); private snapshots; aerial views of towns and mountains, for example Cityscape Madrid (1968) and Alps (1968); seascapes (1969–70); and a large multi-partite work made for the German Pavilion in the 1972 Venice Biennale, Forty-eight Portraits (1971–2), for which he chose mainly the faces of composers such as Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, and of writers such as H. G. Wells and Franz Kafka.^[10]

Many of these paintings are made in a multi-step process of representations. He starts with a photograph, which he has found or taken himself, and projects it onto his canvas, where he traces it for exact form. Taking his color palette from the photograph, he paints to replicate the look of the original picture. His hallmark "blur"—sometimes a softening by the light touch of a soft brush, sometimes a hard smear by an aggressive pull with his squeegee—has two effects:^{[citation needed]}

1. It offers the image a photographic appearance; and
2. Paradoxically, it testifies the painter's actions, both skilled and coarse, and the plastic nature of the paint itself.

In some paintings blurs and smudges are severe enough to disrupt the image; it becomes hard to understand or believe. The subject is nullified.^{[original research?]} In these paintings, images and symbols (such as landscapes, portraits, and news photos) are rendered fragile illusions, fleeting conceptions in our constant reshaping of the world.

Richter has stated^{[citation needed]} that the use of photographic imagery as a starting point for his early paintings resulted from an attempt to escape the complicated process of deciding what to paint, along with the critical and theoretical implications accompanying such decisions within the context of a modernist discourse. To achieve this, Richter began amassing photos from magazines, books, etc., many of which became the subject matter of his early photography-based paintings. Thus the Atlas was born: Atlas is an ongoing, encyclopedic work composed of approximately 4,000 photographs, reproductions or cut-out details of photographs and illustrations, grouped together on approximately 600 separate panels.^[11] When Atlas was first exhibited in 1972 at the Museum for Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht under the title "Atlas der Fotos und Skizzen," it included 315 parts. The work has continued to expand, and was exhibited later in full form at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in 1989, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 1990, and at Dia Art Foundation in New York in 1995.

While elements of landscape painting appeared initially in Richter’s work early on in his career in 1963, the artist began his independent series of landscapes in 1968 after his first vacation, an excursion that landed him besotted with the terrain of Corsica.^[12] From around 1964 Richter made a number of portraits of dealers, collectors, artists and others connected with his immediate professional circle. Richter's two portraits of Betty, his daughter, were made in 1977 and 1988 respectively; the three portraits titled IG were made in 1993 and depict the artist's second wife, Isa Genzken; Lesende (1994) portrays Sabine Moritz, whom Richter married in 1995, shown absorbed in the pages of a magazine.^[13] Many of his realist paintings reflect on the history of National Socialism, creating paintings of family members who had been members, as well as victims of, the Nazi party.^[14] From 1966, as well as photographs given to him by others, Richter began using photographs he had taken as the basis for portraits.^[15] In 1975, on the occasion of a show in Düsseldorf, Gilbert and George commissioned Richter to make a portrait of them.^[16]

Richter began making prints in 1965. He was most active before 1974, only completing sporadic projects since that time. In the period 1965–74, during which Richter made most of his prints (more than 100), the same or similar subjects often occurred in both his paintings and prints.^[17] He has explored a variety of photographic printmaking processes – screenprint, photolithography, and collotype – in search of inexpensive mediums that would lend a "non-art" appearance to his work.^[18] He stopped working in print media in 1974, at about the same time as he gave up painting from found photographs, and began to use photographs he took himself.^[17]

Richter's landscapes have emerged since 1968 as an independent work group in his oeuvre.^[19]In 1972 Richter had embarked on a ten-day trip to Greenland, originally having intended to be accompanied by his friend Hanne Darboven, but eventually journeying alone. His intention was to experience and record the desolate arctic landscape. In 1976 four large paintings, each titled Seascape emerged from the Greenland photographs.^[20]

In 1982 and 1983, Richter made a series of paintings of Candles and Skulls that relate to a longstanding tradition of still life memento mori painting. Each composition is most commonly based on a photograph taken by Richter in his own studio. Influenced by old master vanitas painters such as Georges de la Tour and Francisco de Zurbarán, the artist began to experiment with arrangements of candles and skulls placed in varying degrees of natural light, sitting atop otherwise barren tables. The Candle paintings coincided with his first large-scale abstract paintings, and represent the complete antithesis to those vast, colorful and playfully meaningless works. Richter has made only 27 of these still lifes.^[21] In 1995, the artist marked the 50th anniversary of the allied bombings of his hometown Dresden during the Second World War. His solitary candle was reproduced on a monumental scale and placed overlooking the River Elbe as a symbol of rejuvenation.^[22]

