The Tate Modern in London is currently staging a retrospective exhibition of German artist Gerhard Richter's works due to last until January 8, 2012 with a particular insight into the influence of Nazism on his art.
Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter joined the Hitler Youth when he reached the age of 10, while his father, a rather staunch National Socialist – was busy fighting on the Eastern Front.
At the start of his career in East German, Richter produced Social Realist murals in the mid-Fifties before he decided to leave for West Germany in 1961, just before the Berlin Wall was raised after he felt that his future there was rather blocked.
Richter's early paintings were above all based on copies of black-and-white photos taken from magazines and family albums as in Aunt Marianne which shows him as a baby in the arms of his aunt, a schizophrenic who was sterilised and ultimately euthanised by the Nazis. The work is placed alongside Uncle Rudi, showing Richter's uncle, posing in his Wehrmacht uniform, shortly before his departure to war during which he eventually died.
Richter was thus much concerned with the consequences of Nazism to such an extent that he felt obliged to tackle its impact on the German people who paid a heavy price after the war for having supported Hitler and his regime. In this respect, he did not hesitate to condemn their attitude and to pinpoint the fact that the economic prosperity of West Germany could not hide the genocidal past.
His aerial views of cities painted in dark colours are also reminiscent of wartime ruins as a result of air raids whereas his works of the early 1970's obviously recall the concentration camps.
In fact, Richter has always tried to put his finger on the dark aspects of Nazism hidden in the German people's minds while his stunning photo-paintings series 18 October 1977 are rather paying a kind of hidden homage to the Baader-Meinhof group which had been unsettling West Germany for several years.
Meanwhile, Richter's abstract works of the past twenty years tend to show that he has finally come at peace with himself after he presumably felt that Germany's young generation had amended their parents' faults.
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