When he was twenty and still a student at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, Gerhard Richter read War and Peace and was deeply impressed. What struck him most was Tolstoy’s portrait of General Kutuzov and his way of observing the workings of events without intervening. He waited for the right moment “to give weight to something that had already begun on its own.”
Mikhail Illarionovich Golenishchev-Kutuzov was the general chosen by the Tsar to confront Napoleon’s Grande Armée after the defeat at Smolensk. Once in command, the elderly general avoided open battles to preserve his army’s integrity. His strategy remained unchanged even after Napoleon entered Moscow and the subsequent fire drove the French to retreat. Kutuzov believed time was his greatest ally, counting on winter and partisan forces in the countryside to wear Napoleon down. He cautiously followed the retreating French column while Cossacks, hidden in the forests, multiplied their raids. By the time they reached the Berezina River, the French were exhausted.
In the novel, Prince Andrei offers the most incisive portrait of Kutuzov:
[The general] will not be swayed by anything personal. He will contrive nothing, undertake nothing, […] but he will listen to everything, remember everything, put everything in its place, hinder nothing useful, and permit nothing harmful. He understands that there is something stronger and more significant than his own will: the inevitable course of events. He knows how to see them, grasp their meaning, and, in light of that meaning, renounce participation in them, along with his personal desires directed elsewhere.
Retracing Richter’s artistic and intellectual trajectory, it seems the German artist sought to follow Kutuzov’s footsteps in the snow, repeatedly masking style and composition so that nothing is disturbed and everything remains as it is: “That’s why I don’t plan or invent, add or omit anything.”
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Born in Dresden in 1932 but raised in Upper Lusatia, Richter returned to the Saxon capital in 1951 to begin his artistic education in a city nearly erased by Allied bombings. By 1961, with Germany now divided, he fled East Germany for Düsseldorf, leaving behind the constraints of socialist realism and entering the international art scene. The Düsseldorf Academy was then a vibrant hub of experimentation, home to Joseph Beuys and Fluxus.
In his first year there, Richter painted frenetically (later destroying many works) and began haphazardly collecting photographs. For years, he stored them in simple cardboard boxes—an archive without order, filled with amateur snapshots, found postcards, magazine clippings, sketches, and collages:
For a time, I worked in a photo lab, and the sheer volume of images passing daily through the developing acid must have caused a kind of permanent trauma.
Soon after, he began using these images as models. In 1962, he painted Tisch (Table), copied from a design magazine photo, marking it as “1” to inaugurate his personal archive.
Richter’s Foto-Bilder (Photo Paintings), created from this point onward, derive from ordinary photographs—newspaper clippings, advertisements. He reproduces them with light brushstrokes, striving for fidelity. Other times, he blurs edges, mimics motion, or overexposes scenes to make them resemble photographs even more, not paintings. Richter paints like a camera; dragging a dry brush over wet paint creates an aura of uncertainty beyond his control:
I don’t try to imitate a photograph; I try to make one. If I disregard the fact that a photograph is just a piece of paper exposed to light, then I practice this technique through other means: I don’t create paintings that resemble photos, but ones that are photos.
In popular thought, photography conveys reality more credibly than painting, even when technically flawed. As Susan Sontag noted in 1977 (a reflection still relevant in the age of deepfakes), The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture." Over time, Richter’s photo-based works coalesced into thematic cycles: landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, family scenes. Yet his most notorious series is 18 Oktober 1977 (1988), 15 works referencing the deaths of RAF terrorists Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stuttgart’s Stammheim Prison:
The terrorists’ deaths, and the events surrounding them, filled me with anxiety and horror, despite my efforts to suppress these feelings. […] The images are monotonous, gray, blurred, and sparse. Their presence embodies horror—a refusal to respond that’s unbearable to define, explain, or endure.
What is this “refusal to respond” that permeates not just the Baader-Meinhof works? Why do Richter’s Foto-Bilder ultimately surrender to a sense of futility and impossibility?
