Gerhard Richter

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Lore & Background

Richter was born in Hospital Dresden-Neustadt in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau (now Bogatynia, Poland) and in Waltersdorf. His father Horst was a teacher who was forced to join the National Socialist Party; his mother Hildegard trained as a bookseller. At age 10, Richter was conscripted into the Deutsches Jungvolk. He left school after 10th grade, apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, and studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts after an initial rejection in 1950. Together with his wife Marianne, Richter escaped from East to West Germany two months before the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In West Germany, Richter studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz. With Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg (pseudonym Lueg), he introduced the term Kapitalistischer Realismus (Capitalistic Realism) as an anti-style of art. He taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a visiting professor, and returned to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1971, where he worked as a professor for over 15 years. He married Marianne Eufinger in 1957, sculptor Isa Genzken in 1982, and Sabine Moritz in 1995, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.

Reader's Guide

Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on sources like newspapers, books, private snapshots, and aerial views. For Forty-eight Portraits (1971–72), he chose faces of composers such as Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, and writers such as H. G. Wells and Franz Kafka. His ongoing work Atlas was first exhibited in 1972 at the Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst in Utrecht, containing 315 parts; it has since expanded to approximately 4,000 photographs and illustrations on about 600 panels. Richter began his independent series of landscapes in 1968 after a vacation to Corsica, and his landscapes are compared to the work of Caspar David Friedrich. In 1982 and 1983, he made a series of paintings of Candles and Skulls related to memento mori tradition, influenced by Georges de La Tour and Francisco de Zurbarán. He has made only 27 of these still lifes.

Did You Know?

• Richter's aunt Marianne, who had schizophrenia, was starved to death in a psychiatric clinic as a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program.
• His application to study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1950 was rejected as 'too bourgeois'.
• Both his wall paintings in the Academy of Arts and the Hygiene Museum were painted over for ideological reasons after he escaped to West Germany.
• Richter made a ten-day trip to Greenland in 1972, traveling alone, to experience and record the desolate arctic landscape.
• In 1995, Richter marked the 50th anniversary of the allied bombing of Dresden with a series of works.

A Career Spanning Abstraction and Precision

Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, has built a body of work that resists simple categorization. His output stretches across abstract compositions, photorealistic canvases, photographic series, and sculptural glass pieces, placing him among the most versatile figures in contemporary art. During the 1960s and early 1970s he developed his signature method of translating black-and-white photographs into paintings, drawing source material from newspaper clippings, private family snapshots, aerial views of cities and mountain ranges, and seascapes. Among his most ambitious projects was the multipart work created for the German Pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale, alongside his celebrated Forty-eight Portraits, which rendered the faces of composers such as Mahler and Sibelius and writers including Kafka and Wells. His commercial standing has been equally extraordinary: multiple works have set record prices at auction, and at one point he held the distinction of being the most expensive living painter in the world.

Fleeing the Wall and Naming a Movement

In 1961, just two months before the Berlin Wall went up, Richter and his wife Marianne made the decisive choice to leave East Germany for the West. The departure carried a painful cost: both of his major murals—Communion with Picasso at the Academy of Arts and Joy of Life at the German Hygiene Museum—were painted over by East German authorities for ideological reasons. Decades later, fragments of Joy of Life were rediscovered in a museum stairway, and in 2024 a large portion of the mural was finally uncovered and restored. In West Germany, Richter enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Otto Götz, studying alongside Sigmar Polke and a cohort of fellow artists. Together with Polke and Konrad Fischer, Richter coined the term Kapitalistischer Realismus—Capitalistic Realism—as a deliberate anti-style. The concept borrowed the visual shorthand of advertising and consumer culture while simultaneously critiquing both the Soviet doctrine of Socialist Realism and the art market of Western capitalism, positioning Richter squarely at the crossroads of Cold War ideology and aesthetic experimentation.

A Childhood Shaped by War and Loss

Richter entered the world in February 1932 in a Dresden hospital, the son of Hildegard Schönfelder and Horst Richter, a mathematics and physics student who would go on to teach in the Upper Lusatian countryside. His maternal grandfather had once been regarded as a gifted pianist before a brewing venture ended in bankruptcy, and Hildegard herself trained as a bookseller, nurturing a deep love of literature and music. The family's rural setting in Reichenau and later Waltersdorf kept them largely insulated from political life, though Horst was eventually compelled to join the National Socialist Party—a step he never embraced. At ten, young Gerhard was conscripted into the Deutsches Jungvolk, the junior wing of the Hitler Youth. The war's toll on the family was devastating: two of Hildegard's brothers died serving as soldiers, and her sister Marianne, who suffered from schizophrenia, was starved to death in a psychiatric clinic as a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program. After finishing only the tenth grade, Richter apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter before his 1950 application to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts was rejected as "too bourgeois." He finally gained admission in 1951.

Legacy, Titles, and the Life Beyond the Canvas

Richter's standing in the art world has earned him superlatives that few living artists command. He has been called the "greatest living painter," "the world's most important artist," and even the "Picasso of the 21st century," while his canvases have repeatedly broken auction records, making him at one point the most expensive living painter on the market. Beyond his own output, his influence extended through the classroom: he held teaching posts at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as a visiting professor, before returning to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1971, where he served as a professor for more than fifteen years. His personal life has been marked by three marriages—first to Marianne Eufinger in 1957, then to the sculptor Isa Genzken in 1982, and finally to Sabine Moritz in 1995, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Since 1983 he has lived and worked in Cologne, moving in 1996 into a studio designed by architect Thiess Marwede, where he continues his practice to this day.

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