Gerhard Richter’s Blurred World

On the occasion of the retrospective devoted to him at the Fondation Vuitton, one thing becomes clear: looking at a work by Gerhard Richter is never a comfortable experience. At first, we think we recognize something. A photograph. A portrait. A landscape. Then something resists. The image does not fully give itself up. It confirms nothing. It stands there, slightly unstable, as if refusing to settle. That precise point is where Richter’s work begins. Not in style, since he has so many. Not in subject, since he approaches them all. But in a deep mistrust of images that are too confident in themselves.

Richter is a technically solid painter. He knows it. We know it. And yet his entire body of work seems organized around a paradoxical idea: mastery is never enough. Worse still, it can become a trap. An image that is too precise, too correct, too perfectly controlled eventually closes in on itself. It stops the gaze. It becomes a dead image.

Images, authority, and mistrust

Richter grew up in Nazi Germany, in a world saturated with images that did not doubt themselves. Images were directive. They asserted. They commanded. They left no room for hesitation or ambiguity. This experience was not theoretical. It was lived. And it permanently shaped his relationship to representation.

Added to this was an intimate tragedy: the disappearance of his aunt Marianne, a victim of the Nazi euthanasia program. Richter never painted this event. He never narrated it. He never illustrated it. This refusal is fundamental. It is not a silence born of avoidance, but a moral impossibility of producing images that claim authority.

When Richter began painting seriously, after his training in Dresden and his move to the West in 1961, this mistrust was already embedded in his practice. The early paintings based on photographs (Onkel Rudi, Tante Marianne…), the family portraits, are restrained, almost cold. The paint layer is thin. The brush disappears. The surface is smooth. Nothing is demonstrative.

Then blur appears.

Blur as necessity

In Richter’s work, blur is neither decorative nor stylistic. It is precise, localized, controlled. Technically, it is achieved through light rubbing, dry brush, cloth, sometimes the hand, on paint that is still fresh but already stabilized. The image is not destroyed. It is rendered unstable.

This is crucial. Too little blur, and the image becomes illustrative. Too much, and it disappears. Richter searches for that fragile point of balance where the image remains active, where it does not impose itself. He stated it clearly: an image that is too sharp claims a truth it cannot sustain. Blur, on the contrary, removes authority from the image. It makes it more honest by exposing its fragility.

The series of blurred paintings after photographs, and later September (2005), show how difficult this distance is to maintain. In this painting devoted to the Twin Towers, the blur is harsher, more kinetic. The painting seems to struggle against the event itself, as if Richter were finding it harder here to maintain his habitual distance.

Grey: neutralizing without renouncing

In the 1970s, Richter painted a series of grey paintings. They have often been described as conceptual. For a painter, they are above all radical. They ask a simple, brutal question: what remains when you remove from painting everything that makes it expressive?

These greys are never neutral. They are constructed, unstable, sometimes greenish, sometimes bluish. Technically, they rarely result from a simple black-and-white mix. They are soiled greys—alive, but deliberately restrained.

The gesture is anti-expressive. No center. No hierarchy. No narrative. The surface is leveled, almost administrative. Grey becomes a form of protection. A painting that refuses to exalt, to seduce, to convince.

This is not a renunciation. It is a refusal to lie.

Destroying in order not to repeat oneself

From the 1980s onward, Richter developed his large scraped abstractions. He knows how to paint. He knows how to compose. He could produce effective abstraction. That is precisely what he refuses.

The process is heavy, physical. He applies thick layers of color, then intervenes with large plexiglass squeegees. This gesture is not a visual effect. It truly destroys what has just been done. The lower layers reappear by accident. Colors contaminate one another. The paint resists.

The composition is never planned in advance. It emerges. And above all, it is interrupted. Richter stops when the painting becomes too legible. Too seductive. Too sure of itself.

Stopping is the real gesture. Continuing would be a betrayal.

Copier Titien pour mieux échouer

One episode clarifies this position with exemplary clarity. Richter made a copy of a painting by Titian. Technically, the painting holds. It is accurate. But that is not enough for him.

He then transforms this image into a series of six paintings, progressively degrading it, over-blurring it, altering it until it becomes illegible. And it is there that he finds a truer form of painting.

This gesture is essential. It shows that technical fidelity is no guarantee of truthfulness. Precision closes the image. It shuts down the power of representation. Blur, on the contrary, keeps the image open, active, productive.

Series, gaze, and distance

Richter never commits to a single register. His work moves through portraits, landscapes, still lifes, abstractions, color charts. Series play a central role: they prevent any single image from becoming definitive.

Atlas is fundamental in this respect. Thousands of images: banal photographs, failed ones, repetitive ones, color tests. Nothing is hierarchized. Richter does not seek subjects. He seeks zones of visual friction, images that ask for nothing.

The intimate works follow the same logic of distance. Ema, Betty, the portraits of Isa Genzken: precise drawing, restrained values, cool palette. Everything is held back. The brush disappears. It could be sensual. It is not. Richter refuses pictorial confession.

Where he is today

Richter lives and works in Cologne, in a state of quiet withdrawal. Far from discourse. Far from noise. He continues to draw, to experiment, to produce without trying to conclude, often in small formats.

What Richter teaches us

For an artist striving for excellence, Richter is not a model to imitate. He is an exigency to confront. He reminds us that:

– mastery is necessary, but dangerous

– precision can close an image

– virtuosity must be treated with suspicion

– stopping is a gesture in its own right

Painting, for Richter, is not about showing what one knows how to do, but about resisting what one knows how to do too well. Today, we often say that for a painting to be more than merely “good,” something must remain out of control. It can be color, composition, texture, drawing. Richter has shifted the focal point entirely. For an artist, letting go in this way is profoundly stimulating.

After these observations and inspirations, feel free to consult me in the studio if you have questions about the various techniques Richter uses. How to approach blur in oil or acrylic? How to plan scraping in abstraction or semi-figuration? How to paint contemporary subjects?

To your brushes.