Abstraktes Bild

Acquired by Barbara and Thomas F. Eagleton in 1991, Abstraktes Bild (1988) is a captivating and vibrant work from the height of Gerhard Richter’s abstract practice. Striated veils of olive green are swept before a cyan ground that flickers like flame, marbled with deep black fissures. Pink streaks illuminate the painting from within. Towards the right-hand edge is a chasm of heated colour, with the tooth of the canvas visible beneath its abraded surface. Richter made this work using the squeegee technique typical of his late-1980s abstracts, dragging a scraping tool across the still-wet paint to produce variegated, unpredictable chromatic and textural effects. In this surrender of his process partly to chance, he sought to create a visual analogy for the irreconcilable complexities and contradictions of reality itself.

The present work dates from an important juncture in Richter’s career. It is among the first abstract paintings in the catalogue raisonné to follow his landmark figurative cycle 18. Oktober 1977 (October 18, 1977) (1988, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), which occupied him from March to October 1988. These fifteen monochrome photo-paintings depicted moments from the lives and deaths of members of the Baader-Meinhof group who had terrorised West Germany during the previous decade, and conveyed a grief-struck numbness in the face of historical tragedy. ‘I’m not so sure whether the pictures “ask” anything; they provoke contradiction through their hopelessness and desolation, their lack of partisanship’, wrote Richter (‘Notes, 1988’, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist (eds.), Gerhard Richter: Text: Writings, Interviews and Letters 1961-2007, London 2009, pp. 203-204).

The Abstrakte Bilder made in the wake of these history paintings took on a new intricacy and weight. Although Richter had been developing his use of the squeegee since the early 1980s, he would later recognise this phase of his abstract work as ‘more adult’ (in conversation with U. Wilmes, in Gerhard Richter. Abstrakte Bilder, exh. cat., Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2008, p. 46). Even as he allowed chance to play an ever greater role in his creative process, he introduced elements of deliberate formal structure, intercutting the squeegee’s randomised effects with more controlled strokes of a spatula. These scraping actions are visible in the upper reaches of the present work, where horizontal bands carve through the auroral static of the squeegee. Each layer of the work calls into question its predecessor, creating a continual oscillation between coincidence and design.

This was the analogue for reality that Richter aimed for: not the essentialising or reduction conventionally ascribed to abstract painting, but rather an accumulation of visual phenomena that yielded endless discoveries and surprises during its progress. No less than the Baader-Meinhof pictures, Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder refuse to settle into a fixed image or single answer. ‘The picture should develop out of a painterly or visual logic, emerging as if inevitably’, he said. ‘And by not planning the result, I hope to achieve a harmony and objectivity that any random piece of nature (or a readymade) always has … I want something more interesting than what I can think up’ (in conversation with S. Schütz, 1990, in D. Elger and H. U. Obrist (eds.), op. cit., p. 256).

In 1989, Richter reflected that the 18. Oktober 1977 pictures had ‘set a new standard, set a challenge to me. I may be deceiving myself. It’s all still too fresh. But one thing I have realised; it’s hard for me to go on painting’ (in conversation with J. Thorn-Prikker, 1989, in ibid., p. 240). Many of the abstract paintings made in the series’ aftermath have a tough and melancholy quality. His 1989 trilogy of diptychs Januar (January), Dezember (December) and November—which the Eagletons helped acquire for the Saint Louis Art Museum in 1991—represents a coda to 18. Oktober 1977. Lit by brief flashes of magmatic colour beneath cold, heavily encrusted anthracite surfaces, these paintings have been seen as expressions of Richter’s scepticism towards the process of German Reunification, which would come with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. In works such as the present, however, Richter also engaged with fresher, more hopeful palettes evocative of the growth and life of the natural world.

