Works on paper by Germany’s most incisive post-war artists: Richter, Kiefer, Polke, Baselitz and Penck

In 1987, Barbara and Thomas F. Eagleton returned to their home town of St Louis, Missouri, leaving Washington, D.C. behind. They had lived in the federal capital of the United States for almost two decades, while Thomas served three terms in the Senate.

Newly back in St Louis upon his retirement, the couple converted a long-standing interest in the arts into the assembly of an important art collection, particularly rich in work by a generation of Germans breaking new aesthetic ground. Though well known today, these figures — the likes of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz — were not widely appreciated in the US at the time.

Highlights from their collection are about to be offered across a number of auctions at Christie’s in London. These include Richter’s painting Abstraktes Bild (1988), which used to hang prominently in the couple’s living room. It features in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 14 October 2026.

The Eagletons thought that draughtsmanship offered the truest expression of an artist’s visual intellect, and they duly acquired numerous works on paper. Below, we highlight a selection of such works to be offered in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 15 October. They were all made between the early 1960s and the early 1990s, against the backdrop of major socio-political change in the artists’ homeland, the period in question beginning with the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961) and ending just after Germany’s reunification (1990).

Gerhard Richter, 14. Jan. 91 and 15. Jan. 91

The Eagletons acquired these two vibrant watercolours shortly after their creation in 1991. They each comprise quasi-fluorescent ripples of red, yellow and blue.

Richter began engaging in earnest with watercolour in the late 1970s, coming to see its value in parallel to his oil paintings. It tackles ‘the same sort of problem, but with different means,’ he said. ‘Like a poem and a novel by the same author.’

As when creating his Abstrakte Bilder — a large body of abstract oil paintings, to which these two works invite comparison — Richter enjoyed leaving a fair amount to chance. With their inherent fluidity, watercolours allowed unpredictable elements to emerge. ‘Something is created there all by itself, which one only has to observe in order to intervene at the right moment [and] stop,’ he said.

Richter has expressed a particular fondness for his watercolours from the early 1990s — such as 14. Jan. 91 and 15. Jan. 91 — because of the representational echoes he sees in them. ‘What I find very beautiful,’ he says, ‘is that these [works] have so many stories to tell. Almost as in a fairy tale, one can recognise figures, battling serpents, red giants, boulders and clouds.’

Anselm Kiefer, Untitled and Untitled (Des Malers Atelier) (The Painter’s Studio)

Born in the Black Forest area of southern Germany during the final months of the Second World War, Kiefer grew up amidst the ruins left by Allied bombing raids. As a boy, his first artistic urge was to create tiny would-be houses out of the rubble.

Fast-forward to the early 1980s, and Kiefer was responding to architecture in a different manner — with a set of pictures that depict buildings designed by the Nazis. In some cases, these structures had been built; in others, such as the examples in the two broodingly atmospheric watercolours coming to Christie’s, they were based on designs of never-realised structures by the architect Albert Speer.

Kiefer is renowned for investigating Germany’s troubled historical legacy, and it is in this vein that one should consider his title for the series of images to which the Eagleton works belong: Des Malers Atelier (‘The Painter’s Studio’).

He suggests that the buildings in question are — contrary to visual evidence, such as their vast size — actually artists’ ateliers. ‘I transformed those old edifices and gave them a new destiny, a new meaning,’ he says. ‘It’s more efficient to transform than to destroy.’

Georg Baselitz, Untitled

Having met as students at art school in West Berlin, Baselitz and his partner Elke Kretzschmar married in 1962. They would remain together for more than six decades — until his death earlier this year, aged 88. Baselitz repeatedly acknowledged the debt he owed Elke. In the early years of their marriage, she ran a successful fashion boutique and gave him the financial support he needed to keep making art at a time when few people were buying it.

She was also a muse for him throughout his career, and may have been the inspiration for this drawing on brown paper from the Eagletons’ collection, created in 1965.

The subject is seen standing, holding flowers with tendril-like stems that spiral across the picture — perhaps suggesting Baselitz’s all-encompassing affection for his wife. ‘The drawing comes from the centre and diverges,’ he said.

Made early in the artist’s career, when he was in his mid-twenties, it recalls the flora that appear frequently in the work of the French Symbolists Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon. More tellingly, it was made the same year that Baselitz began one of his most acclaimed bodies of work: the paintings series, Heroes. Each image in the series features a large solitary figure in a disquieting landscape, and one can certainly see similarities with Untitled.

A.R. Penck, Untitled (Self-Portrait) x 4

Like Richter, Polke and Baselitz, Penck was born in an area of Germany that, following the country’s division in the aftermath of the Second World War, became part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Unlike that trio, however, who headed west before the Berlin Wall went up — to live in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) — Penck chose to remain in his home city of Dresden for many years.

Never inclined to produce art in the state-sanctioned style of Socialist Realism, he had a difficult relationship with the authorities — which came to a head in 1979, when the secret police raided and wrecked his studio. A year later, he was expelled from the GDR and settled in Cologne.

Penck produced the quartet of drawings being offered at Christie’s shortly afterwards. They belong to a large series of self-portraits made in 1981, and suggest an artist at a deeply introspective moment of his life. With their fractured facial features, the works seem to express feelings of disorientation and a fragmented identity.

Penck was now in his forties, and the use of elaborate colour calls to mind that associated with movements such as Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism and Fauvism — none of which had found favour in the GDR.

Sigmar Polke, Wir sind die Zigarren (We Are the Cigars) and Untitled

Polke is regarded as the trickster of post-war German art: the creator of layered, inquisitive, frequently ironic work that should never be taken at face value. Like Richter, he entered the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1961. Both men soon grew dissatisfied with the teaching that prevailed there, which was rooted in the abstract style of Art Informel.

Polke produced the two drawings under consideration here a couple of years later. They are rendered in a direct, deadpan manner, not showing any of the fluid or gestural mark-making associated with Art Informel. Polke also chose to create them using ballpoint pen on inexpensive paper: anything but a time-honoured artistic combination.

He was much interested in Pop art from the UK and the United States — which was becoming increasingly well known in West Germany at that time — specifically the way it engaged with everyday life. The Eagletons’ two drawings were inspired by advertising imagery from the early 1960s, and respectively depict a box of anthropomorphic cigars and a scantily dressed woman who looks out at us suggestively.

West Germany’s economy was then undergoing a remarkable post-war recovery, but what Polke leaves deliberately unclear is whether he was celebrating the country’s consumerist boom, satirising it, or perhaps both simultaneously.

Works from the Collection of Senator and Mrs Thomas F. Eagleton will be offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale (14 October 2026), the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale (15 October) and the Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale (16 October) at Christie’s in London

Explore Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art London auctions, 14-22 October