“A surprisingly personal journey through history with this purportedly impersonal artist"—Jackie Wullschläger
October 15, 2025
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. Read more Learn more about Gerhard Richter.
