Floor 4: Gerhard Richter: Northwest entrance from Flavin
Overview
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Label Text
“I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, noncommittal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”
—Richter, 1964
Gerhard Richter
Born 1932, Dresden, Germany; based in Cologne
Coming of age in a country divided by the Cold War, Gerhard Richter trained in Socialist Realist painting in East Germany before fleeing to West Germany, where he studied the gestural abstraction then dominant in Western Europe. He soon sought a third path between realism and abstraction, and—like his Düsseldorf classmate Sigmar Polke—an alternative to the emerging Pop styles of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol (all featured in nearby galleries). In 1962, Richter began making paintings based on photographs, but deliberately blurred. Over the following decades, he has alternated freely between figuration and abstraction. The remarkable diversity of Richter’s work is unified by his persistent testing of the nature and possiilities of painting.
Objects
8 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Label Text
1971
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1993
This is one of many portraits that Richter created of Brigid Berlin (also known as Brigid Polk), an American artist who frequently collaborated with Andy Warhol. She carried a Polaroid camera and would capture herself throughout her day. Richter based this composition on a Polaroid taken during Polk’s visit to Germany in 1970. He painted it with the slight blur and muted tones of the original, achieving the immediacy and intimacy of a snapshot in paint. As he explained in 1972, “I’m not trying to emulate a photograph, I want to produce one.”
Visual Description
A horizontally oriented, oil-on-linen painting (3 × 4 ft, wider than it is tall) presents a portrait of a partially reclined woman in a shadowy interior. Her pale face sits slightly right of center and her body is tilted sideways. Her tousled, dark-blonde hair fans outward to the right edge in loose strands. Her eyes, a bright light-blue, are clear points of color and focus. One hand rises in the foreground with slender fingers; an index finger touches or hovers at her lips. She wears a dark garment that blends into the surrounding area, with a lighter patch of skin visible along the left side where her arm or shoulder emerges from the darkness. The background dissolves into hazy blocks of deep green-gray and brown, with a vague vertical pale form near the upper right resembling a lit window or doorway. The painting contains blurry transitions and fogged edges.
Label Text
1965
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1988
Richter used photographs as sources for his paintings so as to minimize self-expression and compositional decisions. His sources ranged from newspaper and magazine clippings to family photos and personal snapshots. Portrait Müller is based on a portrait of Hans-Jürgen Müller, a Stuttgart art dealer, while Gymastics shows Karin Janz, a renowned East German gymnast, mid-leap. The blurred effect—created by dragging a dry brush over wet pigment—removes the artist’s hand from the paintings, making the surfaces, in his words, “technological, smooth and perfect.” The blurring also gives the pictures a sense of uncertainty, nostalgia, or loss.
Visual Description
An 31 × 23.8 inch oil-on-linen painting presents a softly blurred, grayscale portrait of a light-skinned adult man from the chest up, framed within a broad off-white linen border. The man's head and shoulders are turned slightly toward the left, with his gaze directed off to our left as well, giving a neutral expression. His hair is short and dark, combed back from a high forehead, and his facial features—eyes, nose, and mouth—are rendered with softened edges. He wears a light-colored suit jacket over a darker collared shirt and tie; the knot and shirt buttons are faintly visible but hazy. Across the entire image, thin horizontal bands and streaks run from left to right. The background is a pale gray field with no defined setting.
Label Text
1967
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1989
Richter used photographs as sources for his paintings so as to minimize self-expression and compositional decisions. His sources ranged from newspaper and magazine clippings to family photos and personal snapshots. Portrait Müller is based on a portrait of Hans-Jürgen Müller, a Stuttgart art dealer, while Gymastics shows Karin Janz, a renowned East German gymnast, mid-leap. The blurred effect—created by dragging a dry brush over wet pigment—removes the artist’s hand from the paintings, making the surfaces, in his words, “technological, smooth and perfect.” The blurring also gives the pictures a sense of uncertainty, nostalgia, or loss.
Visual Description
A vertically oriented oil-on-linen painting (about 3.5 × 2.5 ft) depicts a single figure in a grayscale interior, rendered with heavy blur and soft edges that suggest motion. Center-left, a young woman with light skin and short, tousled, dark-blonde hair turns her head back toward the left while her left arm reaches straight up, extending beyond the upper portion of the composition. Her eyes are wide and surrounded by shadowing, her eyebrows arched, and her mouth is slightly parted. She wears a loose, short-sleeved dark top that drapes and bunches around the torso, as well as dark briefs. Her bare legs extend diagonally down toward the lower right, elongated and pale against the darker tones. The midair pose implies a jump or a dance-like stretch, with the body arcing and the legs tapering into faintly-defined feet at the bottom right. Behind her, the background is an abstracted interior space: a broad horizontal band crosses the upper third like a wall molding or ledge, and below it a lighter rectangular field suggests a wall surface. Along the bottom, watery drips that run downward resemble vertical streaks and panels. The overall palette stays within cool grays.
Label Text
1990
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
_Wald (4)_is one of a group of abstract paintings that Richter painted in 1990. He only perceived a connection to the landscape upon their completion. Richter later explained, “There seemed to me a romantic mood in these four paintings that reminded me of a forest. In the blue, there is the sensation of a diffuse light, which is why I came upon the title. I applied the paint across the canvas in two separate movements; across the middle one can see a caesura.”
