Gerhard Richter is widely recognized as one of the most significant painters working today, and he is certainly among the most influential. He has worked in a wide range of media since the early 1960s, producing abstractions, landscapes, images derived from the mass media and from other photographs, and more. Seen together, these works call into question such widely held assumptions as the importance of stylistic consistency, individual artistic sensibility and spontaneous creativity. They also explore the impact of technology and media imagery on the traditional methods and formats of painting.
The Museum of Modern Art has published two important books on Richter, both written by Robert Storr: one covering forty years of his work, and published to accompany the Museum's large retrospective of his work in 2002, and one focusing on a single crucial series, October 18, 1977. This book brings together the essays and recent interviews from both of those books in a single volume.
