This blog post actually has its origins in early 2020. That spring, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was hosting a major Gerhard Richter retrospective at their Met Breuer location. Gerhard Richter is one of my favorite contemporary artists, so plans were made for a big NYC trip in June that would include the Richter retrospective and more.
Then COVID happened.
The Met's blockbuster retrospective, originally scheduled to run March 4 - July 5 lasted just over a week, closing, as much of the world did, after March 12. It was disappointing to be sure, but I wasn't alone there. In truth, if your dashed travel plans were the worst thing that happened over those weeks and months and years, you could rightly count yourself among the lucky. Still, it was a missed opportunity, and one that stayed with me over the years.
Fast forward five years to the late summer of 2025 when I learned that the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris was mounting an even bigger Gerhard Richter retrospective ! Well, it's not often we get second chances like that, and I was not going to be denied. The timing was terrible to be sure, and the idea of a long weekend in Paris to see an art exhibition seemed antithetical to the frugal, middle-class lessons of my youth. It wasn't what people like me did.
Here's the thing though, and I don't know if this is a perspective that comes with age or from somewhere else, but at some point, as I weighed the wisdom of a long weekend in Paris (LOL!!!), two things occurred to me, 1.) we could in fact make this trip work, and 2.) there was very little chance I would regret going.
Put another way, the likelihood that I'd find myself on my deathbed thinking, "If only I hadn't gone to Paris to see that Gerhard Richter exhibition..." seemed near zero. With that pair of facts established, we took a break from the work of the Akron almost-mansion, the terrible world, the foot of snow on the ground in Ohio, and a timeline filled with authoritarian violence, and set off on a February Paris side quest.
If I'm being honest, I'll admit that prior this exhibition I didn't know that Louis Vuitton had a museum building/gallery space/compound in Paris. I didn't know that it was designed by Frank Gehry either (though, on reflection, of course it is). I also didn't know Paris hosted a park that's twice the size of New York's Central Park (Bois de Boulogne) and that the Foundation Louis Vuitton is located in that very park. If one can claim to be surprised by one of the biggest urban parks in the world, then I was surprised. The building itself is a fascinating exercise in how we present art these days. It's part Whitney Museum (for the views and terraces) part Wexner Center (for the weird angles and turns), and all Gehry (for the billowy curves and state of the art construction).
The galleries inside hosted a collection of over 270 career spanning works by arguably one of the 20th-century's most renowned artists. The arrangement was chronological by decade and covered Gerhard Richter's output from the early 60s when he began exploring the relationship between painting and photography, through his abstractions and installations, and up to the present drawings and smaller works on paper. Richter famously stopped painting in 2017, declaring his oeuvre complete. He continues to produce new work, but since that time he has limited himself to drawings.
We went through the exhibition twice. I took a bunch of pictures, but even a month later, it's still hard to get my head around all that we saw. I'll say for starters that all the hits were there: the Annunciation Series (after Titian), the Venice Biennale portraits, The Reader, Betty, the Baader-Meinhof paintings, the Eight Student Nurses, Birkenau, Uncle Rudi, Ema, Tisch, Cage paintings, bombers, color swatches, candles, skulls and so much more.
Seeing these works presented chronologically seems at first a not particularly daring choice, but in the case of Richter it really works. You get to follow the artist's path through all those jarring instances of pivots and discovery in the same way he did. Then, just as quickly, you'll watch him double back to revisit some idea or pick up a previous thread. The works themselves (in their near perfect execution) can often feel discrete and self contained. The advantage then in seeing them all together is that we can begin to puzzle out the larger journey Richter has been on.
Ample expository text offers fun facts along the way. Richter was pals with Gilbert and George. The Annunciation paintings had their origins in a postcard he picked up in Venice during the Bienalle. Richter declined to paint saints for the stained glass commission offered by the Cologne cathedral, and suggested colored squares instead (
they accepted). He thinks a mirror might be the greatest artist.
I feel like it's something of a cliche for a guy my age to champion Gerhard Richter and the art he's made. His work appears on the cover of a Sonic Youth record after all! Plus, it's all so very coolly intellectual and so very coolly executed. And maybe I am a cliche, but on a personal level (and as someone who is very appreciative of mental constructs, puzzling things out, and sometimes obsessive exploration), I'm very much drawn to what I see. There's a rigor that I admire in Richter's work. It's a rigor that's borne out of the desire to find the exact right way to make an idea visible.
Apparently I'm not the only one so drawn. I don't know what I was expecting in terms of attendance, but we visited the exhibition on a Saturday in February, fairly late in the show's run, and it was still pretty crowded. I took this picture to remember that element of the visit, and also because it reminded me of the experience you have when you find the Vermeer in a museum. People really do just stop and stare. It's like they know, "This one's important". People love their Vermeers, and they apparently love their Gerhard Richters too.
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