With characteristic boldness and a bright sense of color theory, Gerhard Richter splits his 1984 Abstraktes Bild down the middle. To the left, perpendicular gradients of scarlet and grey create a sense of depth, as if viewing a fiery sunset over a mountain. Across the border, energetic brushstrokes of white, crimson, and phthalo green writhe against a lime green background that fades to a darker shade at far right. Diagonal strokes cross the center, like a storm cloud with lime green lightning bolts, uniting both sections in the same abstract ecosystem. These formal contrasts push and pull the eye over the canvas, across Richter’s virtuosic juxtaposition of complementary colors and variance of brushstroke.

 

The 1980s were arguably the most important decade in Richter’s career, as the artist transitioned from a largely representational painting practice, defined by his blurred photorealist paintings, to a practice dominated by abstraction. In 1983, the artist moved to Cologne, where he has maintained residence ever since, making Abstraktes Bild one of the earlier works to come out of the studio in which he produced his most iconic work. In contrast to his abstractions in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the gridded Color Charts and monochrome Grey paintings, the Abstrakte Bilder of the 1980s burst out in dynamic, kaleidoscopic hues. The bright, even explosive handling of paint across the surface of Abstraktes Bild is far-removed from the strict rigor of the artist’s early abstractions. Richter’s work received increasing attention internationally, and was shown more widely; in the year of Abstraktes Bild’s creation alone, he participated in the Venice Biennale (his third), and had four solo exhibitions across Europe.

 

 

Abstraktes Bild was previously in the collection of U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton and his wife, Barbara, a philanthropic couple who contributed funds to art museums in their home state of Missouri. The couple originally donated Abstraktes Bild to the Saint Louis Art Museum, which owns Richter’s 1989 suite, November, Dezember, and Januar, some of the finest of Richter’s Abstrakte Bilder in public collections in the United States. Perhaps one of Richter’s most iconic photorealistic paintings, Betty, 1988, resides in the Saint Louis Art Museum in part due to the Eagletons’ generosity. Their selection of the present work speaks to the museum quality of Abstraktes Bild. 

“Variations on a theme—the theme of painting—provide the rule of Richter’s production rather than the exception.”
—Anne Rorimer

When Richter created Abstraktes Bild, art critics were working within the framework of postmodernism, a set of ideas that valued the artistic process as a reinterpretation of existent forms, rather than the product of one individual’s original ideas. Postmodernist critics announced the death of painting in the 1980s, cynically arguing that painting—figurative, abstract, and otherwise—had nowhere else to go. Richter wasn’t convinced. 

 

In his own words, Richter leaned into “the sheer obstinacy of carrying on painting,” and turned to abstraction to push the boundaries of his chosen medium.ⁱ In writings and interviews from the 1980s, Richter defined his position as an artist without ideology, who, therefore, is guided by his materials.ⁱⁱ He saw the absence of ideology as a form of freedom, which allowed him to focus on the process of painting, and the way in which paintings could, in a sense, create themselves. Painting was about “letting a thing come, rather than creating it,” he wrote, and this intuitive, responsive approach to painting guides Abstraktes Bild.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

 

Richter’s receptive attitude towards the process of painting stands in contrast to the bombastic, emotive practices of the Abstract Expressionists and Lyrical Abstractionists a generation before him. Where such artists focused on the brushstroke as gesture, a record of a personal, emotional state, for Richter, the brushstroke is a tool, and one that he increasingly abandoned across the 1980s in favor of the squeegee. Abstraktes Bild does not use the latter tool, but shows the artist on his path to his signature abstract idiom, at a midpoint between gestural expression and the obliterative marks of the squeegee. From basal planes of red and green, reminiscent of Minimalist, Color Field expanses, Richter builds up his marks on the surface of Abstraktes Bild. In foregoing the individualist idiom of gestural abstraction, Richter writes in his own painterly language, all the same.

 

 

ⁱ Gerhard Richter, quoted in “Interview with Wolfgang Pehnt, 1984,” in Dietmar Elger and Hans Ulrich Obrist, eds., Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961-2007, Distributed Art Publishers, 2009, p. 137.

ⁱⁱ  Richter, entry for 28 Mar., 1986, in “Notes, 1986,” ibid., p. 161.

ⁱⁱⁱ  Richter, entry for 28 Feb. 1985, in “Notes, 1985,” ibid., p. 140.