“I do not accept the premise on which his entire career is based,” the art critic Jed Perl wrote of Gerhard Richter in an incendiary essay of 2002, “that in the past half century painting has become essentially and irreversibly problematical, a medium in perpetual crisis. This is a counterfeit crisis.” Others see Richter, as the New York Times asserted in 2011, as “the towering figure of Contemporary art on the international scene,” an artist who “used his skills in photography to translate into oil painting the visual effects that can be achieved with a camera.” With over 100 works spanning six decades on view, including two recent series—“Birkenau” (2014) and “Cage” (2006)—the Met Breuer gives us a chance to come to our own conclusions. —L.J.