Gerhard Richter: the day is long: in a conversation with the curator of his forthcoming retrospective, Gerhard Richter looks back on his 40 years as an artist. From his boyhood in East Germany, through his student days in Dusseldorf with Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and others, to the launch of his career and beyond, his self-imposed task remained the same: "to decide what is good and what is bad." - Cover Story - Interview

Born in Dresden in 1932, Gerhard Richter came of age after World War IL In the villages of Reichenau and Waltersdorf, where his father taught school before being mobilized, Richter had a provincial childhood that mixed Tom Sawyer escapades in the forests of Saxony with compulsory membership in the Hitler Youth and a catch-as-catch-can education. His mother, the daughter of a gifted pianist and a bookseller prior to her marriage, read Goethe, Nietzsche and the classics of German literature, listened avidly to the great 18th- and 19th-century composers and encouraged her son's interest in drawing and painting.

Upon leaving grammar school at age 15, Richter found a series of temporary jobs--assisting a local photographer, decorating banners for the East German Communist regime and painting sets for a theater in the small city of Zitau. In 1952, after failing at his first try, he was admitted to the Art Academy in Dresden. During his five-year stint at the academy, Richter received a thorough but traditional studio training under the tutelage of Heinz Lothmar, a former Surrealist and dedicated Communist who supervised the mural painting department. Paradoxically, this department permitted students the greatest freedom to experiment formally, since mural painting was assumed to be a "decorative" form by otherwise strict enforcers of the prevailing Socialist Realist esthetic. Upon graduation, Richter executed several mural commissions that were well received by officials and the public. In addition to attracting a degree of recognition and assuring him a steady income, this success allowed Richter the opportunity to travel to the West.

On the second of these trips, in 1959, he visited Documenta II in Kassel. The exhibition was one of a series of surveys of international modern and contemporary art intended to fill in the blanks in German cultural history created by the 12-year blackout of the Third Reich and to present vanguard painting and sculpture condemned by authorities in the Communist Bloc. There, for the first time, Richter saw many artists about whom he had heard and many altogether unknown to him. Among those who impressed him most were Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock. Two years later, shortly before the Berlin Wall was erected, Richter abandoned his secure and "promising" future in Dresden and slipped over the border to West Berlin. On the advice of a friend who had made the move ahead of him, Richter enrolled in the Academy of Art in Dusseldorf.

That same year, Joseph Beuys was named professor of monumental sculpture at the academy, and though Richter always kept his distance from him, Beuys was henceforth an increasingly important presence in the burgeoning art worlds of Dusseldorf and Cologne. When Richter himself was appointed a professor at the academy in 1971, Beuys became a faculty colleague. Richter's own professor in Dusseldorf was the informel or gesture painter Karl Otto Gotz, and for a brief period the younger artist worked in a physically aggressive manner influenced by Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier and Fontana, in effect starting over again and unlearning all that he had been taught at the conservative Dresden Academy.

Almost as soon as he arrived in Dusseldorf, Richter fell in with three other students, Sigmar Polke and Blinky Palermo, also refugees from the East, and Konrad Lueg, who later changed his name and became the art dealer Konrad Fischer. With Lueg and Polke, Richter shared an active interest in Pop art, which was then brand new and which they did not consider an exclusively American or British domain. Indeed, when Richter and Lueg traveled to Paris in 1963, they introduced themselves to the dealer Ileana Sonnabend as German Pop artists. Later that year, Richter and Lueg mounted two exhibitions/ demonstrations of their own work, the first one also involving the collaboration of Polke and another friend, Manfred Kuttner. These were the first occasions on which Richter showed his photo-based paintings. The exhibitions inaugurated a singularly protean, 40-year career which was to encompass many surprising changes in his work.

The following interview was recorded Oct. 17 and 18, 1996. Overall, the exchange was more conversational than interrogative and was punctuated by more laughter than is mentioned here, for by nature Richter is as playful in his speech as he is precise. He was teasing in his answers to some questions, at times startlingly blunt in response to others. Assisting at the interview was Isabelle Moffat, who acted as skillful interpreter when the conversation shifted into German and who transcribed and, where necessary, translated the audiotape. The interview covered many topics; the parts published here--with the editorial contribution of Sue Taylor--deal with aspects of Richter's early years that are not generally known, and with issues raised by his recent work.

--R.S.

Robert Storr: How it is that you first began to make paintings?

Gerhard Richter: When I was a child, at 15 or 16, I made watercolors, landscapes and self-portraits. I remember doing a watercolor of a group of people dancing. It was quite a nice one.