| This dissertation examines the historical transition of Gerhard Richter's work from the aesthetics of an East German Socialist Realist artist to an identification with the Neo-Avantgarde prevailing in Western Europe and the United States in the 1960's.;Within this historical framework, numerous theoretical questions are developed: how does the post-war generation of German artists relate to the pre-war avantgarde legacies and how does this generation respond to the particular difficulties of the representability of history? Furthermore the thesis examines how Richter reworks certain pictorial conventions (e.g., the Nude or the Portrait) and juxtaposes them in a continuous process of interrogation with the conventions of modernist painting (e.g., the monochrome and gestural abstraction). |
