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A retrospective in Paris makes for a surprisingly personal journey through history with this purportedly impersonal artist

Most elderly painters wish to die standing at the easel, and some come close. Ninety-seven-year-old Chagall died instantly of a heart attack on leaving the elevator from his studio. Ninety-one-year-old Picasso painted until 3am on a spring Sunday and died hours later. Ninety-three-year-old Frank Auerbach’s models were still sitting for him in the days before his death last November. 

Gerhard Richter, 93, wants none of that. Provocative to the end, in 2017 he announced his oeuvre of paintings complete, and laid down his brush. It’s rare for a painter to do this, and although handling heavy squeegees for his abstractions had become difficult, many great artists, Matisse famously, overcame infirmity and continued. 

Instead, Richter implied that the will to paint is controllable, that painting is a job from which one retires, a cerebral, considered thing. His gesture of withdrawal refuted romantic ideas that a painter compulsively expresses himself, and confirmed the extreme order with which he approached his art.

Similarly curating his early work, Richter destroyed everything before 1962 and declared “Table”, depicting a photograph of a furniture advertisement scrawled over with paint to render it hardly visible, number one in his catalogue raisonné. This aggressive tabula rasa, wiping the slate to start anew, opens Fondation Vuitton’s sweeping, staggering retrospective, and heralds much to come — “in my beginning is my end.”

Richter arrived in Düsseldorf in 1961 after a childhood under Nazism and art school in communist Dresden. He knew two things: first, he would forever distrust systems, ideologies, extreme emotional expression, any claims for a defining image, and second, he had to begin again, as Germany itself had to in 1945, and as painting must to assert itself in a postwar photographic age. 

He succeeded quickly, with the 1960s monochromes based on innocuous family snapshots: distorting photographic sources with smudgy impasto, they questioned, through the grotesquerie of paint, the apparent innocence of those complicit with Nazism among his own relatives. A superb presentation shows how painting an image at one remove — inaugurating a lifetime’s practice — allowed Richter to face history close-up.

Hugely enlarged and with brash thick painterly effects, “Family at the Seaside”, based on a holiday snap of his beaming father-in-law hugging his children as waves rush in, resembles a movie horror still. Richter did not then know that Dr Eufinger — the father of his then wife Ema Eufinger and “an authoritarian whom I really hated at times” — had enthusiastically participated in the Nazi programme of forced sterilisations. That ignorance only emphasises the point that all his German generation felt morally fatherless, aware despite near-ubiquitous silence that their parents had supported Hitler. 

“Family” hangs with “Tante Marianne”, Richter’s vacant-looking teenage aunt cradling the artist as a baby; she was a victim of the Nazi extermination of psychiatric patients. Here and in “Onkel Rudi”, a grinning Wehrmacht officer (“he was very stupid”) killed on the western front, adulated at home, Richter softens outlines, dilutes shadows, flattens surfaces to achieve hazy, pathetic effects, also present in “Horst with Dog”, Richter’s father holding a fluffy pet, the pair sharing flimsy curls, idiotic gazes. One almost pities this hapless clown, a former Nazi without prospects returning from war to find antsy teenage Richter ruling the roost. 

Recognised immediately for their technical brilliance, the tragic tonality of these grey pictures deepens with time. Indeed Richter’s trademark blur — fundamental also to his abstractions — concerns passing time, mists of memory, fleeting perception, as well as his ambivalence about almost everything: “my own relationship to reality . . . has a great deal to do with imprecision, uncertainty, transience, incompleteness . . . I have no programme, no style, no direction . . . I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite.”

So, in this largest ever gathering of his work, Richter shape-shifts his way across Fondation Vuitton’s four floors, through ever more daring takes on photo-based realism, innovative abstraction so cool it’s hot, computer-generated minimalism, distorting glass and mirror pieces, random works on paper up to the present (he continues to draw). 

Every now and then, the way differing works feed one another stuns. “Betty” (1988), an arresting realist portrait of the artist’s daughter, concentrates on her twisting shoulder, ornamental floral jacket, blond hairdo, as she turns away to study a grey background — one of her father’s monochromes. 

From the same year as this vision of easy youthfulness, the grisaille group “18 October 1977” unfold as if in slow motion, painted images from murky press shots recording the lives and suicides/murders of three young Baader-Meinhof terrorists found dead that day. 

In turn, these eerily neutral works lead into 1989’s sombre enveloping black-and-white abstract diptychs “January”, “November” and “December”, made as a broken Germany was reuniting in capitalist triumph.   

Tightly curated, the show never palls, taking in German and world events — in “September” (2005), the 9/11 Twin Towers are subsumed in veils of icy blue paint, loss and fear suspended, unresolved — until, when you reach Richter’s final painting, a luscious purple/green “Abstract Painting”, you find you have made a surprisingly personal journey through history with this purportedly impersonal artist. 

Fiercely competitive, Richter duels with everyone, living and dead. The smudgy grey still life “Toilet Paper” (1965) answers Warhol’s commodity culture celebration “Brillo Box” from the year before. A Duchamp parody portraying Richter’s first wife nervously walking downstairs “Ema (Nude on a Staircase)”, and “Annunciation after Titian”, five increasingly abstracted renderings of Venice’s 1535 “Annunciation”, are deliberate failures, dramatising what contemporary painting can no longer be. Meanwhile slick, smooth, garish, monumental abstractions such as “Faust” (1980) — once adorning Deutsche Bank’s Wall Street office — swipe at gaudy pop and the legacy of emotive abstract expressionism.

But Richter is greedy and wants all the tunes. Around 1985, he developed his own distinctive abstract gestural manner, slowly gliding a squeegee across wet paint, building up, scraping, removing layers, balancing precision and chance, to produce iridescent out-of-focus surfaces which beguile the eye: flat and deep, rippling and jagged. They are sumptuous, formally dazzling and extremely expensive (record price £30.3mn) though not, at least to me, moving as de Kooning or Rothko abstractions stir the heart. 

Richter himself was the first to question them — “in one sense, abstract art is absolutely nothing, stupid. In 100 years, maybe people will just think it’s garbage” — but, whether he believed, doubted or both, they are a mighty part of his oeuvre and vitally complement the shades of grey elsewhere. Two dozen glow here: highlights are Fondation Vuitton’s “Forest (3)” (1990), a bleary black screen revealing bright shimmers beyond, and the “Cage” series’ striated acid greens, pale yellows, icy silvers, classical and balanced. 

This is named for minimalist composer John Cage, whose “I have nothing to say and I am saying it” could be an epitaph for much but not all Richter. We would know, without the title, that the harsh scarlet and black surfaces, no light piercing through, in the “Birkenau” quartet (2014) connote something terrible. They are the result of Richter’s repeated aborted attempts to paint the Holocaust, until, returning in the language of abstraction to his early method of blurring photographs, he finally entirely overpainted four little-known images of bodies piled up and women on their way to the gas chambers of Auschwitz — an erasure of an erasure, the unthinkable unpaintable. 

But we are there. The paintings hang opposite mirrors looming as high, and we see ourselves in a tunnel of hell against this abstraction of terror: forced to confront history.

Fortunately, the show doesn’t end there: six “Abstract Paintings”, 2016-17, some splendid rainbow harmonies, others meditations of varied mark-making around a single hue, deep crimson, radiant yellow, bring hope and joy, as if Richter in his swansong abandons himself to elegiac beauty. It is hard to tear yourself away from these last paintings, and must have taken an ascetic’s discipline for the artist to tear himself away from painting them.

October 17-March 2, fondationlouisvuitton.fr