9780262680844. Pre-Owned: Good condition. Trade paperback. Language: English. Pages: 288. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 288 p. Contains: Illustrations. Writing Art. "Now that we do not have priests and philosophers anymore, artists are the most important people in the world. . . . Art is wretched, cynical, stupid, helpless, confusing." -- Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, is one of the foremost painters of his generation. A great deal has been written about the bewildering heterogeneity of his work over the past 30 years. His seemingly willful and defiant movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation and his seemingly inconsistent methods of applying paint to canvas are consistent, if nothing else, with Richter himself -- the master of the paradoxical statement. Although he has emphasized that he is first a painter and has never been a theorist, he has, throughout his career issued provocative, contentious, and memorable statements.