Richter was open to suggestive atmospherics in his abstract paintings. He gave the title Forest to a quartet of works completed in 1990, noting that ‘There seemed to me a romantic mood in these four paintings that reminded me of a forest. In the blue, there is the sensation of a diffuse light, which is why I came upon this title’ (‘Comments on some works, 1991’, in ibid., p. 270). While the present painting has no such telling title, its cascading blues, mossy greens and sunset oranges speak to a Romantic strain that runs throughout Richter’s abstract work, as if reconfiguring the vast sublimity of Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes for a new era of slippage, uncertainty and change. Like Friedrich’s pictures, it points to a universe of forces, depths and scales beyond our control or understanding, and the mystery of our place and time within it. This, for Richter, was ‘painting like nature, painting as change, becoming, emerging, being-there, thusness; without an aim, and just as right, logical, perfect and incomprehensible’ (‘Notes, 1985’, in ibid., p. 142).

THE COLLECTION OF SENATOR AND MRS THOMAS F. EAGLETON

Throughout their lives, Barbara and Thomas F. Eagleton made extraordinary contributions to the political and cultural life of Missouri, Washington, D.C. and the broader United States. Married in 1956 in their hometown of St. Louis, they lived first there and also in the state capital, Jefferson City, during Thomas’s rapid rise within Missouri politics. Following his election to the United States Senate in 1968, the family moved to Washington, D.C. There they would make their home until the Senator chose to retire from the Senate in 1987, having served three six-year terms.

It was in 1966 that the Eagletons visited two separate exhibitions in another city—New York—that would transform their understanding of art and, eventually, their lives. One was Lucas Samaras’s intense, phantasmagorical and immersive mirrored Room No. 2 (1966) at Pace gallery. The second was Brice Marden’s debut solo exhibition at Bykert Gallery, which introduced the artist’s austere paintings in beeswax and oil. These dissimilar experiences awakened in the couple an awareness of the wide-ranging aesthetic possibilities being created by the artists of their time.

It happened that the Eagletons’ early years in Washington coincided with the city’s flourishing as a cultural centre. Their move to the nation’s capital came just as the visionary J. Carter Brown was named head of the National Gallery of Art (whose iconic East Building, designed by I. M. Pei, would be commissioned and completed during his tenure) and as ground was broken for construction of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Throughout this period, the couple also made frequent outings to New York City, where Barbara—a long-time balletomane—became a passionate devotee of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet.

On a trip to New York in the autumn of 1976, the couple saw and were captivated by an exhibition of new works by Willem de Kooning at Xavier Fourcade Gallery, paintings the art critic John Russell characterised as ‘giddy adventures’. Experiences like these subtly built on earlier encounters of the era, including a visit the Eagletons made to the British author and aesthete Harold Acton at his storied Villa La Pietra in the hills outside Florence, Italy.

Acton took the couple to see Villa I Tatti, the home of the art historian Bernard Berenson, an influential advisor in his day to collectors like Isabella Stewart Gardner and J. P. Morgan. While highly disparate characters, Gardner and Morgan each possessed a charismatic individuality and dynamism of a kind both Thomas and Barbara Eagleton would be attracted to throughout their professional and personal lives.

Forceful character, in fact, is an unmistakable leitmotif of a collection first formed after the Eagletons returned to St. Louis in 1987. Long recognised as a first-rate regional institution, The Saint Louis Art Museum was blessed with forward-thinking curators and the ardent support of a strong local community. Among its acknowledged treasures were Matisse’s Bathers with a Turtle (1907-1908) and a trove of important German Expressionist works assembled by the department store heir and philanthropist Morton D. ‘Buster’ May. It was the latter works that the curator Michael E. Shapiro looked to build on when he became chief curator in 1987. Shapiro’s vision would eventually lead the museum—and the Eagletons—to discover and promote the work of an emerging generation of German artists breaking new aesthetic ground.

Soon after Shapiro approached the Eagletons for help with the purchase of Anselm Kiefer’s monumental sculpture Bruch der Gefässe (Breaking of the Vessels) (1990), the couple recognised that, with this new group of artists, they had set their collecting compasses. There followed years of adventure in pursuit of works by an array of strong and complex characters, often discovered long before these artists were widely appreciated in the U.S.A.

