Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Group of People
Gerhard Richter German
Not on view
Group of People displays the artist’s newly acquired skill at copying the language of photography. The painting’s restriction in terms of subject matter—to the banality of a West German crowd randomly assembled in a public space, assimilated in the daily normalcy of forgetting a traumatic past—is matched by its chromatic restriction to a photographic grayscale. Focused at the center of the painting is the photomechanical illustration in a newspaper, the medium upon which Richter’s paintings are often based—informing a society whose newly declared freedom the artist seems to have contemplated with the skeptical eye of an ethnographer.
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This artwork is meant to be viewed from right to left. Scroll left to view more.
