"Gerhard Richter is one of the most influential painters working today. Since the early 1960s, his work has received much attention and many international accolades. Richter's diverse body of work calls into question such widely held assumptions as the importance of stylistic consistency, individual artistic sensibility, spontaneous creativity, and the impact of technology and media imagery to traditional studio methods and formats. Unlike many artists today, he has explored these issues mainly through the medium of painting, challenging it to meet the demands posed by new forms of conceptual art. His varied output ranges from austere photo-based figurative realism of the early 1960s to brightly colored gestural abstractions of the early 1980s and encompasses such startling works as his brilliant cycle of black-and-white paintings of the Baader-Meinhof group, thought-provoking monochrome abstractions and banal Pop images, delicate landscapes and intimate portraits. As an artist, Richter has assumed a critical distance from vanguardists and conservatives alike regarding what painting should be; and the result has been a vital renewal of painting itself." "This book accompanies the first comprehensive exhibition of the seventy-year-old German artist's paintings ever to appear in New York and includes beautiful color plates and duotones of some two hundred canvases in a broad representation of his forty years of painting. In addition, this volume contains a substantial recent interview with Richter, a chronology, selected bibliography, and comprehensive exhibition history. The retrospective this book accompanies was organized by Robert Storr, Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. After its showing in New York, this extraordinary exhibition will be seen in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C."--Jacket.