The huge Richter retrospective that closed in 1994 in Madrid, after showing in Paris, Bonn, and Stockholm, has only confirmed the key position of the artist among his contemporaries. This book forgoes the accepted avenues through art history, genre theory, and materials, seeking a new approach to the questions that continue to haunt Richter's work. By reconsidering the relations between photography and painting, by analyzing the historical, social, and political elements brought into certain works, as well as the relations between romantic "nature philosophy" and Richter's landscapes, the volume demonstrates how the development of the pictorial material leads to a more open notion of the "image". Richter's oeuvre is clearly linked to certain traditional categories of painting, but the image as he defines it most often eludes those categories. It is this new definition that must be analyzed.