In a 1988 series of 15 ambiguous photo paintings entitled Baader-Meinhof (October 18, 1977) he depicted four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing terrorist organization. These paintings were created from black-and-white newspaper and police photos. Three RAF members were found dead in their prison cells on October 18, 1977, and the cause of their deaths was the focus of widespread controversy.^[23] In the late 1980s, Richter had begun to collect images of the group which he used as the basis for the 15 paintings exhibited for the first time in Krefeld in 1989. The paintings were based on an official portrait of Ulrike Meinhof during her years as a radical journalist; on photographs of the arrest of Holger Meins; on police shots of Gudrun Ensslin in prison; on Andreas Baader's bookshelves and the record player to conceal his gun; on the dead figures of Meinhof, Ensslin, and Baader; and on the funeral of Ensslin, Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe.

Since 1989, Richter has worked on creating new images by dragging wet paint over photographs. The photographs, not all taken by Richter himself, are mostly snapshots of daily life: family vacations, pictures of friends, mountains, buildings and streetscapes.

Richter was flying to New York on September 11th, 2001, at the time of the attacks on the World Trade Centre. His plane was diverted to Halifax, Nova Scotia. A few years later he made one small painting specifically about the planes crashing into the Twin Towers.^[24] In September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter, Robert Storr situates Richter's 2005 painting "September" within a brand of anti-ideological thought that he finds throughout Richter’s work, he considers how the ubiquitous photographic documentation of the September 11th attacks affects the uniqueness of one’s distinct remembrance of the events, and he offers a valuable comparison to Richter’s “October 18, 1977” cycle.^[25]

In the 2000s, Richter made a number of works that dealt with scientific phenomena. In 2003, he produced several paintings with the same title: Silicate. Large oil-on-canvas pieces, these show latticed rows of light- and dark-grey blobs whose shapes quasi-repeat as they race across the frame, their angle modulating from painting to painting. They depict a photo, published in the FAZ, of a computer-generated simulacrum of reflections from the silicon dioxide found in insects' shells.^[26]

Abstract work[link]

In 1969, Richter produced the first of a group of grey monochromes that consist exclusively of the textures resulting from different methods of paint application.

In 1976, Richter first gave the title Abstract Painting to one of his works. By presenting a painting without even a few words to name and explain it, he felt he was “letting a thing come, rather than creating it.” In his abstract pictures, Richter builds up cumulative layers of non-representational painting, beginning with brushing big swaths of primary color onto canvas.^[27] The paintings evolve in stages, based on his responses to the picture’s progress: the incidental details and patterns that emerge. Throughout his process, Richter uses the same techniques he uses in his representational paintings, blurring and scraping to veil and expose prior layers. From the mid 1980s, Richter began to use a home-made squeegee to rub and scrape the paint that he had applied in large bands across his canvases. In the 1990s the artist began to run his squeegee up and down the canvas in an ordered fashion to produce vertical columns that take on the look of a wall of planks.^[28]

Richter’s abstract work is remarkable for the illusion of space that develops, ironically, out of his incidental process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving, and subtracting paint. Despite unnatural palettes, spaceless sheets of color, and obvious trails of the artist’s tools, the abstract pictures often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside. As in his representational paintings, there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In those paintings, he reduces worldly images to mere incidents of Art. Similarly, in his abstract pictures, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.

Firenze continues a cycle of 99 works conceived in the autumn of 1999 and executed in the same year and thereafter. The series of overpainted photographs, or übermalte Photographien, consists of small paintings bearing images of the city of Florence, created by the artist as a tribute to the music of Steve Reich and the work of Contempoartensemble, a Florence-based group of musicians.^[29]

After 2000, Richter made a number of works that dealt with scientific phenomena, in particular, with aspects of reality that cannot be seen by the naked eye.^[30] In 2006, Richter conceived six paintings as a coherent group under the title Cage, named after the American avant-garde composer John Cage.^[31] In May 2002, Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting no. 648-2, from 1987. Working on a long table over a period of several weeks, Richter combined these 10 x 15 cm details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German FAZ newspaper on March 20 and 21. This work was published in 2004 as a book entitled War Cut.

