The story at the tip of the brush: When gerhard richter erases the past
The slanting light of a winter afternoon cuts through the Cologne studio. On the easel, a still-wet canvas shows a young girl with blond hair, turned toward an indistinct landscape. Her features are sharp, almost too precise, like an old photograph. Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, the artist takes a wide, dry brush and begins to soften the edges. The hair dissolves into the background, the face loses its details, the eyes become two blurred smudges. In a few seconds, the image shifts: this is no longer a portrait, but a memory slipping away, a presence dissolving into time. The girl’s name is Betty. She is the artist’s daughter. And this act of erasure is Gerhard Richter’s—the man who has spent his life painting the impossible: history when it refuses to be grasped.
By Artedusa
••8 min read01The silence of images: when Germany looks away
Picture Dresden in 1945. Firebombs have reduced the city to ashes, and in the rubble, a family tries to rebuild their lives. Among them, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gerhard, sketches charred landscapes on scraps of newspaper. Twenty years later, that same man, now settled in Düsseldorf, projects a photograph onto a canvas and sets about reproducing it with meticulous precision. The image shows his uncle Rudi, smiling in his Wehrmacht uniform. The brush hesitates, then Richter decides to blur the outlines. The uniform becomes a gray stain, the smile a shadow. Why erase what is already there? Because in 1960s Germany, some images are still too heavy to bear. No one speaks of the past’s crimes, no one shows the faces of the perpetrators. So Richter does what no one dares: he paints these images only to make them unreadable.
His studio is a laboratory of ambiguity. On the walls, hundreds of photographs cut from newspapers, family albums, magazines. Some show idyllic landscapes, others scenes of war, portraits of loved ones, pornographic images. This is his Atlas, a visual archive that has fed his work for over sixty years. Within this accumulation of images, one question keeps returning: how to represent what can no longer be represented? How to paint horror without slipping into voyeurism, or worse, oblivion?
02The lying photograph: when Richter reinvents painting
In 1966, Richter exhibits for the first time a series of canvases that will upend the art world. Titled photo-paintings, these works reproduce photographs with unsettling fidelity before deliberately blurring them. One of them, Ema (Nude on a Staircase), depicts a naked woman descending a staircase, inspired by a photo of his first wife. The composition recalls Marcel Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase, but where Duchamp fragmented movement, Richter dissolves it into a dreamlike haze. Ema’s skin seems to melt into the light, as if her body were made of mist. Critics are baffled. Is this painting or photography? A celebration of the body or a negation of its presence?
Richter plays with the viewer’s expectations. He knows that photography is an illusion—a stolen moment, a frozen instant that reveals nothing of the truth. So he takes these images and turns them into riddles. In Aunt Marianne (1965), he paints his aunt, a smiling woman holding a baby in her arms. The baby is him. But what the image doesn’t show is that Marianne was schizophrenic and was sterilized, then euthanized by the Nazis as part of the Aktion T4 program. The smile becomes a tragedy, the blur a way to shield the viewer from the unbearable. Richter does not judge, does not condemn. He shows, then erases, leaving the viewer to confront their own questions.
03The breathing archive: when the Atlas becomes a work of art
In a corner of his studio, a stack of black binders lines a shelf. These are the pages of the Atlas, the monumental project Richter has been building since 1962. Inside, thousands of images pasted onto sheets of paper: landscapes, portraits, newspaper clippings, family photos, scientific images, pornographic snapshots. Some pages are organized thematically, others seem assembled at random. On page 398, a photo of his studio floor, covered in dried paint splatters. On page 127, a series of blurred women’s portraits, as if Richter had tried to capture their essence before giving up.
The Atlas is not just a collection of images—it is a work in its own right, a meditation on how we archive the world. Richter explores the boundary between public and private, between collective history and intimate memory. Some images recur like obsessions. Others disappear, replaced by new finds. The Atlas is alive; it breathes, it evolves with its creator. And perhaps that is its greatest strength: to show that history is never fixed, that it constantly reinvents itself through the eyes of those who behold it.
04The liberating gesture: when painting becomes abstraction
In the early 1970s, something shifts in Richter’s work. The photo-paintings gradually give way to abstract canvases, where colors explode in swirling masses of pigment. The brush is replaced by a squeegee, a house painter’s tool he uses to spread and scrape the paint. The canvases become battlefields, where layers of color clash, overlap, destroy one another. In Abstract Painting (726), streaks of red, blue, and yellow seem to float over a gray ground, like clouds torn by a storm. No figure emerges, no narrative takes shape. Yet these canvases are not mere formal exercises. They are the result of a process both controlled and random, where Richter allows chance to enter his work.
Why this turn to abstraction? Perhaps because, after years of blurring images, Richter understood that some truths cannot be represented. They must be felt. In these canvases, there is no subject, no story—only raw emotion. Color becomes a living matter, breathing, bleeding, vibrating. And the viewer is invited to plunge into this organized chaos, to lose themselves in these inner landscapes.
05The bleeding history: when Richter confronts terrorism
In 1988, Richter embarks on a series of canvases that will mark a turning point in his career. Titled October 18, 1977, it draws on photographs of members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) found dead in their prison cells. The images, blurred and dark, show the lifeless bodies of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, presented as suicides by the authorities. Richter does not seek to reconstruct the facts, nor to take a stance. He paints these images as if burying a secret, rendering them nearly unreadable. Faces are blurred, bodies become shadows, colors reduced to shades of gray and black.
The series is a shock to Germany. Some see it as a glorification of terrorists, others as a critique of media manipulation. Richter remains silent. He knows these canvases will answer no questions, but they will raise new ones. How to represent violence without sensationalism? How to commemorate the dead without instrumentalizing them? By blurring the images, Richter forces the viewer to look beyond appearances, to seek truth where it is no longer visible.
06The resisting light: when Richter paints the unthinkable
In 2005, four years after the September 11 attacks, Richter exhibits a canvas titled September. At first glance, it could pass for an abstract landscape, a burst of bright colors against a gray background. But on closer inspection, the outlines of the Twin Towers emerge, shrouded in thick smoke. Richter does not show the collapse, does not depict falling bodies. He paints the moment before the horror, when the world tips into the inconceivable. The canvas is both a commemoration and a warning: some images should not be shown, some pains cannot be represented.
With September, Richter confirms what he has always known: painting is not there to illustrate history, but to question it. It is not a mirror, but a filter, a way to look at the world without being blinded by its violence. And perhaps that is its greatest power: to resist oblivion, even when everything seems determined to disappear.
07The blurring legacy: when Richter reinvents contemporary art
Today, Gerhard Richter is considered one of the greatest living artists. His canvases sell for millions, his exhibitions draw immense crowds, and his influence is felt in the work of an entire generation. Yet he remains a discreet, almost shy man, still working in his Cologne studio, far from the spotlight. His art, meanwhile, continues to question, to blur, to defy expectations.
What remains of Richter when we close the art books? A way of seeing the world through the prism of blur, an invitation to doubt what we think we know. His canvases do not provide answers; they open doors. They remind us that history is never written once and for all, that memory is a fragile thing, and that art, sometimes, is the only way to preserve what refuses to be grasped.
So the next time you encounter one of his canvases, take a moment to look beyond the blur. For it is there, in that gray zone between the visible and the invisible, that the truth may lie.