TheGerman artist Gerhard Richter (1932) begins an abstractpaintingwitha simple compositionofwedges and arcs in primary colors and lets it dry. When he returns to the canvas he repaints it in a neutral color, concealing the original image. Then he scrapes away the top layer, allowingbitsandpiecesoftheunder-paintingtoshowthrough.Richter can be seen painting by this method in the film Gerhard Richter Painting (2011), directed by Corinna Belz (http://www .imdb.com/title/tt1982113/?ref_=nv_sr_1). In the film he uses a two-handled squeegee to smear on or scrape away superficial layers, pulling it across the canvas in a smooth motion or in choppyjerkstocreasethewetlayersofpaint.Withapaletteknife he hacks at the surface layer, exposing jagged blocks of color. Inhispainting Ice (2), thevertical streaks left by the squeegee bring to mind a melting glacier, fracturing under immense pressure to reveal scraps of prismatic detritus buried deep in the ice. Richter’s method can have unanticipated resultsbecause it isdifficult topredicthowmuchpaint thesqueegeewill remove. This is finewith him, because he prefers not to plan his paintings. He witnesses their emergence as an active but disinterested participant. The initial under-painting is clearly his design, but thereafter the squeegee determines what is stripped away and what remains. Richter was born in Dresden, Germany, in 1932. His family life was severely disrupted by the Nazis’ rise to power and thedestructionofhishomelandduring theSecondWorldWar. His father, a teacher, was conscripted into the German army, captured by Allied forces, and detained in an American prisoner of war camp. Two of his uncles were killed in active service, and an aunt starved to death in a psychiatric clinic. Like otherboyshis ageRichter attendedschool, played soldierwith cast-off weapons, and joined the Pimpfe, an organization for childrenthatpreparedthemformembership in theHitlerYouth (membership in theHitler Youthwas compulsory after 1939). Fortunately, he was too young to serve in the army before it was defeated in 1945. The war’s end for his corner of Germanywas chaotic—soldiers in retreat, attacksbySoviet planes and artillery, wrecked vehicles, and looting. Richter and his familywere living in thevillageofWaltersdorf inFebruary 1945 when Allied bombers destroyed the city of Dresden, but he could see and hear the bombs falling in the distance. Later, when he moved back to Dresden, he often walked through rubble to get fromplace to place. It is no surprise that he came to distrust grand schemes to change the world for the better, considering that strategic choices on all sides had such terrible consequences for central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. WhenthewarwasoverRichterstudiedattheDresdenAcademyofFineArtsandacceptedateachingfellowshipaftergraduation. As a state-sponsored institution of the German DemocraticRepublic (a satellite stateof the formerSovietUnion), the Academy expected its students to make art that was compatiblewith thegoalsof communism.The ideal subjects forpaintings were men and women working to achieve better futures for themselves and others. All artists had to fall in line. Characters in plays and novels were either heroic or evil, without shadingsofmotivationorbehavior.Notsurprisingly, artisticexpression stagnated in this environment. Delivering a consistentmessage for the commongoodmademore sense to socialist politicians than to artists,manyofwhomfound this style of “socialist realism” to be repetitive, one-dimensional, and tedious. Under pressure to comply with the Academy’s political orientation, Richter felt intolerably constrained. Hewanted to pursuenewapproachestoartandinteractwithotherartistswho had divergent views, so he and his wife made the irrevocable decisiontoemigrate to theFederalRepublicofGermanyin1961. They settled in Dusseldorf, which had an active arts community. Richter foundkindred spirits there andembarkedona series of exhibitions with other young painters and performers. He was intrigued by the consumerism and popular culture of the capitalistWest and the values implicit in photographic images, so he used photographs as subjects for his paintings. He projectedandtracedthemontocanvasandthenpaintedtheprojections to look like the original photographs.Oftenheblurred the imageswith a brush or a squeegee, whichmade them look amateurishandspontaneous. Inan interview,Richter said that copying images allowed him tomake pictures without having to invent a subject with a clear meaning. The best pictures, in hisview,wereambiguous.The techniqueofblurringerodedvisual certainty by dissolving demarcations to make all parts of the image equally important. What interested himmost were the transitions from one part of an image to another—the passages, tonal sequences, and overlaps. Richter’s progression from blurry photo-paintings to abstract images such as Ice (2)was a slowone, interruptedby the pursuit of other visual styles. In the 1960s he painted a series of gray monochromes. In the 1970s he made figurative images and covered themwith layers of paint. Eventually hehad the idea to scrape off the surface layers and show glimpses of whatwasunderneath.Richter sayshismethodofpaintingover and scraping away allowshim to react to a painting as it is created, to appreciate the uncertainty of the process without relinquishing control. He still gets to decide when a painting is finished,when toput down the squeegee and thebrush. Each step forward,hesays, ismoredifficult,with feweroptions, and he stops when he concludes there is nothing left to do. Then he may study the completed painting for days before decid-