SFMOMA, Floor 4 · Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.

The Richter room is the hub of the fourth floor. Doors lead from it to Polke, Warhol, Flavin, and Close. Its eight paintings look as if several different artists made them. A businessman in gray is blurred as if seen through a dirty window. A young woman leaps in midair, also gray and blurred. A woman with pale blue eyes looks straight out of a dim room, one finger at her lips. A sea and sky nearly ten feet square are painted so smoothly they look like a photograph. Beside them hang a grid of 256 colored rectangles, two abstractions dragged across their surfaces in streaks of teal, navy, and orange, and four gray panels that read as windows.

The usual way to explain this is in phases. Richter painted from photographs in the 1960s, made color charts and gray monochromes in the 1970s, and turned to abstraction in the 1980s. Doris Fisher, on SFMOMA's audio guide, gives a better account. Richter, she says, worked on abstract and photorealist paintings at the same time. The room bears her out. His refusal to choose one kind of painting is the subject of his work, and it began in a country where the state made that choice for artists.

1932–1945 — Dresden and the War

Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden on February 9, 1932. His mother, Hildegard Schönfelder, had trained as a bookseller. His father, Horst Richter, became a village teacher. The family moved to Reichenau, in Saxony near the Polish border, and in 1943 to Waltersdorf. At ten Gerhard was enrolled in the Deutsches Jungvolk, the Nazi organization for young boys.

The war reached his family directly. His mother's sister Marianne was diagnosed with schizophrenia by the end of the 1930s, confined in mental hospitals, and forcibly sterilized. In February 1945 she was murdered in the Nazi euthanasia program and buried in a mass grave. Her brother Rudi was killed on the Western Front in 1944. That same February, Allied bombing destroyed Dresden.

Richter painted both relatives in 1965, from family snapshots. Neither painting is in this room, but they explain the method of the two gray figure paintings that are.

1945–1961 — Socialist Realism in East Germany

After the war Saxony became part of the Soviet zone and then, in 1949, of the German Democratic Republic. Richter left school at fifteen for a trade school, then worked as an apprentice sign painter and a painter of stage sets. His first application to the Dresden Art Academy was rejected as "too bourgeois." On his second try he was admitted, and he studied mural painting.

The academy taught Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism was the official art of the Soviet bloc: figurative, optimistic, and easy to read, painted to show the achievements of socialism and the people who built it. Richter learned it well. For his diploma in the mid-1950s he painted a large mural, Lebensfreude (Joy of Life), in the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. As a master student he took state commissions, including a mural titled Arbeiterkampf (Workers' Struggle). In 1957 he married Marianne Eufinger, known as Ema.

Ema's father, Heinrich Eufinger, was a gynecologist who had joined the SS in 1935. Until 1945 he carried out about 900 forced sterilizations of the mentally ill at clinics in Dresden and Leipzig, including the clinic where Richter's aunt Marianne had been sterilized.

In 1959 Richter was permitted to travel west to see Documenta 2 in Kassel. There he saw paintings by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana. The curator Robert Storr calls it "the turning point of Richter's artistic life." Pollock's drips and Fontana's slashed canvases had no subject at all. In Dresden such work could not be made.

In 1961, two months before the Berlin Wall went up, Richter and Ema left for West Germany. Both of his East German murals were later painted over.

1961–1966 — Photographs

In the West, Richter enrolled again as a student, at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, under the abstract painter Karl Otto Götz. His classmates included Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg. In 1963 the three of them, with Manfred Kuttner, showed their work in an empty shop in Düsseldorf and coined the term Capitalist Realism, a joke aimed at both American Pop and the Socialist Realism Richter had been trained in. The Polke post covers that show.

In 1962 Richter painted Table, an enlarged picture of an extension table from an Italian magazine, with gray paint swirled across it. He made it number one in his own catalogue of works. For the rest of the decade he painted from photographs: newspaper and magazine pictures, amateur snapshots, family albums. He worked in grays, copied the image onto canvas, and then dragged a dry brush across the wet paint to blur it.

Richter's blur is the softening of a painted image by brushing across it while the paint is wet, which flattens forms and erases detail the way an out-of-focus photograph does. He described it as "an opportunity to express the fleetingness of our ability to perceive." He said he used ordinary photographs in an attempt "to turn something artless into a form of artless art."

The photographs solved a problem his training had created. Socialist Realism had told him what to paint and why. The Western avant-garde of the late 1950s pointed him toward gestures with no subject at all. A snapshot gave him a subject he had not chosen. He painted it without composing it, and the blur kept it at a distance.

1965 — Portrait Müller

Portrait Müller is oil on linen, 31½ by 23¾ inches. It shows a man from the chest up, turned to look toward the viewer's left. He has short dark hair combed back, a light suit jacket, and a dark collared shirt. His expression is neutral. Thin horizontal streaks run across the gray, and an off-white border frames the image like the margin of a printed photograph.

