Gerhard Richter, who was born in Dresden in 1932, is widely considered one of the most significant European painters of the post-war period. He remains the only German artist to have been accorded the honour of a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in his own lifetime. The Royal Scottish Academy’s new exhibition of his work, “Gerhard Richter: Paintings from Private Collections”, is much more extensive than its modest title implies. The private collections in question include that of Richter’s friend and long-term dealer, Anthony d’Offay, and that of the painter himself. The resulting exhibition contains some 60 paintings and covers more or less the full gamut of Richter’s coolly detached, heavily ironic and intriguingly eclectic oeuvre. It is the first serious retrospective of his work since the Tate mounted a large-scale show back in 1991.
Richter studied painting in Dresden in the 1950s before moving to West Germany in 1961. He enrolled at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf until 1963, subsequently choosing to destroy almost all the pictures he had created up until that date. His earliest surviving works show the influence of American and British Pop Art, although the young Richter adapted the means and methods of painters such as Andy Warhol and Richard Hamilton to his own bitterly acerbic ends. Party, painted in 1963, is one of the painter’s first essays in what would become his trademark idiom, a form of strongly disaffected photorealism. The source for the picture was a magazine photograph of a slick Sixties entertainer named Vico Torriani enjoying a drink with a bevy of smiling young ladies. With the help of a slide projector, Richter painstakingly reproduced the scene, in black and white, on a medium format canvas. He then slashed and ripped it, subsequently repairing the damage with prominent...
