Books by Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter: Eight Gray
In his investigations of the nature of the constructed image and the perception of truth versus fiction, Gerhard Richter, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, has worked in numerous styles and playfully but astutely questioned our expectations of both photography and painting. Expanding on his study of the nature of looking, Richter has also experimented with windows, mirrors, and the frame throughout his career. This series of eight gray, mirrored panels, created on the occasion of a commission from the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, is part of the particular aspect of his oeuvre focused on in Eight Gray: the importance of the Mirror series, projects in glass, gray monochromes, and related works. More than 50 images of drawings and other works dating from 1965 to the present, as well as studies for the Berlin installation, are illustrated alongside an essay by Richter expert Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and a focused bibliography. No other publication has been dedicated to the understanding and analysis of this significant segment of the artist's career.
Essay by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.
Hardcover, 10 x 11 in., 128 pages, 80 color, 25 b/w illustrations
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Gerhard Richter: A Private Collection
The works by Gerhard Richter that Georg and Ingrid Bockmann collected in Berlin between 1960 and 2003 span all of the artist's important genres: portraits, landscapes, still lifes, geometric color charts, abstract compositions. Thus the collection, comprehensively illustrated in this publication, provides a welcome survey of the central aspects of the artist's production. Statements and interviews from Richter's diaries exemplify his position as a painter who has repeatedly undertaken new approaches and found new formulations. Despite the ever-increasing dominance of photography and new media in art making, Richter has always foreseen a future for painting. For him, it is the lust to paint that is proof of painting's necessity.
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Gerhard Richter: Editions 1965-2004: Catalogue Raisonné
by Gerhard Richter, Hubertus Butin, Stefan Gronert
Though Gerhard Richter is one of the most accomplished and best-known contemporary German artists, and his paintings are widely exhibited, his collectorís editions have attracted relatively little public attention. This catalogue raisonné, compiled through intensive research over a period of many years by art historian Hubertus Butin, Richter's former assistant, documents the full range of graphic and photographic editions as well as the artistís books, multiples and editions in oil realized by the artist between 1965 and 2004. This publication presents four-color illustrations of each and every one of these collector's editions. The illustrations, accompanied by basic texts, shed new light on the significance of Gerhard Richter's editions within the context of his complete oeuvre. Richterís painting reflects the influence of his interest in photography, and a closer look at his collector's editions reveals, in a somewhat different way, the extent to which Richter's art is based upon visual reproductions of reality. Through his reflections on the various pictorial motifs as well as the media and technical processes involved in his work, the artist has succeeded in introducing new information to the body of materials that aim to document his production.
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Modern Art Despite Modernism
by Henri Matisse, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Robert Storr, Ben Shahn, Salvador Dali, Georgia O'Keeffe, Glenn Lowry, Balthus, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Beckmann, Francesco Clemente, George Grosz, Glenn D. Lowry
Throughout the twentieth century, the evolution of mainstream Modernism in the arts has been shadowed and made complex by alternative expressions of a seemingly retrograde type, art that appears to set back the clock or to redirect the stream of progress. Modern Art Despite Modernism explores the anti-Modernist impulse in painting and sculpture through socio-cultural conflicts of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Texts by Robert Storr advocate the strengths of this impulse in paintings and drawings by Otto Dix, Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente and even Pablo Picasso--and note the enduring popularity of such artists as Pavel Tchelitchew, whose "Hide and Seek," along with Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World," remain among the public's favorite pictures. Storr also discusses taste and its implications, both part and present, for institutions like The Museum of Modern Art. This book was published as the second in a series of three titles, in conjunction with the millennial exhibitions schedule of MoMA2000 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Benjamin’s Ghosts Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory
This book explores the implications for todays critical concerns of the work of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Although his writings are considered to be among the most powerful and suggestive theoretical enterprises of the twentieth century, his ideas are strangely resistant to cooptation by the established doctrines of various critical programs. The innovative essays gathered here engage this resistance by examining the notion of the ghostly in Benjamins work.
