Although Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is considered one of the most significant writers and theorists in twentieth-century Western culture, his enigmatic sense of the political has eluded definition. His later work in particular stages a perpetual but little understood confrontation with German fascism. 
Gerhard Richter shows that Benjamin's engagement with the political cannot be understood in terms of unified concepts and fully deducible theses that can be easily verified or refuted. Rather than explaining his sense of the political, Benjamin enacts it in the movement of his language. Richter traces Benjamin's radical notions of the political through a series of corporeal figures in his often neglected autobiographical writings-the Moscow Diary, the Berlin Chronicle, and the Berlin Childhood around 1900. Each text subtly mobilizes a different trope of anatomy: the body, the ear, and the eye. Richter places these figures into a wide network of references from Benjamin's corpus demonstrating that Benjamin's innovative acts of self-portraiture are inseparable from his analyses of the physiognomy of Weimar culture and German fascism. Benjamin's preoccupation with the body becomes visible as a political struggle that illuminates the relations among the self, history, reading, and language. Benjamin's autobiographies, as Richter shows, negate fascism and its ideology of stable meaning with each turn away from an essential corporeal self.
Readers interested in modem German literature and culture, literary and cultural theory, comparative literature, Weimar culture, and fascism will welcome this book.

Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (German Literary Theory and Culture Series)

Literature & Fiction

gerhard-richter

History & Criticism

Wayne State University Press

This monumental and comprehensive publication maps the ideas, processes, life and times of one of the most important painters of our time. Conceived and closely edited by Gerhard Richter himself, Atlas cuts straight to the heart of the artist’s thinking, collecting more than 5,000 photographs, drawings and sketches that he has compiled or created since the moment of his creative breakthrough in 1962. Year by year, the images closely parallel the subjects of Richter’s paintings, revealing the orderly but open-ended analysis that has been so central to his art. Offering invaluable insight into Richter’s working process, this encyclopedic new edition, which completely revises and updates the rare, out-of-print 1997 edition and includes 147 additional plates, features 780 multi-image panels, each reproduced full page and in full color. Richter redefined the terms of contemporary painting as he looked to photography for a way to release painting from the political and symbolic burdens of Socialist Realism and Abstract Expressionism. From pictures of family and friends to images from the mass media, Richter’s photographs--sometimes found, sometimes original--have provided the basis for many of his paintings, often re-emerging in a luminous, monochromatic palette, and falling ambiguously between documentary and historical painting.

Gerhard Richter Atlas: The Reader

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Whitechapel Art Gallery

Gerhard Richter: Forty Years Of Painting

GERHARD RICHTER: FORTY YEARS OF PAINTING is a survey of works by German artist Gerhard Richter (born 1932), one of the most influential painters working today from every phase of Richter's career. ranging from photography-based pictures to gestural abstraction, and includes a rare interview with the artist. This was the catalog for the travelling exhibit 2002-2003 at The Museum of Modern Art, NY, the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC. Published in 2002 by the Museum of Modern Art, NY. 340 pages.

Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting

Robert. Storr

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Large format hardcover and dust jacket just about perfect. Brilliant color prints of paintings and sharp reproductions of print pencil sketches.

Gerhard Richter/Abstract Paintings and Drawings

Marian Goodman Gallery

A Stammheim Sdnr30

Pieter H. Bakker Schut

Anthony D'Offay Gallery

This extraordinary six-volume slipcased production offers a comprehensive account of a largely unexplored (though immensely popular) aspect of the practice of Gerhard Richter: the Overpainted Photographs series, which he began creating in the mid-1980s and still engages with today.These works begin with informal photographs―often snapshots of the artist’s personal life―which are subsequently obscured under layers of paint. Richter’s process often transforms their visual meaning entirely, creating a fascinating and dreamlike body of work.The first volume contains essays including newly commissioned texts on the Overpainted Photographs by acclaimed American art critic Robert Storr, Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator, critic and co-director of Serpentine Galleries, Paul Moorhouse of the National Portrait Gallery, Stefan Gronert, Christine Mehring and Dorotheé Brill alongside important reprinted texts on the subject, including essays by Siri Husvedt, Uwe M. Schneede and Botho Strauss.

Gerhard Richter

Heni Publishing

A numbered edition, limited to 800 copies, '40 Tage' is a series of 40 graphite-on-paper drawings by Gerhard Richter produced between May and September 2015.

40 Tage

Gerhard Richter is widely seen as one of the most important painters at work in the world today. Born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932, he left for the West in 1961, settling in Dusseldorf, where he held his first exhibition in 1963. He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, including retrospectives in New York, Paris and Dusseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne. As the artist draws near to his eightieth birthday in 2012, Tate Modern in collaboration with the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, is staging a major retrospective exhibition. While many previous books have focused on one aspect of Richter's work, this stunningly illustrated survey encompasses his entire oeuvre, including photo-paintings, abstracts, land and seascapes, portraits, glass and mirror works, drawings and photographs. Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, has conducted a new interview with Richter, covering his life and achievements. An array of international critics and curators each examine a specific period of the artist's career, bringing fresh perspectives to bear and placing individual works in the context of world events. With extensive comparative works, studio photographs, a chronology and a selective bibliography, this monumental book is a fitting tribute to one of the world's greatest living artists.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama: [A Retrospective]

Tate

Benjamin's Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura

Colin Rhodes

Lise Patt

Vance Bell

Biographies & Memoirs

Inst of Cultural Inquiry

motifs (CATALOGUES DU M.N.A.M)

Individual Artists

CENTRE POMPIDOU

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