Alexander Menden at Prospect Magazine:
In the spring of 1961, Gerhard Richter, a young East German artist noted mainly for his portraits and socialist wall paintings, slipped through the last chink in the Iron Curtain—West Berlin—and fled to the Federal Republic of Germany. A few weeks later, he justified this move in a letter to his former teacher at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts: “My reasons are mainly professional. The whole cultural ‘climate’ of the West can offer me more, in that it corresponds better and more coherently with my way of being and working than that of the East.”
Richter, 29 at the time and deeply impressed by the works of Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock, which he had seen during a visit to the contemporary art exhibition Documenta in Kassel two years earlier, wanted the same stylistic and thematic freedom of those artists. He intended to settle in Munich. But an old friend from Dresden, the sculptor Reinhard Graner, who had moved to the West before Richter, strongly advised him against it, saying: “No, for God’s sake, Düsseldorf is the city of art!”
more here.
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