Painting After All

Painting After All is the catalogue for Gerhard Richter's 2020 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, surveying six decades of the artist's work across figuration, abstraction, and glass.

The 270-page book reproduces roughly 100 paintings, from the photo-based canvases Richter began making in the early 1960s through later portraits, large-scale abstract series, and works in glass. New essays commissioned for the catalogue cover distinct threads in the work, including Sheena Wagstaff on Richter's technique, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh on the Birkenau paintings of 2014, Peter Geimer on his use of photographic source imagery, and Hal Foster on the glass and mirror works, alongside essays by Briony Fer, Brinda Kumar, and André Rottmann. The Metropolitan Museum of Art published the book with Yale University Press for the exhibition at the Met Breuer in New York (March 4-July 5, 2020), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, has used both representation and abstraction over his sixty-year career to address the legacy and collective memory of postwar Germany. The library also holds his 1996 artist's book Abstraktes Bild 825-11: 69 Details and Landscape, a 2020 Hatje Cantz monograph on landscape across his work.