Pages 656 - 665

My focus for these pages will mostly be with the German artists, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. What I find so interesting about Richter's work is within his attempt to reposition painting as a critical reflection on German history, but he does so in such an abstract way. I have family that lived in Germany and have been to many of the cities in Germany and was just recently in Munich. Munich in particular, is a city that rebuilt the entire city in the same way that it stood before the destruction from the second World War. Most of the German cities re-built their buildings in a new architectural style, but Munich stuck to the classical style of architecture celebrating the rococo style. What I find so interesting about Gerhard Richter's work is how he focuses on the painting style to shy away from the pictures generation, and yet his paintings, his portraits in particular, look extremely similar to a blurry photo. When I first saw Richter's work, I immediately thought it was a photograph and not a painting at all. Kiefer's work, on the other hand, looks very much like a painting, with his almost 3-Dimensional texture to his paintings. Both artists are very descriptive of Germany in that era by presenting their work in a very dark and gloomy manner. We see a shift in Richter's work 20 years later which his incorporation of much more color and a shift from his black, white, and gray palette he worked with so prominently before. In 1988, the artists contemplate a renewal of the history painting which speaks loudly to the thought process of the country at the time. With their country destroyed, they began to adopt many old practices, architecture, and other aspects of culture to keep their culture embedded in their society after it had been destroyed in the war. Richter and Kiefer speak to this shift in the German population in their art, and its extremely expressive of German culture at the time.