Artist Gerhard Richter works in his studio in 1984.

Gerhard Richter took a pronouncedly dead medium and brought it back to life. To be fair, painting had been claimed to be on its last legs time and time again, only to be revived by Matisse and Picasso and Delaunay and the like. The issue remained, however, that any 20th century artist who ventured to create a painting would have to reconsider how to make an age-old craft relevant to a public presented with exponentially growing forms of entertainment.

Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter grew up shaped by World War II and a crumbling world order. After a tumultuous childhood under Nazi then Soviet control in East Germany, he defected to West Germany and attended the art academy in Düsseldorf. He began to explore West German consumerism and current global affairs through his artistic practice, which have developed to include various different kinds of painting, photography, and minimalistic sculptures. Richter is best known for his photorealistic paintings of historical figures, family members, and strangers alike, and colorful abstractions.

Some early critics took issue with contradictions within Richter’s work; however, art history has proven to be on his side, as Richter remains one of the most famous living artists today. In the preface for a catalogue of his work, Armin Zweite and Helmut Friedel examine these oscillations: “Richter’s output characteristically alternates between traditional and avant-garde attitudes, between non-personal processes and personal motivation, between construction and destruction, as it also does between concealing and revealing.” His behavioral and artistic juxtapositions simply reveal a truth about the human condition: that to attach convenient labels and categories to people or their craft only sets people up to defy those definitions.

This contradictory nature reveals itself in “Gerhard Richter Painting,” a remarkable 2011 documentary by filmmaker Corinna Belz about the artist’s craft. Richter appears so confident in his abilities, approaching the canvas with his signature squeegee and adding and detracting until the painting has just the right balance and is aesthetically perfect to him. His assistant, however, insists he can never comment on a painting, even if it seems to be finished. As soon as you say you like it, he says, Richter will paint over it: “Because he was looking for a reason. He was looking for a reason to destroy it.”

Because Richter has ascended to such a high artistic level within his lifetime, art historians and the like are able to question the artist on such contradictions and his larger motives in making art. One such conversation appears in “Gerhard Richter Painting” as an art historian who has visited Richter’s studio attempts to pin a preexisting movement to his art. It’s not often that a filmmaker and later her audience is able to witness the writing of art history, especially with input from the artist, let alone just hear an artist talk through on film the struggles — for Richter, it’s knowing when an artwork is finished, assuming it will ever see the light of day — that make an artist’s work unique to him.

Left: Betty [663] (1988) as pictured in the program for the 2012 Richter exhibition I attended in Paris. Right: Richter’s original painting.

I first encountered Betty on a sign advertising Richter’s show “Panorama” at the Centre Pompidou the summer of 2012. A small group from my high school took an art trip to France, ending in Paris, and my incoming-junior self had discovered a love for photography throughout the previous year. Betty (or at least the Betty with the catalogue number 663-5) looked to me to be a beautiful, colorful, elegantly blurred photograph of Richter’s daughter. When we visited the Pompidou and I stood in front of the work itself, I admired it for a minute, walked away, then urgently walked back to make sure it was indeed only a photograph, only to find it was an oil painting. Richter at that moment became my favorite artist and hasn’t lost the title since.

After years of leaving Richter’s work and coming back to it, I have realized that my immense admiration for it is twofold: On a purely aesthetic level, many of Richter’s various “modes of representation” — the abstract squeegee paintings, the photorealistic figurative paintings, the color studies — greatly appeal to me; then, too, on a more intellectual level, something about the way Richter goes about creating art has always struck me. Maybe this was a hunch, solely based on the fact that I loved the works themselves. But diving deeper into his work and his life has proven that hunch to be absolutely accurate.

Take, for example, Richter’s photorealistic works. The artist collects photographs — some taken by himself, some by friends, and some clippings from newspapers — that strike him. After choosing one to paint, he projects the image onto a canvas and works from that original photograph until he arrives at a finished painting, often a burred vision of the original photograph with the same rich, deep colors he sought out in keeping the original photograph.

Similar to Susan Sontag’s line of thinking, Richter approaches photography not as a direct reflection of the world but as one interpreted through the medium and the artist’s specific use of it:

“Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks…The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist.” (Sontag, On Photography)

Richter insists on taking or keeping a photograph because he enjoys it purely in that form; though he will go on to paint some of those images later, taking a photo with the intention to paint it, he has learned, will result in a less-than-superb painting (and an even worse photograph). He holds no false impression that any photograph accurately depicts the world from which it came — it instead creates its own world, emerging from ours but remaining distinctly separate from it because of the context its four walls leave out.

Richter seems to be a photographer who is bored with the craft. He’s unimpressed by the process and its direct products; instead, he would like to impose his own process. Richter experiments with other modes as well, as he did for abstract painting, taking a squeegee to the canvas to reveal earlier layers of paint, and photorealistic painting, using various methods to blur what would have been a crisp image.

The academy-trained artist views himself as “the heir to a vast, great, rich culture of painting — of art in general — which we have lost, but which places obligations on us,” he remarked in 1964, a culture which he was determined to neither duplicate nor “give up altogether.” In exploring the ways in which he could revitalize both figurative and abstract painting, Richter kept thousands of photographs and sketches that give us a glimpse into his basic aesthetic leanings and the organized manner in which he goes about making art. Seeing the photographs he took (below) and the paintings they become simply illuminates the strong story his art alone begins to tell.

Top: Pages from Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. Bottom: Two Candles (1982) and Reader (1994).

Despite the endless literature and academic musings on Richter’s work, and despite the fact that Richter himself creates work from an intellectual place, he repeatedly comes back to the idea that art has to be as beautiful to the viewer as it was to the artist. It must reveal to each a truth about the world that could not be expressed in any less creative form.

To me, he has accomplished this goal — that’s not to say that I love every piece he’s made; however, Richter’s own insistence on this individualized aesthetic truth allows me to appreciate the entire breadth of his career without any resentment for the paintings that do not personally speak to me. They held up to his high standards and have no doubt given some people who’ve seen them pleasure.

Okay, enough talking about his art; it was never about that anyway.