Why This Series — Why Richter
On the painter who refused to choose between figuration and abstraction — and why that refusal turned out to be the most rigorous position available
Richter's squeegee paintings are built on controlled accident — the tool catches multiple layers simultaneously, creating depth no deliberate mark could produce. Fragment of Thought works a different negotiation: successive horizontal and vertical passes, each layer yielding partially to the next, nothing fully covered, nothing fully stated. Richter refused to choose between figuration and abstraction. Fragment of Thought refuses to choose between any of its own colors. Every decision remains visible. The painting is its own argument in progress.
Gerhard Richter is the most intellectually serious painter of the second half of the twentieth century. His canonical status rests not on a single breakthrough or a recognizable signature style, but on something rarer: a sustained, lifelong inquiry into what painting is for — conducted simultaneously in multiple modes, refusing resolution, never settling.
The career that shouldn't work
By every conventional logic of artistic coherence, Gerhard Richter's career should be a mess. He paints blurred photorealist portraits of his family and photorealist images of bombers in flight — and also large abstract canvases made by dragging a squeegee across wet paint, producing surfaces of vertiginous chromatic complexity. He makes grey paintings. He makes glass works. He makes mirrors.
No single 'Richter style' is identifiable in the way a Rothko or a Pollock is identifiable from across the room. And yet he is, by most serious critical accounting, the most significant painter of the past fifty years. How?
Richter's refusal to choose between figuration and abstraction was not indecision. It was the most precise diagnosis of painting's condition that anyone in postwar art managed to make.
What Richter understood about painting's crisis
Richter came of age as a painter in East Germany, crossed to the West in 1961 — the year the Berlin Wall went up — and arrived in Düsseldorf to find two warring orthodoxies: American Abstract Expressionism on one side, European geometric abstraction on the other, both claiming to be the future of painting, both certain of themselves in ways that Richter found philosophically naive.
His response was to treat both modes as equally available and equally suspect. The blurred photographs said: here is representation, but I have introduced uncertainty into it. The abstract works said: here is paint moving across a surface, but I have used a tool, not a hand — I have introduced chance and removed expression. In both cases, the move is the same: take the received convention and introduce a doubt that the convention had suppressed.
The squeegee and what it does
Richter's abstract paintings — made by applying paint in thick layers and dragging a wide squeegee across the surface — are among the most visually extraordinary objects in contemporary art. The squeegee catches and smears multiple layers simultaneously, creating passages of color whose depth and complexity are impossible to replicate with conventional painting tools.
Crucially, the squeegee is not expressive in the way a brushstroke is expressive. It records force and direction but not the fine motor nuance of the hand. Richter has described the process as one of controlled accident — he determines the parameters, and then the paint does what paint does under those conditions. The result is surfaces that are simultaneously made and found, authored and discovered.
On the question of doubt as a method
What makes Richter's position canonical rather than merely interesting is that his skepticism is not nihilism. He has not concluded that painting is impossible or meaningless. He has concluded that painting's meaning is precisely its refusal of false certainty — that a canvas that acknowledges its own conditions, that holds open the questions it might otherwise foreclose, is doing more honest work than one that presents itself as a resolution.
This is a painterly application of the best philosophical thinking of his era. But it is not illustrated philosophy — it is painting that arrived at this position through the specific pressures and discoveries of making work over sixty years. The thinking is in the paint.
Why the market and the institution both recognized it
Richter holds multiple auction records. His work is in every major museum collection. He has had retrospectives at MoMA, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou. This is sometimes cited as evidence of art world machinery rather than genuine achievement.
But the institutional recognition followed the intellectual influence, not the other way around. By the time the market arrived at Richter, multiple generations of painters had already spent decades arguing with him, learning from him, finding his positions inescapable. The auction results are, in this sense, a lagging indicator. They measure the consequence of an influence that had been building for thirty years before the prices caught up.
