Facing “Birkenau” are exact digital prints of the same works, as if to dissolve their momentousness. Between the four “Birkenau” paintings and the four copies are four gray mirrors, and everything appears under dimmed lights. If “Birkenau” is meant to assert that we will never truly understand the Holocaust, at the Breuer everything adds up too easily: The abstract paintings express the inexpressible, the copies indicate that even the worst can happen again, and the mirrors force us to face our place in history.

It’s the one room in this otherwise impeccably hung exhibition that feels overfilled. If it were up to me I’d hang the “Birkenau” paintings like any others, and leave us to our grief. Yet I suspect Mr. Richter, closely involved in the organization of this room, has his own aims with the copies and the mirrors. The Third Reich and the G.D.R. inculcated in him a lifelong doubt of ideologies — but now, nearing 90, the artist doubts even his own doubtfulness, and he seems less confident than his many admirers of what “Birkenau” achieves. For 60 years, he has treated uncertainty as an ethical duty. That remains true even at this final celebration, and with every pass of the squeegee, he has modeled how an artist can create in the face of doubt, face down the fear of wrongness, mistrust oneself and still fight on.

That is the priceless example he offers today’s young artists, whose every mistake or hesitation gets pounced on by digital Savonarolas. So much dogmatism out there, so much high-volume moralizing. The voice we need to hear is the voice that says: I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m still thinking. I’m still working.

Gerhard Richter: Painting After All

Through July 5 at the Met Breuer, 945 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-731-1675, metmuseum.org. It travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles on Aug. 15.