The Unblinking Blur

• Share

(2 of 2)

The images are taken from the most banal police and official photographs. But the profile portraits of the dead Ulrike Meinhof--like the barely perceptible vibration in darkness that is all Richter shows of the hanging body of Gudrun Ensslin--have a deeply haunting intensity about them. This is the kind of unutterable sadness, one imagines, that Andy Warhol would have given his soul to evoke in paint, but Warhol didn't have enough soul.

When the Baader-Meinhof paintings were shown in New York some 10 years ago, they came under clumsy attack from right-wing critics. Here, went the cry, was the pseudoradical art world up to its nefarious tricks, making heroes out of terrorists, blah, blah and blah. Nothing, of course, could have been farther from the truth. Richter is not, and never has been, a radicalism groupie; he's not even a man of the left. He is a remarkably measured and thoughtful painter who despises theatrics, especially the theatrics of violence that play a low, deadly game with human life in the name of idealism, as the Baader-Meinhof gang did.

It's no mystery why some nostalgic radicals think of Richter as a capitalist stooge, while some conservatives fancy he's a leftie. The reason is, he's doing something right, and that something lies beyond politics, in the domain of real and noble painting.