Color Chart paintings[link]

As early as 1966 Richter had made paintings based on colour charts, using the rectangles of colour as found objects in an apparently limitless variety of hue; these culminated in 1973–4 in a series of large-format pictures such as 256 Colours.^[10] Richter painted three series of Color Chart paintings between 1966 and 1974, each series growing more ambitious in their attempt to create through their purely arbitrary arrangement of colors.^[32] The artist began his investigations into the complex permutations of color charts in 1966, with a small painting entitled 10 Colors.^[33] The charts provided anonymous and impersonal source material, a way for Richter to disassociate color from any traditional, descriptive, symbolic or expressive end. When he began to make these paintings, Richter had his friend Blinky Palermo randomly call out colors, which Richter then adopted for his work. Chance thus plays its role in the creation of his first series.

Returning to color charts in the 1970s, Richter changed his focus from the readymade to the conceptual system, developing mathematical procedures for mixing colours and chance operations for their placement.^[34] The range of the colors he employed was determined by a mathematical system for mixing the primary colors in graduated amounts. Each color was then randomly ordered to create the resultant composition and form of the painting. Richter's second series of Color Charts was begun in 1971 and consisted of only five paintings. In the final series of Color Charts which preoccupied Richter throughout 1973 and 1974, additional elements to this permutational system of color production were added in the form of mixes of a light grey, a dark gray and later, a green.

Richter’s 4900 Colours from 2007 consisted of bright monochrome squares that have been randomly arranged in a grid pattern to create stunning fields of kaleidoscopic color. It was produced at the same time he developed his design for the south transept window of Cologne Cathedral. 4900 Colours consists of 196 panels in 25 colors that can be reassembled in 11 variations – from a single expansive surface to multiple small-format fields. Richter developed Version II – 49 paintings, each of which measures 97 by 97 centimeters – especially for the Serpentine Gallery.^[35]

Sculpture[link]

Richter began to use glass in his work in 1967, when he made Four Panes of Glass.^[36] These plain sheets of glass could tilt away from the poles on whicht they were mounted at an angle that changed from one installation to the next. In 1970, he and Blinky Palermo jointly submitted designs for the sports facilities for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. For the front of the aren, they proposed an array of glass windows in twenty-seven different colors; each color would appear fifty times, with the distribution determined randomly. In 1981, for a two-person show with Georg Baselitz in Düsseldorf, Richter produced the first of the monumental transparent mirrors that appear intermittently thereafter in his oeuvre; the mirrors are significantly larger than Richter's paintings and feature adjustable steel mounts. For pieces such as Mirror Painting (Grey, 735-2) (1991), the mirrors were coloured grey by the pigment attached to the back of the glass.^[37] Arranged in two rooms, Richter presented an ensemble of paintings and colored mirrors in a special pavilion designed in collaboration with architect Paul Robbrecht at Documenta 9 in Kassel in 1992.^[38]

In 2002, for the Dia Art Foundation, Richter created a glass sculpture in which seven parallel panes of glass refract light and the world beyond, offering altered visions of the exhibition space; Spiegel I (Mirror I) and Spiegel II (Mirror II), a two-part mirror piece from 1989 that measures 7' tall and 18' feet long, which alters the boundaries of the environment and again changes one's visual experience of the gallery; and Kugel (Sphere), 1992, a stainless steel sphere that acts as a mirror, reflecting the space.^[39]

Drawings[link]

In 2010 the Drawing Center showed Lines which do not exist, a survey of Richter's drawings from 1966 to 2005, including works made using mechanical intervention such as attaching a pencil to an electric hand drill. It was the first career overview of Richter in the United States since 40 Years of Painting at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002.^[40] In a review of Lines which do not exist, R. H. Lossin writes in The Brooklyn Rail: "Viewed as a personal (and possibly professional) deficiency, Richter’s drawing practice consisted of diligently documenting something that didn’t work—namely a hand that couldn’t draw properly. …Richter displaces the concept of the artist’s hand with hard evidence of his own, wobbly, failed, and very material appendage."^[41]

Commissions[link]

Throughout his career, Richter has mostly declined lucrative licensing deals and private commissions.^[42] In 1980, Richter and Isa Genzken were commissioned to design the König-Heinrich-Platz underground station in Duisburg; it was only completed in 1992. In 1986, Richter received a commission for two large-scale paintings - Victoria I and Victoria II - from Victoria insurance company in Düsseldorf.^[43] In 1990, along with Sol LeWitt and Oswald Mathias Ungers, he created works for the Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechselbank in Düsseldorf. In 1998, he installed wall piece based on the colours of Germany's flag in the rebuilt Reichstag in Berlin.

