The Met Breuer closes with an exhibition of the 88-year-old German painter, likely to be the final major show of his lifetime.
An exquisite melancholy has settled upon the galleries of Marcel Breuer’s inverted ziggurat on Madison Avenue: an air of dashed aspirations, commitment and farewell. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which rented Breuer’s granite fortress from the relocated Whitney Museum of American Art in 2015, will be vacating the building in July, three years ahead of schedule. (Costs were too high.)
The museum could not have offered a more apt final show — more rigorous, more resigned — than “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All.” It engrosses two floors of the Breuer with art of total mastery that also, at every turn, casts doubt on its own achievement. The squeegeed oils, the clammed-up portraits. The aseptic color charts, the matter-of-fact panes of glass and mirrors. Here they all are, poker-faced as ever, pushing forward with painting even as Mr. Richter subjects painting to endless criticism and interrogation. Some say the medium died in the 1960s, some say it’s never been more vital. He believes both, and, at times, neither.
At this agitated moment for museums, desperate to prove their social impact, this greatest of living painters asks: What is contemporary art really for? Can it do anything? Have I accomplished anything? Mr. Richter, even as his auction prices have reached Alpine elevations, has never been certain — and this beautiful valediction, with 60 years of work, affirms the artistic and moral force of his irresolution and skepticism. (The artist, 88, has said this will very likely be the last major museum exhibition of his lifetime. It travels to Los Angeles in summer.)