A cross-disciplinary conversation between the world’s greatest living painter and a German physicist across two decades

In July 2000, an article appeared in the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with the title First look inside an atom and a blurry illustration of the electron clouds of an atom. The article fascinated the painter Gerhard Richter (born 1932) so much that he used it as a template for his edition First View (2000). Richter was also interested in how physicists image such small objects, and this led to contact between him and Franz J. Giessibl, the inventor of the eye for the atomic force microscope used in imaging the electron cloud. The contact between Richter and Giessibl has continued to this day, due to their common interests, and the book chronicles their encounters over the past two decades.