Gerhard Richter: War Cut

In 1988, Gerhard Richter created one of the most controversial and fascinating political painting-cycles of all time, with his Baader-Meinhof series. In 2002, he returned to the theme of media and political truth with his artist’s book War Cut. For this project, Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting “No. 648-2” (1987), and, working on a long table over a period of several weeks, combined these 4 x 6-inch details with 165 texts on the Iraq war, published in the German Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper on the dates of the war’s outbreak (March 20 and 21, 2003). “My method was to attach a number of texts to a number of images without having to think about whether something would be better positioned to the left or the right, above or below,” Richter told an interviewer, for a New York Times feature on the publication. “I placed these images so that a connection develops in terms of colors, structures and other characteristics. . . . Some images match the cruelty and the madness described in the texts shockingly well. And others can even serve as illustrations when the texts speak of deserts and other landscapes.” Text to this 2004 edition is in German only.