Cologne Cathedral[link]

In 2002, the same year as his MoMA retrospective, Richter was asked to design a stained glass window in the Cologne Cathedral In August 2007, his window was unveiled. It is an 113 square metres (1,220 sq ft) abstract collage of 11,500 pixel-like squares in 72 colors, randomly arranged by computer (with some symmetry), reminiscent of his 1974 painting "4096 colours". Although the artist waived any fee, the costs of materials and mounting the window came to around €370,000 ($506,000). However the costs were covered by donations from more than 1,000 people.^[44] Cardinal Joachim Meisner did not attend the window's unveiling; he had preferred a figurative representation of 20th century Christian martyrs and said that Richter's window would fit better in a mosque or prayer house.^[45][46][47] A professed atheist with "a strong leaning towards Catholicism", Richter's three children with his third wife were baptized in the Cologne Cathedral.^[48]

Richter and minimalism[link]

This section may contain original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding references. Statements consisting only of original research may be removed. More details may be available on the talk page. (October 2011)

Throughout the body of Richter's work one can often observe waves of minimalism appearing only to disappear again. It has been noted that perhaps it may be necessary to view Richter as a conceptual artist wherein his individual pieces point towards a very painterly approach, while possibly this may not be his intent. If one views the progressions in the individual series as single works, a very different concept erupts. While many critics agree that this analysis may be necessary, let us take it one step further: assuming that Richter's small series is analogous to his entire body of work, one sees the same images of realism to blur. For example Eight Grey 2002. It may be considered, thus, that he is interested in the progression, and not in the individual images nor the qualities of paint nor any other medium he uses. In this a new idea of minimalism is born; a minimalism where the material means nothing, however, its use is technically masterful. As was said by Jan Van Eyck in the inscription on the frame of Man in the Red Turban "Als Ich Kann" which are the first words of the proverb "As I can, but not as I would."^{[original research?]}

Exhibitions[link]

Richter first began exhibiting in Düsseldorf in 1963. Richter had his first gallery solo show in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Soon after, he had exhibitions in Munich and Berlin and by the early 1970s exhibited frequently throughout Europe and the United States. In 1966, Bruno Bischofberger was the first to show the Richter's works outside Germany. Richter's first retrospective took place at the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1976 and covered works from 1962 to 1974. A traveling retrospective at Düsseldorf's Kunsthalle in 1986 was followed in 1991 by a retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London.

Richter became known to a U.S. audience in 1990, when the St. Louis Art Museum circulated Baader-Meinhof (October 18, 1977), a show that that was later seen at the Lannan Foundation in Marina del Rey, California.^[49] Richter's first North American retrospective was in 1998 at the Art Gallery of Ontario and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2002, a 40-year retrospective of Richter's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and traveled to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. He has participated in several international art shows, including the Venice Biennale (1972, 1980, 1984, 1997 and 2007), as well as Documenta V (1972), VII (1982), VIII (1987), IX (1992), and X (1997).^{[citation needed]}

The Gerhard Richter Archive was established in cooperation with the artist in 2005 as an institute of the State Art Collections in Dresden, Germany.^[50]

Solo exhibitions (selection)[link]

• Gerhard Richter 4900 Colours: Version II at the Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom. 2008^[51]
• Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, London, United Kingdom. 2009^[52]
• Gerhard Richter: Panorama at the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom. 2011^[53]

Tate Modern - 2011-12.

Recognition[link]

Although Richter gained popularity and critical praise throughout his career, his fame burgeoned during his 2005 retrospective exhibition, which declared his place among the most important artists of the 20th century. Today, many call Gerhard Richter the best living painter. In part, this comes from his ability to explore the medium at a time when many were heralding its death. Richter has been the recipient of numerous distinguished awards, including the Staatspreis of the State Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 2000; the Wexner Prize, 1998; the Praemium Imperiale, Japan, 1997; the Golden Lion of the 47th Biennale, Venice, 1997; the Wolf Prize in Israel in 1994/5; the Kaiserring Prize der Stadt Goslar, Mönchehaus-Museum für Moderne Kunst, Goslar, Germany, 1988; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna, 1985; the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel, 1981; and the Junger Western Art Prize, Germany, 1961. He was made an honorary citizen of Cologne in April 2007.

