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Upon moving from East Germany to Dusseldorf in 1961, Richter discovered American art. The artistic limitations he had experienced while growing up in Dresden-where socialist realism was essentially the enforced style for visual work-gave way with this new education in other kinds of art, and Richter began to view his world through a double lens that he would use throughout his career. Feeling the tension between the figuration with which he had been brought up and the abstract art of Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana, for example, that so intrigued Richter, he painted Table towards the beginning of his career in the West. The painting depicts a table based on a photograph thought to have been clipped from an Italian design magazine. Richter felt disappointed with the sparseness of the work after just painting the table on the canvas, so he added a cloud of gray brushstrokes. The combination in this painting-about which he said when he finished he felt "it should be left that way, without knowing why"-of a real object and an abstract layer metaphorically attaches Richter's austere past in East Germany with the gestural images that pervaded his work upon his arrival in the West.
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