“Gerhard Richter: Forty Years Of Painting,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is large, confusing, uningratiating, and overdue.¹ It’s also hard work. Despite his considerable international reputation, Richter has exhibited relatively little in this country, and what has been seen has not fully reflected his concerns. For four decades, this elusive painter has shuttled restlessly among opposed modes, approaches, themes, and even painting languages, producing Pop-derived and politically engaged figure paintings, dispassionate abstractions, sentimental landscapes, romanticized portraits, and more. (An astute artist friend compared him to someone trying on clothes without having any clear idea of what he wanted to buy, weighing possible transformations of identity with each new garment.) Richter is probably best known to Americans for his abstractions, which, curiously, dominate the MOMA retrospective, despite the museum’s obvious attempt to be comprehensive through its inclusion of many less familiar works. Entire series of figurative images are represented by single examples, subtly weighting the show’s account of Richter’s history. All of this makes it difficult to follow the logic of his evolution, but what makes the show really strenuous is the character of the work itself.

Richter’s paintings could be described as the ultimate embodiment of postmodern cool. They’re the “high art” equivalent of those deliberately ugly Prada garments designed to signal the wearer’s hyper-sophisticated scorn for traditional notions of taste (and ability to pay vast amounts in order to make this declaration, but that’s another matter). Richter’s pictures are impersonal to the point of coldness,