“I simply think that we have not yet got over the Romantic epoch. Romanticism is far from dead. Exactly like fascism.”
(Gerhard Richter, 1973)
… He began to paint directly from photographs: family album pictures, clippings from newspapers or encyclopedias, and eventually images he shot himself. Frequently he would retain the dimensions and cropping of the source image. And then, as in this view of the Bay of Naples, he would gently smear the still-wet oils with a dry brush. Any remaining physical gesture, any mark that suggested certainty, would pass into a blur.
Gerhard Richter, “Vesuv (Vesuvius),” 1976, rising above the Tyrrhenian Sea, overlooking the entire Bay of Naples. Credit… Gerhard Richter; via David Zwirner. [New York Times caption and illustration]
… These strange, streaky pictures… reawakened… my belief that Richter’s stutters and equivocations are among the finest models imaginable of how to push through a cultural or intellectual deadlock.
… Where confident gestures get negated and scraped away by a squeegee dragged across the surface.
… When kitsch and propaganda fill up every screen, when sincerity and irony seem equally toothless, there is still, in the fog, a path forward.
Gerhard Richter, “Davos S.,” 1981. Credit… Gerhard Richter; via David Zwirner. [New York Times illustration and illustration]
… The sensual scrutiny of the facts of paint… The fuzziness corrupts the landscape-as-image. But it redeems the landscape-as-painting.
(Jason Farago, “For Painting’s Great Skeptic, Gerhard Richter, History Is a Blur,” New York Times, 6-11-26)
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