Influence[link]

Among the students who studied with Richter at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf between 1971 and 1994 were Ludger Gerdes, Thomas Schütte, Thomas Struth, Katrin Kneffel, Michael van Ofen, and Richter's second wife, Isa Genzken. He is known to have influenced Ellsworth Kelly, Christopher Wool and Johan Andersson (artist).

He also served as source of inspiration for writers and musicians. Sonic Youth used a painting of his for the cover art for their album Daydream Nation in 1988. He was a fan of the band and did not charge for the use of his image.^{[citation needed]} The original, over 7 metres (23 ft) square, is now showcased in Sonic Youth's studio in NYC. Don DeLillo's short story "Looking at Meinhof" describes an encounter between two strangers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The meeting takes place in the room displaying October 18, 1977 (1988).^[54]

Position on the art market[link]

Following an exhibition with Blinky Palermo at Galerie Heiner Friedrich in 1971, Richter’s formal arrangement with the dealer came to an end in 1972. Thereafter Friedrich was only entitled to sell the paintings that he had already obtained contractually from Richter.^[55] In the following years, Richter showed with Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf, and Sperone Westwater, New York. Today Richter is represented by Marian Goodman,^[56] his primary dealer since 1985.^[21]

Today museums own roughly 38% of Richter's works, including half of his large abstract paintings.^[57] Already by 2004, Richter’s annual turnover was $120m (£65m).^[58] At the same time, his works often appear at auction. According to artnet, an online firm that tracks the art market, $76.9m worth of Richter’s work was sold at auction in 2010.^[21] Richter's high turnover volume reflects his prolificacy as well as his popularity. As of 2012, no fewer than 545 distinct Richter's works had sold at auctions for more than $100,000. 15 of them had sold for more than $10,000,000 between 2007 and 2012.^[59] Richter’s paintings have been flowing steadily out of Germany since the mid-1990s even as certain important German collectors — Frieder Burda, Josef Fröhlich, Georg Böckmann, and Ulrich Ströher — have held on to theirs.^[21]

Richter's candle paintings were the first to command high auction prices. Three months after his MoMA exhibition opened in 2001, Sotheby's sold his Three Candles (1982) for $5.3 million. In February 2008, the artist's eldest daughter, Betty,^[60] sold her Kerze (1983) for £7,972,500 ($15 million), triple the high estimate, at Sotheby's in London.^[61] His 1982 Kerze (Candle) sold for £10.5 million ($16.5 million) at Christie's London on October 14, 2011, setting a new auction record for Richter.^[62]

In February 2008, Christie's London set a first record for Richter's “capitalist realism” pictures from the 1960s by selling the painting Zwei Liebespaare (1966) for £7,300,500 ($14.3 million)^[63] to Stephan Schmidheiny.^[21]

In 2010, the Weserburg Modern Art Museum in Bremen, Germany, decided to sell Richter’s 1966 painting Matrosen (Sailors) in a November auction held by Sotheby’s, where John D. Arnold^[64] bought it for $13 million.^[65]

Another coveted group of works is the “Abstrakte Bilder” series, particularly those made after 1988, which are finished with a large squeegee rather than a brush or roller.^[21] At Pierre Bergé & Associés in July 2009, Richter’s 1979 oil painting Abstraktes Bild exceeded its estimate, selling for €95,000 ($136,000).^[66] Richter's Abstraktes Bild, of 1990 was made the top price of 7.2 million pounds, or about $11.6 million, at a Sotheby's sale in February 2011 to a bidder who was said by dealers to be an agent for the New York dealer Larry Gagosian.^[67] In November 2011, Sotheby’s was selling a group of colorful abstract canvases by Richter, including “Abstraktes Bild 849-3, a dreamy 1997 canvas of pinks and blues that was estimated at $9 million to $12 million. It made a record price for the artist at auction when Lily Safra^[68] paid $20.8 million^[69] only to donate it to the Israel Museum afterwards.^[68] When asked about amounts like that Richter said "It's just as absurd as the banking crisis. It's impossible to understand and it's daft!"^[70]

Quotes[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Gerhard Richter

"One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is idiocy.” (From Richter, "Notes 1973", in The Daily Practice of Painting, p. 78.)

At a Q&A ahead of his retrospective at the Tate Modern on October 4, 2011 he was asked: "Has the role of artist changed over the years?" to which Richter replied: "It’s more entertainment now. We entertain people.”^[70]

See also[link]

• Karl Otto Götz
• Sigmar Polke
• Konrad Lueg

Notes[link]