by Jon Lackman | 4 May 2006 | Contemporary
“Schein ist mein Lebensthema,” declared Gerhard Richter in 1989 (“appearance is my life’s subject”). Correspondingly, critics have seen in his work a deep skepticism of reality — its declarations, moralities, movements, positions, and ideologies. Jürgen Schreiber’s provocative new biographical study of the artist’s family pictures reaches a radically different conclusion, writes Eduard Beaucamp. According to Schreiber, the traditional approach is useful for bodying forth relevant history — from the Nazi background to the Communist recent past to the capitalist present — but it leaves most of the aesthetic questions unanswered, especially that of how his painting can live up to the enormous claim made for it, as mourning. Burkhard Müller, who compares the book favorably to a political thriller, is happy to make claims of such scale, crediting Richter with leading visual art out of the blind alleys of modernism and postmodernism. Georg Imdahl disapproves of Schreiber’s writing style when it verges on lurid, but he does credit him with powerful reporting – for instance, finding that Richter’s father-in-law was a Nazi doctor responsible for numerous forced sterilizations and that Richter’s aunt was murdered by the Nazis.
