Your review of Gerhard Richter’s retrospective at Tate Modern, entitled “Panorama,” bristles with dollar and pound signs (“The Bold Standard,” October 8, 2011). Although the euro sign is conspicuously absent, an odd deutschmark can be found there, as well. These are sure signs of “a successful painterly life,” as you dub it. He escaped from East to West Germany in the Fifties so as to escape “communist realism” (actually known as “socialist realism”), the only style allowed back home. In the Sixties he produced a series of “capitalist realism” paintings, which are doing very well today. As you report, close to eighty-million dollars’ worth of his work was sold at auction in 2010 alone. Gosh. Whatever he means by capitalist realism you leave aside in your review, but the fabulous prices of his many paintings are there to give it its proper meaning. Anything that makes a bundle, that is.