"From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter brings together a select group of paintings from the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden--one of the most significant collections of German art from 1800 to the present--and new work from the renowned contemporary artist Gerhard Richter."--Page 4 of cover.

New scholarship explores Gerhard Richter's often overlooked early work.

The Spanish-language edition of "September: A History Painting by Gerhard Richter" is now available. Eminent American scholar and curator Robert Storr offers an authoritative consideration of "September," Richter's 2005 painting made in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center of 11 September 2001. Opening with a vivid personal account of being in New York that day and paying particular attention to the role of the media, Storr deftly explores the geopolitical context of the attacks, capturing the effects of the atrocity on a deeply human level while navigating the complex web of political, social, religious, and cultural factors that it embodied and the discourse it has provoked. Through description, comparative illustrations, and references to precedents in modern art, literature, and warfare, Storr analyzes the image's meaning and how it adds to a current in Richter's career that questions evocations of traumatic and controversial moments in history.

Text by Robert Storr.

Over the course of his acclaimed 60-year career, Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) has employed both representation and abstraction as a means of reckoning with the legacy, collective memory, and national sensibility of post–WWII Germany, in both broad and very personal terms. This handsomely designed book spans the artist’s rich and varied oeuvre from the early 1960s to the present, including photo paintings, portraits, large-scale abstract series, and works on glass. Essays by leading experts on the artist illuminate Richter’s preoccupation with painting in relation to other modes of representation, and emphasize the ongoing importance of the medium’s formal and conceptual possibilities in contemporary art.

Now available in a new format, this beautifully illustrated volume on the controversial nineteenth-century Romantic artist addresses his modern critics while deepening our appreciation for his singular genius. "A painting must stand as a painting, made by human hand," wrote Caspar David Friedrich, "not seek to disguise itself as Nature." One of his generation’s most popular painters, Friedrich imagined landscapes of powerful beauty and spirituality from within the confines of his studios. This breathtaking monograph, filled with glorious reproductions and details of his paintings, argues for Friedrich’s reputation as a sublime artist and interpreter of nature. In his thoughtful and well-researched commentary, author Johannes Grave explores Friedrich’s approach to landscape painting as well as his revolutionary thoughts about how these paintings should be received by their viewers. Looking closely at pieces such as Monk by the Sea, Abbey in the Oakwood, and the Tetschener Altar, Grave shows how Friedrich developed an innovative approach to landscape painting, one that communicated a new sense of space and time, and which draws the viewer into a unique aesthetic experience. Highly readable, insightful, and copiously illustrated, this compelling book sheds crucial light on Friedrich’s celebrated body of work.

By uniquely treating Gerhard Richter?s entire oeuvre as a single subject, Darryn Ansted combines research into Richter?s first art career as a socialist realist with study of his subsequent decisions as a significant contemporary artist. Analysis of Richter?s East German murals, early work, lesser known paintings, and destroyed and unfinished pieces buttress this major re-evaluation of Richter?s other well known but little understood paintings. By placing the reader in the artist?s studio and examining not only the paintings but the fraught and surprising decisions behind their production, Richter?s methodology is deftly revealed here as one of profound yet troubled reflection on the shifting identity, culture and ideology of his period. This rethinking of Richter?s oeuvre is informed by salient analyses of influential theorists, ranging from Theodor Adorno to Slavoj ?i?ek, as throughout, meticulous visual analysis of Richter?s changing aesthetic strategies shows how he persistently attempts to retrace the border between an objective reality structured by ideology and his subjective experience as a contemporary painter in the studio. Its innovative combination of historical accuracy, philosophical depth and astute visual analysis will make this an indispensible guide for both new audiences and established scholars of Richter?s painting.