You can't miss the painter Gerhard Richter's studio in a suburb outside Cologne. It is a large white brick-and-concrete shoe box he designed several years ago, an industrial-looking building with a blank wall facing the street. This is a distinguished neighborhood of split-level houses occupied by prosperous families. Richter moved here from a former factory building in Cologne, where many artists live, partly because he wanted to get away from other artists. Just recently, he bought some trees and had them planted in a row to screen the front of the building after he discovered that a few of the neighbors were complaining about its severity. Having built a private Berlin Wall with his studio, he has now decorated it with wild apple trees.
In the studio, there is an office for a part-time secretary, a guest room, a small kitchen and a workshop for the assistant who stretches Richter's canvases and makes the architectural models by which Richter calculates -- to the millimeter, if possible -- how his pictures should look in prospective galleries or museums. Beyond the workshop and a tidy open storage closet are the rooms where Richter paints: a large studio and a smaller one.
Only operating rooms are this immaculate. Not a sheet of paper is on the secretary's black modular desk. Every roll of tape is kept in color-coded order on designated hooks in the workshop. Brushes are stacked in drawers Richter custom-designed on rolling shelves. After leaving a half-full coffee cup in the smaller studio one morning, I returned a short while later to find it gone and the desk wiped clean, although I never saw anybody enter or leave the room.