Gerhard

Gerhard is Germanic bedrock, stitched from ger, spear, and hart, brave or hardy. A spear-bold name, in other words, which the Swedes and Germans have shared for centuries through trade, marriage, and shared Lutheran liturgies. It sounds like it is made of wood and iron, two syllables that land flat-footed and steady. The painter Gerhard Richter, whose blurred photographic canvases redefined postwar art, has given the name a modern cultural afterglow. In Sweden it reads generational, more likely to belong to a grandfather than to a newborn today, which is exactly what makes it interesting again. Gerhard reads craftsmanlike, rooted, unshowy, entirely dependable.