SFMOMA's records do not identify the sitter. That anonymity suits the series. Portraits had traditionally been commissions, painted to flatter and to last. Richter's look like pictures clipped from somewhere and copied without comment. The border tells the viewer that this was a photograph before it was a painting.

1967 — Gymnastik (Gymnastics)

Gymnastik is oil on linen, 43⅜ by 31½ inches. A young woman with short, tousled hair is caught in midair inside a room. Her left arm reaches up and back, and her legs extend diagonally toward the lower right. Her eyes are wide and her smile is broad. A horizontal ledge crosses the upper third of the background, with a paneled wall below. It is painted in cool grays and blurred.

A photograph freezes a jump. Richter's blur unfreezes it slightly, so the figure seems to be moving again. On the audio guide, Doris Fisher calls this her favorite story in the collection: her five-year-old grandson asked whether the woman in the painting was her, when she was younger.

1966–1974 — Color Charts

In 1966 Richter painted 10 Colors, the first of his color charts, which resemble the paint-sample cards of a hardware store. In 1969 he made his first gray monochromes, canvases covered entirely in gray and varied only by texture. In 1971 he returned to the Düsseldorf Academy as a professor, a colleague of Joseph Beuys, and taught there for more than fifteen years. In 1972 he showed in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His final series of color charts came in 1973 and 1974.

1974/1984 — 256 Farben (256 Colors)

256 Farben is dated 1974/1984. It is oil on linen, 87¾ by 163¼ inches, about seven feet by thirteen. A sixteen-by-sixteen grid of glossy rectangles, each wider than tall, is separated by thin white gaps. The colors include magenta, teal, lime, mustard, brick red, and near-black, in no visible order.

On the audio guide, the curator Rachel Jans explains how it was made. Richter mixed the three primary colors into a dozen hues, then added black and white to reach about 180 shades. He numbered them and drew the numbers by chance to fill the grid, so some colors repeat.

The color charts did with color what the photo paintings did with subjects. Richter removed his own choice from the picture. The photograph chose the image, and chance chose the color. Jans connects the work to his interest in images produced by something outside the artist. After years of gray, it was also a systematic way back into color.

1971 — Brigid Polk

Brigid Polk is oil on linen, 39½ by 49½ inches. A woman in her twenties, seen from the waist up in a shadowy room, leans to one side. Her pale face sits right of center. Her dark blonde hair falls almost to the bottom edge. Her light blue eyes look directly at the viewer, and

her left index finger touches her lips. The background is a haze of green-gray and brown, with blurred hints of a wall painting, a window, and a lamp.

SFMOMA's audio guide describes the sitter as a wealthy New Yorker who joined the underground art scene and Andy Warhol's Factory, and says Richter painted the portrait from a Polaroid she gave him. Warhol's own rooms are next door. In 1963 Richter's Capitalist Realism had parodied American Pop. Here he paints one of Warhol's own circle, from her own snapshot, in color.

1976–1990 — Abstraction: Abstraktes Bild and Wald (4)

In 1976 Richter titled a painting Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Picture) for the first time. In 1982 he married the sculptor Isa Genzken, and in 1983 he moved to Cologne. From the mid-1980s he developed the technique that defines his abstract work.

Richter's squeegee is a long, flexible blade that he drags across a wet painted surface to spread, scrape, and blend the layers of paint beneath it. He builds a painting in layers over an extended period, then pulls the squeegee through them. Some areas are scraped back to earlier layers. Others merge with the paint beneath. Jans summarizes the process on the audio guide as "Remove layers, add layers." The result cannot be fully controlled.

In 1988 he completed October 18, 1977, fifteen gray paintings based on newspaper and police photographs of members of the Red Army Faction, the West German militant group. On that date three of its leaders were found dead in their cells in a Stuttgart prison. He made the cycle in the same years as his squeegee abstractions. He never gave up one kind of painting for the other.

The Abstraktes Bild in this room is oil on canvas, 78¾ by 70⅞ inches, from 1990. Teal-green, black, and white fill it edge to edge. Scraped horizontal bands are crossed by vertical drips that form a loose grid. On the left, white and green interlace with black patches. On the right, broad muted sweeps of green-gray and white dominate. Rust-red and ochre flecks appear lower down, and the bottom third darkens.

Wald (4) (Forest [4]) is from the same year. It is oil on linen, 134 by 102½ inches, taller than a garage door. Dense horizontal streaks of navy, teal, and sea green are broken by flashes of orange and gold. A dark blue-black mass anchors the left edge, with orange drips below it. Peach highlights and misty veils appear in the upper half. The right side turns to olive, tan, and beige in blocky, scraped passages.