The contributors show that the urgent and haunting truths Benjamin offers point toward new forms of responsibility, even as they withdraw from straightforward meaning and transparent forms of expression. These truths reside in a figurative elsewhere, a ghostly space that his texts delimit but never fully inhabit, and these essays seek to do justice to the ghosts of Benjamin that are already on board with us.
Through close textual readings and thoughtful contextualizations, internationally known Benjamin scholars engage a wide range of issues, including: the status of the image in Benjamins literary reflections and in his meditations on cinema and visual culture; abiding Benjaminian notions of messianism, aura, reproducibility, semblance, and melancholy; Benjamins relation to Freud; his innovative rethinking of history, virtuality, and translation; and his reflections on tragedy and prophecy, the geometrical dimensions of writing, and the relation between eros and language.
The contributors are Norbert Bolz, Fritz Breithaupt, Stanley Corngold, Peter Fenves, Eva Geulen, Miriam Hansen, Beatrice Hanssen, Lutz Koepnick, Tom McCall, Kevin McLaughlin, Bettine Menke, Rainer Nägele, Gerhard Richter, Laurence Rickels, and Sigrid Weigel.
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Dispatches from Moments of Calm (The German List)
by Gerhard Richter, Alexander Kluge
On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue—but things looked . . . different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they’re read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted with care from the chaos of the contemporary.
That calm was the work of Gerhard Richter, who had been granted control over Die Welt for that single day, taking over and imprinting all thirty pages of the newspaper with his personal stamp: images from quiet moments amid unquiet times, the demotion of politics from its primary position, the privileging of the private and personal over the public, and, above all, artful, moving contrasts between sharpness and softness. He had created an unprecedented work of mass art.
Among the many people to praise the work was writer Alexander Kluge, who instantly began writing stories to accompany Richter’s images. This book, the second collaboration between Kluge and Richter, brings their stories and images together, along with new words and artworks created specifically for this volume. The result, Dispatches from Moments of Calm, is a beautiful, meditative interval in the otherwise unremitting press of everyday life, a masterpiece by two acclaimed artists working at the height of their powers.
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Dispatches from Moments of Calm (The German List)
by Gerhard Richter, Alexander Kluge
On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue—but things looked . . . different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they’re read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted with care from the chaos of the contemporary.
That calm was the work of Gerhard Richter, who had been granted control over Die Welt for that single day, taking over and imprinting all thirty pages of the newspaper with his personal stamp: images from quiet moments amid unquiet times, the demotion of politics from its primary position, the privileging of the private and personal over the public, and, above all, artful, moving contrasts between sharpness and softness. He had created an unprecedented work of mass art.
Among the many people to praise the work was writer Alexander Kluge, who instantly began writing stories to accompany Richter’s images. This book, the second collaboration between Kluge and Richter, brings their stories and images together, along with new words and artworks created specifically for this volume. The result, Dispatches from Moments of Calm, is a beautiful, meditative interval in the otherwise unremitting press of everyday life, a masterpiece by two acclaimed artists working at the height of their powers.
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Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics (Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts)
Gerhard Richter's groundbreaking study argues that the concept of "afterness" is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to "follow" something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred?
The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Kant, Kafka, Heidegger, Bloch, Benjamin, Brecht, Adorno, Arendt, Lyotard, and Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed "after Auschwitz." The study's various analysesacross a heterogeneous collection of modern writers and thinkers, diverse historical moments of articulation, and a range of mediaconspire to illuminate Lyotard's apodictic statement that "after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the 'after.'" As Richter's intricate study demonstrates, much hinges on our interpretation of the "after." After all, our most fundamental assumptions concerning modern aesthetic representation, conceptual discourse, community, subjectivity, and politics are at stake.
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December (The German List)
by Gerhard Richter, Alexander Kluge
In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year.
