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Curator Robert Storr has said of the iconic, inscrutable German painter Gerhard Richter, "He's not playing hard to get, he's doing something that is hard to get.'' The difficulty arises from a Conceptualist oeuvre that style-jumps from Photorealism to large, abstract compositions. Martha Schwendener has summed up Richter's contribution by stating, "Seeing Gerhard's abstraction and Photorealism together, you realize that this dual body of work is the perfect expression of what it means to paint today--and what a contemporary master might be." Whatever the style, Richter's subject is always painting itself. Because it features more than 80 works from important private collections, including the artist's own, this monograph provides a unique contextualization of the artist's incredibly influential career, which, spanning more than 40 years, mirrors not only the history of postwar Germany, but also the medium of painting.