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Now, let’s get to the main event…

Paris, as we now know, is not very good at protecting its crown jewels. But while the shocking weekend heist at the Louvre might have embarrassed the city, it did not obscure what Paris does exceptionally well—unite the entire city around a major cultural event. That was evident last year during the Olympics, but it’s equally true of the city’s main art event, especially in the three years since Art Basel took over the fall fair at Paris’s Grand Palais. Museums around the city take advantage, coordinating major shows to open alongside the fair and giving its many visitors a richer cultural experience while they are here.

Granted, this hasn’t always gone smoothly—in the past, everyone trying to open their shows during the same big week has created a logjam of events. But this season, the planning got more sophisticated. The George Condo show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris was unveiled first, more than two weeks ago; then the Philip Guston exhibition at the Musée Picasso kicked off early last week; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s massive Gerhard Richter retrospective opened last Friday. So I got to see all these shows on Sunday before the whirl of gallery- and fair-related events that took off Monday. Yes, the burglary at the Louvre embarrassed the French government with a vicious act of vandalism, but that’s really detracting from this week’s experience. There’s a lot to learn from paying attention to the museums that weren’t robbed.

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It is a comprehensive chronological look that shows the many different ideas and obsessions the artist tried to work through. Some of his best paintings are included in the show, though far from all of them, and a few of the greats—like the portrait of his daughter, Betty, from 1988, or the portrait of his wife, Reader, from 1994—are presented almost in passing. Though the show features many of his signature abstract paintings, it doesn’t dwell on them.

Perhaps the curators didn’t feel the need to sell the merchandise, as it were, because Richter is unassailably the world’s greatest living painter—the rare artist who declared both an official beginning to his career and a proper end to the painterly project. Schwarz and Serota call Richter a “classical studio artist” more concerned with the creation of images than with self-expression. “You immediately recognize a Richter painting,” they wrote in their catalogue essay, “but you don’t recognize his hand. There’s no typical gesture, no given flourish, no sense of signature.”

Indeed, that’s what is fascinating, beguiling, and frustrating about the Richter show. We get to see the long working life of an artist constantly looking for a meaningful image to make and often toggling back and forth within a wide range of ideas. He’s not interested in painting from life. His art is mediated through photographs, materials, concepts, and even the notion of nostalgia so aptly captured in the blurring technique he uses on his realist paintings from photographs.

This isn’t to say that the show isn’t great. To the curators’ credit, it doesn’t pander to the viewer or excessively flatter. There’s a matter-of-fact quality to the show and signage, which seems to say, Here’s what he was getting at in this series, and here’s what the goal was with that series. And, by the way, there are a lot of different series. Richter had a lot to work out.

The show’s chronological construction highlights some of Richter’s recurring interests. For instance, throughout his career, Richter created works that were essentially mirrors. (Talk about removing the artist’s hand from the image-making.) Some of these are glass panels; others are colored glass arranged at angles to make what he called “corner mirrors.” There is even one large mirror hung in a gallery: a portrait of you, the viewer. I never really understood Richter’s mirrors, or realized he had taken them so far as to produce large ones as “paintings.” But later in the show, there is a structure that combines 11 panes of clear glass into an object that reproduces an image of the viewer, and it uncannily resembles one of Richter’s own blurred portraits.

Was that what the artist had been searching for? Had he finally found a way to create an image directly from life that matched his aesthetic point of view, but did not involve him personally in any way? There is no photograph to paint from, just a reflected image of the viewer, in the most Richter way possible. Of course, I took a picture of “my” Richter, which is to say, my own reflection in his work looking uncannily like a blurred Richter portrait. Anyway, if you happened to be a collector in town and this show inspired you to get on the Richter bandwagon, the artist’s gallery, David Zwirner, was happy to help; they opened their own micro-version of the retrospective on Monday night, complete with several glass and mirror pieces. All you have to do is convince Zwirner to sell one to you.

If Guston’s place in art history is finally secure, George Condo’s should be soon. The show of his work at the Musée d’Art Moderne is being presented as the third installment of a trilogy on 1980s East Village artists that includes Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Of course, MAM did shows about those other artists more than a dozen years ago. And though Condo’s long career means that he was indeed an East Village bad boy, that hardly seems to be the reason we pay any attention to him today.

Condo is most famous for his figures—first, the bizarre surrealist buck-toothed characters; then the cubist crowds and solo shots. But the exhibition wants to position Condo as an artist whose work is about art history, opening with a room full of Condo’s most dramatic takes on other artists like Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin, and Picasso. I only wish the works chosen for this room were among Condo’s best. But the 80 paintings and 110 drawings gathered across the whole exhibition remind us of his great achievements throughout his career. There are the all-over works that he began calling “expanded canvases” as far back as 1985. There’s a group of fascinating word paintings he made from his own name. Groups of works he did in blue, black, and white each get their own focus in the show.

Condo has been a market mainstay for the last seven years, with his auction totals ranging from $36 million to $73 million each year since 2018, and ticking along at a solid $40 million a year since 2022. That makes Condo one of the most consistent and traded contemporary artists. The market boom seems to have come on the heels of the 2017 retrospective of his work at the Phillips Collection and the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. Let’s see if this one has a similar catapulting effect.