MOMA rave
The New York Museum of Modern Art survey of Gerhard Richter’s
40 years of painting is a graceful accolade to a much-loved if controversial
European painter. Opened on St Valentine’s Day, and continuing
until late May, Richter is a critical rave-up, because literally,
he cannot be readily typecast. Moving easily across from total abstraction
to dry figurative mode, he deploys whatever apparatus best suits
his political message of the moment. Above all, however, it is in
the act of painting throughout his four decades that Richter has
recharged the longstanding credibility of the medium. Curator Robert
Storr is to be praised for his courage in organising this alien
importation to the city of continuous critique. Greenberg would
be uneasy, Rosenberg would blench. But, Richter’s philosophy
has been forged through his personal life journey through Nazism
as a child, Communism as a teenager, then jumping across the curtain
in 1961 to break out in West Germany in the company of Sigmar Polke.
The show travels interstate to Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington.
So Tate Modern, what about it? Or even RA? Such retrospectives
do no less than chart the history of our times, and through Richter
we sense the personal cost that motivates a true master for the
20th century, translated into a confident pluralism of means before
its time. Studio International will carry a full review of
the exhibition on 28 March.
