It may almost be a form of revenge that the hundreds of threads criss-crossing the paintings' surfaces create cascades of spidery lines that put the sloppy painting to shame.
When the additional paintings surfaced, and Sotheby's asked him whether they were stolen, he lied, saying they were not.
We can test our reactions, since this week a pair of long-lost paintings surfaced from unusual seclusion.
Furrows run to the high horizon in one-point perspective, creating illusions of awesome distance contrary to the crusty immediacy of the paintings' surfaces.
But no one has come forward to claim ownership, and the authorities are puzzled about why the paintings surfaced separately, within a few weeks of one another, so long after the war's end.
By the 80s Richter was dragging squeegees across paintings' surfaces, smearing (over the next two decades) everything from Venice to a forest to his third wife and newborn child in an astonishing annihilation of the difference between marking and erasing, revealing and obscuring, creating and destroying.
Paintings and painted surfaces are conceivably also susceptible to chemical reactions with acids and salts, although the effects are generally limited by the binder in surficial paint layer.
The paintings share surface similarities with Western abstract art — they have the energy of a Pollock, the exuberant colors of a Matisse, and the fanciful geometric forms of a Miró — yet they are also intricate narrative works that relate detailed stories about the lives of the artists' ancestors.
But, much as Radcliffe expected, some of the six paintings did surface at Sotheby's in London in 2004.
Mark S. Bradford makes his New York debut with a pair of beautiful abstract paintings, their surfaces covered with edge-to-edge rectangular bits of paper forming linear grids.