In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as readily with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car crash by inches. In another, we relive Greek financial crises. There are stories where time accelerates, and others in which it seems to slow to the pace of falling snow. In Kluge’s work, power seems only to erode and decay, never grow, and circumstances always seem to elude human control. When a German commander outside Moscow in December of 1941 remarks, “We don’t need weapons to fight the Russians but a weapon to fight the weather,” the futility of his struggle is painfully present.
Accompanied by the ghostly and wintry forest scenes captured in Gerhard Richter's photographs, these stories have an alarming density, one that gives way at unexpected moments to open vistas and narrative clarity. Within these pages, the lessons are perhaps not as comforting as in the old calendar stories, but the subversive moralities are always instructive and perfectly executed.
Praise for Alexander Kluge
“More than a few of Kluge's many books are essential, brilliant achievements. None are without great interest.”—Susan Sontag
“Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers.”—W.G. Sebald
Copies
No copies available.
December (The German List)
by Gerhard Richter, Alexander Kluge
In the historic tradition of calendar stories and calendar illustrations, author and film director Alexander Kluge and celebrated visual artist Gerhard Richter have composed December, a collection of thirty-nine stories and thirty-nine snow-swept photographs for the darkest month of the year.
In stories drawn from modern history and the contemporary moment, from mythology, and even from meteorology, Kluge toys as readily with time and space as he does with his characters. In the narrative entry for December 1931, Adolf Hitler avoids a car crash by inches. In another, we relive Greek financial crises. There are stories where time accelerates, and others in which it seems to slow to the pace of falling snow. In Kluge’s work, power seems only to erode and decay, never grow, and circumstances always seem to elude human control. When a German commander outside Moscow in December of 1941 remarks, “We don’t need weapons to fight the Russians but a weapon to fight the weather,” the futility of his struggle is painfully present.
Accompanied by the ghostly and wintry forest scenes captured in Gerhard Richter's photographs, these stories have an alarming density, one that gives way at unexpected moments to open vistas and narrative clarity. Within these pages, the lessons are perhaps not as comforting as in the old calendar stories, but the subversive moralities are always instructive and perfectly executed.
Praise for Alexander Kluge
“More than a few of Kluge's many books are essential, brilliant achievements. None are without great interest.”—Susan Sontag
“Alexander Kluge, that most enlightened of writers.”—W.G. Sebald
Copies
No copies available.
Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Cultural Memory in the Present)
In this book, Gerhard Richter explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer. The Denkbild is a poetic mode of writing, a brief snapshot-in-prose that stages the interrelation of literary, philosophical, political, and cultural insights. Richter's careful analysis of the linguistic characteristics of this mode of writing sheds new light on pivotal concerns of modernity, including the fractured cityscape, philosophical problems of modern music, the experience of exiled homelessness, and the disaster of Auschwitz. Thought-Images not only reorients our understanding of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in important ways but also establishes significant links between these writers and contemporary French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida.
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Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity
Theodor W. Adorno's multifaceted work has exerted a profound impact on far-ranging discourses and critical practices in late modernity. His analysis of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives "after Auschwitz," of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the manipulation of consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly-conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human suffering, all speak to central concerns of our time.
The essays collected here analyze the full range of implications emanating from Adorno's demand that the task of critical thinking be to imagine a mode of being in the world that occurs in and through a language that has liberated itself from the spell of an alleged historical and political inevitability, what he once tellingly called a "language without soil."
Adorno' s finely chiseled sentences perform a ceaseless gesture of thoughtful vigilance, a vigilance understood not in the sense of moralizing or ethical normativity but of a rigorous attention to the presuppositions of thinking itself. The volume's fresh readings conspire to yield a refractory and unorthodox Adorno, a suggestive and at times infuriating thinker of the first order, whose intellectual gestures sponsor politically conscious modes of theoretical speculation in a late modernity that may still have a future because its language and aspirations are without soil.
Also included is an annotated translation of a seminal interview Adorno gave in 1969 concerning the relationship of Critical Theory to political activism. In it, the dialectical interplay between thought and action forcefully emerges.
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