Family album and shadow archive: Gerhard Richter\u27s East, West and all German painting, 1949--1966

This dissertation investigates the early career of Gerhard Richter. Born in 1932 in Dresden, the artist grew up under the two dictatorial regimes of National Socialism and Soviet Communism. He was associated with the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from 1951 to 1960, first as a student in the mural painting division, and later as a master student who taught in the evening school from 1957 to 1960. Socialist realism dominated the discourse during his tenure. In 1961, six months before the erection of the Berlin Wall, Richter illegally emigrated to West Germany and settled in Düsseldorf. There he enrolled in the Dusseldorf Academy from 1961 to 1965 and underwent a second training that introduced him to the neo-avant-garde trends of Op art, Pop art, neo-Dada and nouveau réalisme. I argue that Richter\u27s negotiation of socialist realism in East Germany significantly shaped his contribution to the western neo-avant-garde, epitomized by his unique invention of photo-painting in 1962 and later by his simultaneous deployment of different artistic modes, including monochrome painting, gestural abstraction, minimalism and installation art. I show that Richter practiced multiple styles of figurative realism, used photography as an aid to painting, and surreptitiously experimented with abstract painting well before he resettled in the West. Questions of style were problematic for the artist from the outset of his career in East Germany. I also demonstrate that he retained positive aspects of his eastern training, a factor that challenges the presumed superiority of western artistic approaches. Because the photo-paintings collectively evoke an all-German family album, as one reviewer put it in 1966, I use this context to articulate the problem of historical memory for an entire generation of Germans on both sides of the great divide.