Gerhard Richter
Stadtbild Mü, 1968
Amphibolin on canvas
70 7/8 x 63 in. (180 x 160 cm)
Collection of Marguerite and Robert Hoffman, the Rachofsky Collection, and the Dallas Museum of Art: Lay Family Acquisition Fund, General Acquisitions Fund, and gifts from an anonymous donor, Howard Rachofsky, Evelyn P. and Edward W. Rose, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Stoffel, and Mr. and Mrs. William T. Solomon, by exchange, 2002.18
© Gerhard Richter, Cologne, Germany

In scale and execution, Stadtbild Mü is one of the major paintings from Gerhard Richter's haunting Stadtbild (City Picture) series, a group of works that provide ample evidence of this protean German artist's ability to probe the meanings and nature of images, painting, and art itself in the post–World War II era. With unflinching intelligence and determination Richter here puts to use his virtuosic brushstroke to portray the Altstadt (old city section) of Munich as viewed from what can only be the vantage point of an airplane. Richter obliquely yet powerfully raises many questions about history, memory, information, and surveillance by picturing a place, Munich, which is the capital of the southern German state of Bavaria. Known for its Oktoberfest jollity and gemütlich traditions, Munich was also a primary site for the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s—and was the target of subsequent Allied bombing in the very streets Richter depicts here. Those unfamiliar with Munich will still recognize this painting as a city, in the organization of the closely packed streets and the towers that signify a church, all of which comes in and out of focus as one approaches or steps back from the painting itself. Playing a Seurat-meets-cubism game of signification in a field of black, gray, and white pigment and jagged brushstrokes, Richter demands his viewer contend with the now-fractured, now-distinct visual evidence of a place that could not be further from a Seurat Sunday afternoon or a Picasso bottle and pipe.

As in nearly all of Richter's art, photography is here both the source of and the question posed by the work itself. The "original" view Richter used to create this painting may have been an aerial survey photograph taken before World War II, or perhaps later when the city had been reconstructed. Yet Richter leaves certain areas of the canvas simply black, allowing the imagination to roam in search of details of buildings, streets, and trees, suggesting that indeed what we may be seeing is the aftermath of a raid. If Richter does not explicitly picture a bombed city, he must be seen as referring to it in the agitated brushstroke that creates a jumble of brick, stone, and mortar, and possibly rubble. Furthermore, Richter in previous years had depicted fighter jet planes in some of his paintings, reinforcing the idea that aerial activity was clearly on his mind at the time. With such an image as Stadtbild Mü, Richter seems to be challenging viewers to remember events in Munich and throughout Germany that took place during World War II, placing Germany's central social-cultural issue of the postwar years, that is, dealing with the war, right before his audience's eyes.