Gerhard Richter

In response to the social realism of the official East German painting with which he grew up, Richter later propagated - along with Sigmar Polke and others - ‘capitalist realism’, which displayed a similarity to Pop Art in the United States. Photographs of everyday subject matter served as the points of departure for their paintings. Richter has painted two versions of Moritz. The smaller work is fairly realistic, the larger one much less developed and thereby more abstract. In both paintings the subject is depicted ‘out of focus’. Richter achieves that effect by spreading the applied paint, still wet, across the canvas in a sweeping movement, so that the contours become blurred and the colors blend. It is striking just how beautiful and effective this treatment of the paint is: in the velvety soft baby skin, in the balance of darks and lights, in the material expression and the glistening effect of the spoon, but especially in the child’s astonished look and big eyes. A look which is perhaps most reminiscent of Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.