Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting

This biography of painter Gerhard Richter presents a portrait of an artist who has famously resisted associations between his personal life and his five-decades-long artistic oeuvre. But Elger glosses over so many important incidents in Richter's life that the link between his art and his life remains elusive. In an otherwise astute but dense text, Elger traces Richter's artistic evolution: an introverted teenager living in postwar East Germany, who did poorly in high school art classes; influenced by the abstract art of Jackson Pollock and Wilhelm Nay; the culmination Richter's 2002 stained glass windows for the Cologne Cathedral. Elger persuasively identifies Richter's life work as an exploration of the possibilities and limitations of abstraction and as an investigation into “the complexity of reality” and the contradictions within objectivity and human perception. Elger's analysis is largely based on interviews with Richter published in The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962–1993 . But he does not spend much time on Richter's private life; a “personal crisis” in the mid-'70s is only briefly mentioned, and while Elger's expression is generally elegant, the translation is flawed; the sentence structure is sometimes belabored. 78 color and 103 b&w illus. (Feb.)