Gerhard Richter: War Cut

In 1988, Gerhard Richter created one of the most controversial political painting-cycles of all time, with his Baader-Meinhof series. In 2002, he returned to the theme of media and political truth with his artists book War Cut. Richter photographed 216 details of his abstract painting No. 648-2 (1987), and combined these images with 165 texts on the Iraq war.

Originally published only in German in 2004, this long-awaited English version presents Richters powerful attempt to accommodate the extremity of war. For this edition, Richter applied the same process of text selection to The New York Times, using the same dates of the wars outbreak.