The title names a forest, but the painting contains no trees. The horizontal drag of the squeegee reads more like light on water. Richter's titles point toward the visible world without depicting it, and viewers find a forest, a river, or nothing.

1998 — Seestück (Seascape)

Richter had painted landscapes since 1968, often from his own photographs. Seestück is from 1998. It is oil on linen, 114¼ inches square, nearly ten feet on each side. A straight horizon divides it. Above the water is a thin band of pale pink and lavender light, then clear blue sky, with pinkish-gray clouds sweeping in from the upper right. The sea below is slate blue, gray, and brown, with dark rocks and white foam at the bottom. The surface is smooth, with no visible brushmarks.

The painting is co-owned by SFMOMA and the Fishers, who acquired it the year it was made. On the audio guide, Robert Storr argues that nature in Richter's work is indifferent rather than cruel, and that Richter, unlike the Romantic painters, does not project emotion onto it. Storr adds that Richter equates beauty with what is unharmed. The seascape looks like the most traditional painting in the room. It is also a painted photograph, made by the same method as Portrait Müller thirty-three years earlier, without the blur.

In 1995 Richter married the painter Sabine Moritz.

2002 — Fenster (Window)

Fenster is oil on linen, 78¾ by 158 inches, made of four joined vertical canvases. Each holds three stacked gray rectangles framed by white borders. Soft charcoal bands cross the pale gray, like the shadows of window frames falling down and to the right.

It is the latest work in the room and the closest to pure abstraction. It is also a picture of something. Since the Renaissance a painting has been compared to a window, a frame through which the viewer looks at a world. Richter's window shows only gray panes and the shadows they cast.

The same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting, a retrospective of 188 canvases curated by Storr. It came to SFMOMA from October 11, 2002, to January 14, 2003.

Later Work

In August 2007 Richter's window for Cologne Cathedral was unveiled: 11,263 squares of glass in 72 colors, placed mostly by a random number generator. The design grew out of his 1974 color chart 4096 Farben. In 2014 he transferred four photographs taken secretly by prisoners of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz-Birkenau onto large canvases, then painted over them with the squeegee until the images were barely visible. The cycle is titled Birkenau. In September 2020 he unveiled windows for Tholey Abbey and said they would be his last major work, and that he would concentrate on drawing.

The Room

Richter's room connects to Polke, the classmate with whom he invented Capitalist Realism, and to Warhol, whose circle supplied the sitter of Brigid Polk. Its eight paintings span thirty-seven years and do not form a sequence of phases. Gymnastik (1967) and the color chart begun in 1974 were made a few years apart. The 1990 abstractions and the photographic seascape of 1998 were made in the same decade.

Richter grew up in a state where the official style was fixed. In the West he declined to fix one of his own. He let photographs, chance, and the squeegee make decisions that painters usually reserve for themselves. 🌁

Timeline — Gerhard Richter

• February 9, 1932 — Born in Dresden.

• 1943 — Family moves to Waltersdorf.

• 1944 — Uncle Rudi Schönfelder killed on the Western Front.

• February 1945 — Aunt Marianne Schönfelder murdered in the Nazi euthanasia program; Dresden bombed.

• 1949 — German Democratic Republic founded.

• Early 1950s — Admitted to the Dresden Art Academy on his second application.

• Mid-1950s — Diploma mural Lebensfreude, German Hygiene Museum.

• 1957 — Marries Marianne (Ema) Eufinger.

• 1959 — Sees Pollock and Fontana at Documenta 2, Kassel.

• 1961 — Leaves East Germany; enters the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

• 1962 — Paints Table.

• 1963 — Capitalist Realism with Polke, Lueg, and Kuttner.

• 1965 — Paints Portrait Müller and Uncle Rudi.

• 1966 — First color chart, 10 Colors.

• 1967 — Paints Gymnastik.

• 1969 — First gray monochromes.

• 1971 — Professor at the Düsseldorf Academy; paints Brigid Polk.

• 1972 — German pavilion, Venice Biennale.

• 1973–1974 — Final color charts, including 256 Farben (dated 1974/1984).

• 1976 — First painting titled Abstraktes Bild.

• 1982 — Marries Isa Genzken.

• 1983 — Moves to Cologne.

• Mid-1980s — Develops the squeegee technique.

• 1988 — Completes October 18, 1977.

• 1990 — Paints Abstraktes Bild and Wald (4).

• 1995 — Marries Sabine Moritz.

• 1998 — Paints Seestück; acquired by SFMOMA and the Fishers.

• 2002 — Paints Fenster; MoMA retrospective, at SFMOMA October 2002 to January 2003.

• August 2007 — Cologne Cathedral window unveiled.

• 2014 — Birkenau.

• 2020 — Tholey Abbey windows; calls them his last major work.

• April 18, 2026 — Eight paintings in Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists.