Peter Schjeldahl's review of Gerhard Richter, March 2002

Peter Schjeldahl's actual art/artist critiques read very differently from his essays that we read earlier in the semester. Perhaps this is because the reviews were written for The New Yorker, whose audience encompasses a much wider audience than simply the art community. Schjeldahl's review of the German artist, Gerhard Richter, is sensitive, academic, and poignant all at once. Schjeldahl truly enjoys Richter's art, which he says represents "triumphant sorrow." The artist certainly has a sorrowful background, from growing up (and joining in) Nazi Germany, to the shame at the return of his father. These themes turn up throughout Richter's art, sometimes subtly, sometimes forcefully reminding the viewer of the artist's past.

I had never heard of Richter before, so after reading the article, I did a Google Images search and discovered that I really liked a lot of what he painted. Schjeldahl says he was never able to stay with one main style of painting, but rather jumped around to several, from abstraction to photo-realism. I was particularly intrigued by Richter's technique of painting an clear canvas in oil, and then using a squeegee to blur it and distort the image. He erases part of the painting's past, and leaves the viewer with a finished product that is both a new image, and a destroyed former one. The work spoken of most in Schjeldahl's piece is a painting called "Stag," which blends Richter's blurry oil painting of a stag with a stark, abstract, forest background. It draws the viewer in, due to the hints of depth, but also disables us from doing so, due to the prominent separation (in the form of a tree trunk) in the center of the painting. After doing a little research, I found that my favorite piece of Richter's work was his painting entitled, "Betty," which is a portrait of his daughter. Richter wanted to achieve a talent in painting to rival Vermeer, who is one of my favorite artists. "Betty" almost seems to be a photograph, and the slight sorrow in her pose is also reminiscent of the Dutch artist. Gerhard Richter was truly a Renaissance man of an artist, and Schjeldahl was able to capture this personality in his review.

Gerhard Richter, "Betty," 1988