‘The ravishing beauty and (almost) nihilism of Gerhard Richter’s art’ by Sebastian Smee
January 2026
Perhaps the most notable thing about the 93-year-old German artist, who is the subject of a retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, is that he refuses to wring meanings from life that aren’t there. We know they’re not there because history and unimaginable loss have taught us they’re not there. The very search for meaning, his work suggests, is a histrionic response to reality, and, to that extent, in bad taste.
