“Dear Mr. Richter,” the letter began. “I have been working on the idea for a feature film, about which I would like to talk to you, if you can make that possible. Could you give me an hour of your time?” The author, the German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, had been trying to get in touch with Gerhard Richter for quite some time. Mutual acquaintances had refused to make an introduction; no one wanted to jeopardize a relationship with the man widely considered to be the greatest painter alive. So Donnersmarck, who is full of what Ulrich Mühe, the lead actor in Donnersmarck’s first film, “The Lives of Others,” called “implacable friendliness,” resorted to mailing a handwritten letter to an address listed on Richter’s official Web site. A few days later, Richter responded, with an invitation to visit him in Cologne.
It had been almost a decade since “The Lives of Others,” which explores the Stasi surveillance of artists in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic, was awarded the 2006 Oscar for best foreign-language film. Like many European auteurs before him, Donnersmarck, who was thirty-three when he won, found himself drawn centripetally toward Hollywood. He and his wife, Christiane, a lawyer who oversaw the international operations of Creative Commons and now facilitates Donnersmarck’s career, moved to Los Angeles with their three children. The family rented a nineteen-thirties estate in the Pacific Palisades, near the house where Thomas Mann once lived.
In 2009, Donnersmarck, an unabashed admirer of Hollywood maximalism—he heaps praise on “The Terminator”—co-wrote and directed a hundred-million-dollar studio movie, “The Tourist,” in which a spy and her lover, played by Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, evade both the Mafia and Scotland Yard in the canals of Venice. Critics had applauded the previous film; now many were dismayed. In the Times, Manohla Dargis was gently damning. “It takes an exceptional director to prevent an entertainment as flimsy as this from collapsing under its own weightlessness,” she wrote. “The Tourist” went on to earn two hundred and seventy-eight million dollars worldwide, but Donnersmarck wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. “It was a bit like you had stayed at a super-luxurious spa,” he told me. “It’s beautiful and objectively great, but it feels hollow. I didn’t have that feeling of: Only I can do this.” His friends began to worry. “I told him he should be careful not to lose too much time,” Jan Mojto, who financed “The Lives of Others,” told me. “He said, ‘Between Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” and “Royal Highness” there are nearly ten years.’ I thought, He’s losing his mind, so better bring him back. Then Florian tells me, ‘I have an idea.’ ”
Donnersmarck had been looking for a way to illustrate, in film, the healing power of art. Over breakfast in Los Angeles, he explained how Richter had turned a life of profound trauma and loss into creative grist. “This man has lived through everything imaginable,” he told me. “He’s lived through his mother being raped by the Russians, his father committing suicide, his aunt being euthanized, both of his uncles being killed on the Eastern Front, his childhood classmates being killed in the bombing of Dresden, the experience of incredible impoverishment. Yet he manages to take all these things and charge them, in his paintings, with this mystical energy that comes from the suffering.” In this way, Donnersmarck said, art becomes an emblem of resilience, even productivity: “It gives us that wonderful feeling that our suffering can be of use.”
At eighty-six, Richter, known for an astonishingly diverse practice that includes photo-realistic portraits, Romantic landscapes, and conceptual abstractions, hovers numinously over German art, at once omnipresent and nowhere to be found. Born in Dresden in 1932, he lived through Nazism, the Second World War, and the Communist occupation, before defecting to the West in the nineteen-sixties. But, when faced with curiosity about his person and his work, he has often deployed John Cage’s witty dodge: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” His life story is a meticulously concocted living text, mediated by his paintings, which tell a story of their own.
In the sixties, Richter started making his photo paintings, recognizable by a characteristic blur. The paintings purportedly represented random snapshots of strangers, and their generic titles—“Family at the Seaside,” “Mother and Child”—encouraged this reading. As Richter grew more prominent, he began to refer to “cuckoos’ eggs,” biographical truths hidden in his work. Still, when an interviewer asked about the seeming banality of his source material, he replied, “It’s all evasive action.” Sometimes he explained himself by saying, “My paintings know more than I do.”
“I believe that great art is deeply biographical,” Donnersmarck told me. Anthony Minghella, the director of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” one of Donnersmarck’s favorite films, had no direct experience of American expats on the Italian Riviera, but he drew upon the oppressive class consciousness of his English childhood to lend authenticity to Tom Ripley’s striving. Studying Richter’s work, Donnersmarck learned that he had taken unusual pains to control its reception. Since the sixties, Richter has been compiling his own catalogue raisonné, an official list of works usually assembled by scholars and curators. Furthermore, he started the clock on his œuvre in 1962, after his arrival in the West, erasing a period as a prominent socialist-realist artist in the East, where he had been commissioned to paint murals extolling the ideals of the republic. “He was someone who was quite guarded about his personal things,” Donnersmarck told me. “Although, on the other hand, it’s also partly that he just tells us he’s guarded about his personal things.” Taken together, he felt, Richter’s feints amounted to a pixelated portrait. “Here was someone who never really told the full story, and was steering people in a certain way,” he said. Donnersmarck had set out to research a master of visual representation; now he was beginning to view Richter as what he calls “a master of narrative.”
One painting in particular troubled Donnersmarck. “Ema (Nude on a Staircase)” depicts a luminous nude, Richter’s first wife, Ema Eufinger, who, as Richter later noted, bore a resemblance to Brigitte Bardot. Art historians contended that the image was part of Richter’s dialogue with Marcel Duchamp, who had ostentatiously quit painting after completing his own “Nude Descending a Staircase,” in 1912. But Donnersmarck suspected that there was something more than the anxiety of influence at work.
Richter typically dates his canvases with only the year; this one is marked “May, 1966,” as if the month held special significance. Where the previous photo paintings relied mostly on a gray-scale palette, Ema glows with nacreous pink skin and golden hair—her body “seems to shine from within,” as one critic put it. In fact, she was pregnant, with Richter’s first child, Betty, who was born later that year and would become the subject of some of his most arresting portraits. It was the convergence of two details—Ema’s pregnancy and the date—that stuck in Donnersmarck’s mind, suggesting a mystery that he was determined to solve. “I thought, O.K., I’ve now read the major texts on him. I’ve researched this thoroughly. I’m very familiar with his work. I have to at least throw my theory at him and see how he reacts,” he said. “I was thinking that I’d maybe be thrown out after half an hour.”
In January of 2015, Donnersmarck showed up at Richter’s home. “The most extraordinary thing happened,” he said. “I outlined to him what I planned to do, really just thinking I’d glean from his reaction—Was I on a completely crazy path, or was there something true about it?” Surprisingly, Richter didn’t turn him out. “That first day, I ended up staying seven hours or so.” After several more sessions, Donnersmarck said, “I asked him, ‘I have a good memory, but I don’t remember everything. Do you mind if I record this?’ ”
Donnersmarck grew up stringently Catholic, a choirboy, and he still attends Mass; as an artist, he frames his goals transgressively. His intention, he says, is “to write like I’m wiretapping a confession booth.” He told me that Richter accepted his presence, though he suspected that Sabine Moritz, Richter’s third wife and former student, opposed it. Richter went so far as to allow him to accompany the couple on an anniversary trip to Dresden. “He told me everything—truly everything—about his life, and was amazingly open,” Donnersmarck said. “I ended up staying for one month and recording this stuff, which really I think makes any biography of his completely obsolete.”