Visual Description
A monumental oil-on-linen painting (11× 8.5 feet) presents a dense field of horizontal streaks and scraped bands, dominated by deep navy, teal, and sea-green tones punctuated with flashes of orange and gold. The surface is built from many thin, lateral passes of paint that create a striated, watery texture, as if reflections are rippling across the canvas. Along the left edge, a broad, dark vertical mass—almost black-blue—anchors the composition, with adjacent drips and broken, ladder-like traces of orange that descend irregularly. Across the upper half, scattered orange and pale peach marks appear like fragmented highlights, interrupted by cooler blue zones and occasional pale, misty veils where paint has been dragged thin. A soft, faint horizontal line near the middle suggests a subtle divide, with the lower half becoming heavier and darker, especially toward the lower left where navy and black pool into thicker, more opaque areas. Toward the right side, translucent layers shift into muted olive, tan, and sandy beige, with rectangular, blocky passages and scraped edges that contrast with the more fluid streaking elsewhere. The overall effect evokes shimmering light on water or an urban night reflection, rendered through layered abrasion, smearing, and flickering color.
Label Text
1990
Oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1991
Richter built up abstractions such as this and nearby _Wald (4)_slowly over time, layer by layer. Using a process he began to develop in the 1980s, he applied a coat of paint, then dragged a custom-made squeegee horizontally or vertically across the surface, smearing layers of still-wet pigment or scraping parts away to reveal sections beneath. This technique resulted in luscious patterns of color and texture, and also limited his control, allowing a role for chance. “I don’t have a specific picture in my mind’s eye,” Richter once explained. “I want to end up with a picture that I haven’t planned.”
Visual Description
A large oil-on-canvas painting, about 6.5 × 6 ft, filled edge-to-edge with dense, abstract layers of teal-green, black, and white paint. Broad horizontal strokes appear scraped or dragged so that bands of pale gray-white break through darker green-black fields. Over these horizontal sweeps, thin vertical lines and drips descend in multiple places—some dark and inky, others tinged with green—forming a loose grid.
The left half contains an interlacing of white and green with intermittent black patches, the marks fragmenting into small, jagged shapes reflecting how the paint was pulled with a squeegee and then interrupted. Near the upper center, a slightly lighter zone interrupts the darker green, with small flecks of pale blue and white embedded in the layered surface. On the right half, the paint is swept more broadly, with a large swath of muted green-gray and white that looks brushed sideways, and several darker, dripping vertical trails cut through it. Scattered throughout are small, sharp notes of color—rusty reds and occasional ochre-gold flashes—especially around the mid-to-lower areas, where they peek from beneath the heavier green-black layers. The bottom third deepens into darker greens and blacks, with white streaks and scraped passages breaking through.
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2002
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 2003
This is one of many paintings Richter has created that feature windows and shadows. In these works, he engages with the Renaissance idea of painting as a window onto the world through which we observe a believable rendering of three-dimensional reality. Richter’s window paintings both continue and disrupt this tradition: The space this window suggests is extremely shallow and reveals nothing but a blank wall.
Visual Description
Spanning about 6.5 ft tall and 13 ft wide, this oil-on-linen work is organized into four joined canvas panels, with each panel containing three vertically-stacked rectangles. Each panel is bordered by a clean, off-white margin, and the four panels are separated by narrow vertical seams, reflecting a multi-part structure. The rectangles within each panel are also separated by the same off-white margin. Inside each rectangle, hazy, soft-focus bands of deep charcoal and near-black form cross-like intersections reminiscent of a windowpane's shadow; the vertical bar sits at the center while a horizontal bar cuts across the middle or upper-middle, creating a blurred “plus” shape. The background within each panel is a cool, pale gray that subtly shifts in tone, with gentle gradients. The dark forms vary slightly from panel to panel—some heavier and more opaque, others lighter and more diffuse.
Label Text
1974/1984
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1999
This is one of many color-chart paintings Richter created in the early 1970s using chance as a compositional tool. In these works, multiples of four (the number of primary colors, plus gray) are the basis for configurations that range from grids of four colors to charts containing 4,096 hues. The placement of the colors within the grid was determined randomly, by assigning each color a number and drawing the numbers from a box. Richter has said of this approach, “I found it interesting to tie chance to a wholly rigid order.”
Visual Description
Spanning roughly 7 ft tall by 13 ft wide, this oil-on-linen painting presents an expansive, orderly grid of small, vertical rectangular color swatches arranged in many rows and columns across a white field. Each swatch is a flat, opaque block of color with crisp edges, separated from its neighbors by narrow white gaps that create a consistent lattice. The palette cycles through a wide spectrum—pale lilac, dusty pink, bright magenta, teal, turquoise, sky blue, deep navy, forest green, lime, chartreuse, mustard yellow, orange, brick red, maroon, chocolate brown, charcoal, and near-black—so that no single hue dominates for long. Colors are distributed in a varied pattern: saturated brights punctuate stretches of darker tones, while occasional pastel squares (mint, peach, lavender, light gray-blue).
Label Text
1998
Oil on linen
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1998
Visual Description
A nearly 10 foot-square oil painting on linen (9.6 ft x 9.6 ft) depicts a wide ocean scene beneath a vast, cloud-laden sky. The composition is divided roughly in half by a straight horizon line stretching unbroken from left to right, where a thin strip of pale pink and lavender light appears just above the water. Above this band, dense blue-gray cloud masses sweep in from the upper left and across the top, with misty areas of lightened cloud near the upper center.
Below the horizon, the sea is rendered in subdued tones of slate blue, gray, and muted brown, with a faint sheen of reflected light near the center-left. The water surface is smooth and slightly blurred, transitioning into gentle wave patterns closer to the foreground. In the lower half, low, dark rock formations form irregular lines and small protrusions; thin white foam traces around them in broken arcs and streaks. The very bottom edge deepens into near-black and contrasts with the luminous horizon and the brighter sky.