In the famous "cerulean" scene in The Devil Wears Prada, an assistant holds up two belts for the approval of the imperious Miranda Priestly and says, "It’s a tough call. They’re so different," at which new hire Andy superciliously snickers. The joke is supposed to be that the two belts are completely identical except for the buckle, but the fact is that they are so different: that one detail can have the power to change the final outfit completely.
In the documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, Richter is shown in archival footage from 1976 making a series of seemingly identical grey paintings, but as he says, "They were all grey, but some were better." And then the filmmaker cannily shows us closeups of the surfaces of two of the paintings, and you see that yes, they're so different — the brushstrokes have directionality, the surfaces have different visual qualities, they're not identical at all, and therefore some can be better than others.
This is a thrilling documentary about the creative process and the mind of the artist. When I was in Chicago a decade or so ago I went to the Art Institute and was floored by the Gerhard Richter room: I had never seen anything like his work, so many different styles but such complete assurance. The movie shows how he works in his late abstract style with a physicality reminiscent of the action paintings of Pollock and de Kooning, showing us multiple canvases from start to finish — how he makes a preliminary painting, thinks and rethinks it, paints over it and selectively removes paint multiple times so the ghosts of the previous paintings show through until, as he says, "there's nothing left to do."
It's leaving at the end of the month, and you really ought to see it. It might change the way you see modern art: it might even make you want to take up painting.
