The photos are not fuzzy, some of the paintings were rubbed when wet, so they are intentionally smeared.
First review by DICK
“ Gerhard Richter /he is still a fixture/ if he was not/or what not.”
On second thought:
DICK SAYS: Gerhard Richter must be popular in France because there was a huge line of people waiting to get into this large retrospective show at the Pompidou. Frankly, I couldn’t really place him, but once inside I realized, yeah, this is the guy who painted his uncle in full WWII regalia. I don’t know if that was a heroic act of self-revelation or something every German artist of a certain age should ponder. In any case, most of the show was devoted to Richter’s deliberately fuzzy renderings of photographic-style images and the large, colorful abstract paintings that he began to do after apparently
deciding that he could never paint like Titian. The later can be pretty dramatic. One of these works was essentially a thirty-foot long brush stroke. Needless to say, it made an impression. For my money, though, one of the most interesting pieces in the show was a construction that layered multiple pieces of semi-reflective glass, creating his favored “fuzzy” images out of whoever was standing in front of the piece. In a way, this optical machine undercut the whole notion of painting. I’m not sure that this was Richter’s point, but who knows? He’s kind of a cantankerous guy. When he wasn’t facing off against Titian, he was trying to fight his way beyond Duchamp in a rather obvious way. Then there’s the picture of the Nazi uncle.
Interesting show. Interesting career. I’m not sure what it all means despite the reams of wall text.
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