Under the tutelage of and in collaboration with influential curators like Barbara Butts, Francesca Consagra, Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Betsy Millard, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Jeremy Strick and Charles Wylie, and dealers including Marian Goodman, Gisela Capitain, Anthony d’Offay, Bärbel Grässlin, Ronald Greenberg, Max Hetzler, Paul Maenz, Anthony Meier, David Nolan, William Shearburn and Michael Werner, the couple gradually assembled a collection notable for its emphasis on character, craftsmanship and visual intellect.

Leading that collection is Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (1988), a compelling painting in striated blues and greens, dense blacks and streaks of pink so vivid as to seem lighted from within. This work, which had pride of place in the Eagletons’ St. Louis living room, is from a key period in the career of this most protean artist of the post-war era. As with the greatest of his works, it encapsulates tensions between destruction and creation, figuration and abstraction, cool detachment and irresistible currents of emotion.

Throughout their collecting lives, the Eagletons were drawn to draughtsmanship as an expression of an artist’s personality, an attraction here represented by a superb suite of early works on paper by Sigmar Polke. A close early colleague of Richter’s during the 1960s, Polke blended psychedelia with satirical humour in his often sharp-edged work. Georg Baselitz also emerged in West Berlin during this period and famously evoked the paradoxes of a distorted culture by rendering his monumental images upside down. Baselitz’s early drawing Untitled (1965), richly realised in crayon, watercolour and pencil, was among the prized works in the Eagletons’ home.

A further key figure for the couple was Anselm Kiefer, an artist who eagerly embraced the role of artist-as-alchemist, producing works that took on the weight of history in a darkly Romantic oeuvre laden with symbolism, poetry and pathos. (Kiefer is also, as the works on paper make clear, an exquisitely gifted draughtsman.)

In harmony with The Saint Louis Art Museum’s holdings, the collection also includes vital works by leading Expressionists like Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Ludwig Meidner, Lyonel Feininger and Max Pechstein, who brought a new psychological force to modern painting. Among the artists who took up their mantle after the Second World War was A. R. Penck; working for many years under the oppressive East German communist regime in the post-war period, Penck created what he termed ‘Standart’—two early examples are seen here—using a universalised ideogrammatic language that could communicate across geopolitical boundaries while evading the scrutiny of censors. A series of elemental self-portraits, also from the collection, captures the artist at a deeply introspective moment occasioned by his flight to the West in 1980.

A later cohort of photographers schooled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1970s under the tutelage of the seminal artists Bernd and Hilla Becher are notable for their coolly dispassionate approach to the conventions of documentation. Candida Höfer, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky all brought to photography a questioning intelligence and an eagerness to upend the tired tropes of a century-old medium. As it happens, that stance is characteristic of much of the art collected by the Eagletons, whose lives in politics gave them a unique vantage on the dualities of truth and fiction.

As with many of those who pursue art with a passion, the Eagletons found great adventure in collecting. In seeking new work by the important artists of their day, they were opened up to new ways not only of seeing but of living and being. While Thomas continued his work as an attorney, political commentator and professor of public affairs at Washington University in Saint Louis, Barbara followed her own pursuits as a cultural advocate (a lifelong supporter of local civic institutions, she also founded and directed the Women’s Democratic Forum of Greater Saint Louis, a speakers’ forum, for three decades, well into her eighties).

The couple’s love of St. Louis found an enduring memorial in their contributions towards a number of major acquisitions by The Saint Louis Art Museum. As well as Kiefer’s Breaking of the Vessels, these included Gerhard Richter’s abstract cycle Januar (January), Dezember (December) and November (1989). So delighted was Richter when these works found a home there that he donated his mirror painting, Grauer Spiegel (Grey Mirror), to the institution after its completion in 1991. One year later, the Eagletons were proud to assist in the landmark acquisition of Richter’s Betty (1988), surely one of the artist’s best-known and most beloved paintings and a jewel in the museum’s collection.