Gerhard Richter : Early Work, 1951-1972 brings together new studies of the early career of Gerhard Richter by an international group of scholars concerned with art in the Cold War. Born in Dresden in 1932, educated under the prevailing doctrine of SOcialist Realism at the Dresden Academy of Art and later retrained after his emigration to the West at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, Richter uniquely embodies the division of Germany during the Cold War. The authors approach the Cold War context from a variety of angles that include the social and political histories of a divided Germany, the conflicted development of Soviet Socialist Realism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a Cold War visuality integrating pre- and post-resettlement works, and the archival dimension of Richter's output in relation to his Atlas.^
The essays offer a new view of Richter's early work by taking a closer look at his formation in the GDR in the 1950s and at his first works in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the 1960s, alongside the artist's personal involvement in the representation of his work in archives, exhibitions, and catalogues from the early years in Dresden up to the present day. Although Gerhard Richter counts as perhaps the best known and most widely exhibited contemporary artist form Germany, his reception has mostly neglected the artist's formation in Dresden due to the Cold War division of Germany and the artist's own withholding of his early work from the public.^
All of the authors assembled here bring the gradual and incomplete resurrection of the record to bear on selected works--the murals from the 1950s, the photo-paintings and exhibitions of the 1960s, or the collaborations during these periods--and on selected practices, such as the calculated display of the artist's sources as a work of art in Atlas, or the establishment of the Gerhard Richter Archive in Dresden in 2007/ The essays in this volume evolved from papers delivered at a symposium held at the Getty Center in conjunction with the exhibition From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
