How Gerhard Richter Paints History’s Darkest Chapters

Walking through the Gerhard Richter retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton, the painter’s fascination with death and humanity’s worst historical moments is striking. 

The exhibition, one of the biggest retrospectives of the artist’s career, features 275 works spanning 1965 to 2024. The show is laid out in chronological order, allowing viewers to see the evolution of his work, while also giving insight into the themes occupying his mind at various stages of his life. 

Regarded as one of the most influential living contemporary artists, Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. He studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts before fleeing East Germany for Düsseldorf and ultimately settling in Cologne, where he now resides. 

Although known for the realism of his works, Richter never painted directly from the scene, preferring to reproduce photographs or drawings. Tisch (Table) (1962) was chosen by the artist to be the first work in the exhibition, intentionally excluding earlier works made during his time in East Germany. The painting reveals a core foundation of Richter’s method, in which dissatisfaction with reproduction becomes the catalyst for abstraction. Originally produced from a photo taken from a 1950s edition of Italian design magazine Domus, Richter smeared the reproduction with solvents, creating an image both familiar and distorted. 

Another indication of the impact the move from West Germany to East had on Richter is evident in the first room. Near Tisch (Table) hang portraits of Richter’s family created in 1965, perhaps indicating a degree of contemplation or homesickness for the family he left behind. Onkel Rudi is a confronting work, reproduced from a photograph of Richter’s smiling uncle. The ordinariness of the image is disquieting; it could belong to any family album, except that Rudi wears a Wehrmacht uniform. Next to this is Tante Marianne, depicting his aunt Marianne as a child, holding baby Richter. The identity of both children was a mystery for many years; later, it was uncovered that Marianne was institutionalised for mental illness and killed by the Nazis. 

Beside these works hangs another painting based on a photograph, this time of Richter’s father. Horst mit Hund (1965) shows a cheerful man, hair in disarray, holding a small dog on his lap. Horst Richter had been conscripted into the Nazi Party, captured by Allied forces and imprisoned during the war. When he returned home in 1945, he was unable to resume his teaching position due to his former party membership – a requirement for all German teachers after 1933. Reflecting on that period in a 2004 interview with journalist Jan Thorn-Prikker, Richter said, “We were so alienated that we didn’t know how to deal with each other.” The blurred, slightly distorted portraits of his family convey the sense of memory just out of reach, something felt, but not fully obtainable.

On the opposite wall hangs Bombers (1963), a stark black-and-white depiction of American planes attacking Dresden in 1944, the city where Richter spent his childhood. Encountered together, these paintings create a haunting dialogue of intimate family portraits set against the machinery of war. Their arrangement isn’t designed to provoke a single reaction; instead, the exhibition’s chronological flow lets viewers move through Richter’s gradual reckoning with the contradictions of his family’s place in history.

Later, in one of the final rooms of the exhibition, Richter returns to this history. The Birkenau Paintings (2014) are based on four photographs secretly taken by Sonderkommando prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. After attempting to paint the figures, Richter abandoned reproduction, layering color over the imagery to produce textured, abstract surfaces. Displayed beside the original photos, the works become a tribute to those who risked their lives in an attempt to share the horrors of the camp with the outside world, and a confrontation of Germany’s history. 

Richter’s engagement with violence extends beyond Germany’s past. September (2005), located in another room toward the end of the exhibition, is less obvious than the previous paintings and easy to miss unless you’re looking for it. The painting depicts a cropped section of the World Trade Center towers, based on mass media images of the 9/11 attack. True to his style, the work is blurred in areas, obscuring some of the building. Initially, Richter produced the image with striking realness, however he found the painting too “garish” according to his catalogue essay for Phillips: “That couldn’t work; only when I destroyed it, so to speak, scratched it off, was it fit to be seen,” Richter said. In obscuring these images, which are seared into the minds of anyone who lived during that time, Richter invites viewers to look at the scene anew, with a certain distance that mitigates the sensationalism of the scene. 

Another example of Richter’s fascination with humanity’s dark side is Eight Student Nurses (1966). The paintings depict victims of a Chicago mass murder, their faces reproduced from yearbook portraits. Stripped of individuality, the women become anonymous symbols of collective tragedy – an unsettling commentary on media sensationalism and the commodification of death.

This tension continues in October 18, 1977 (1988), his series of 15 paintings that address the lives and deaths of several members of the Baader-Meinhof group, a West German far-left militant organisation classified as a terrorist group. Feared throughout Germany, the Baader-Meinhof members dominated the news until October 18, 1977 when three members were found dead in prison. Their deaths were officially ruled suicides, however were widely suspected to be murders by the authorities. The subject and ultimately the crime scene photos, published widely in newspapers at the time, interested Richter. In conversation with author Uwe M. Schneede, Richter said of the series: “I remember that I felt I had to avoid all these sensational photos, the hanged woman, the man who shot himself, and so forth. I collected a great deal of material, including a number of banal, irrelevant photos, and then in the course of my work I came back to the very pictures I had actually wanted to avoid, which summed up the various stories.” The blurred, monochrome paintings, based on the crime scene photos, draw viewers close in an attempt to discern the images, mirroring the uneasy fascination with violence that still defines how we consume media.

It would be misleading to state that these are the only notable moments throughout the exhibition; there are hundreds of works. The heavier pieces punctuate beautiful portraits (including Betty, 1988), dreamy landscapes (Apfelbäume, 1987) and color field paintings (4900 Farben, 2007), which altogether show the immensity and diversity of the artist’s oeuvre. However, as Gabriella T. Giorno wrote in 2008 in Rivista di estetica [Review of Aesthetics], Richter places “a sense of responsibility for viewing the works upon the viewer.” Perhaps that’s why, leaving the retrospective, there’s a lingering sense of complicity, as guests are forced to consider the ethics and responsibility of witnessing such violence.