This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: July 24, 2008 - One of the most fascinating works in The Immediate Touch is The Voyage of the Nibelungen to Etzel (1980-81), a book by Anselm Kiefer. It illustrates a story of murderous revenge from the medieval Song of the Nibelungen, using contemporary photographs of German landscapes and the interior of Kiefer's own studio.
Kiefer overlays the photographs with marks in gouache, oil and graphite that alternately distress and enliven the images, with some dissolving into complete obscurity. In Kiefer's characteristically audacious fashion, the book attempts to process centuries of German history and mythology, to explore recent events through the lens of the nation's past, even at the risk infecting old wounds.
In another gallery of the exhibition is It Isn't Your Fault, a book by Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. Among other targets, the book sends up Kiefer's struggles to reconcile Germany's past and present. It features a youthful photograph of Kiefer out on a date (a suggestion of naivete?), pages encrusted with oatmeal and brown paint (a nod to the earthy raw materials Kiefer frequently uses in his works), and a drawing of a drain (where dirty hands are washed clean).
These two books say a lot about German artists working after World War II. They give a glimpse into the wide range of techniques they employed -- the use of paint, photographs, gritty non-art materials, imagery from popular culture, seriousness and satire. They speak of the artist's role in processing a nation's past and present histories. And they reveal how highly attuned the artists were to the work of their colleagues elsewhere in the German-speaking world.
The Immediate Touch: German, Austrian and Swiss Drawings from Saint Louis Collections 1946-2007, at the St. Louis Art Museum through Sept. 7, also tells a story that plays out closer to home, about a generation of collectors who, apparently affected by a local Zeitgeist, focused on works on paper and amassed a formidable collection that reaffirms St. Louis' reputation as an American center for art of the German-speaking world.
St. Louis has had a long love affair with German art, and it's reflected in the efforts of local collectors, as well as the permanent collections and programming of two of the city's major art institutions, the St. Louis Art Museum and Washington University. Local philanthropist Morton D. May's donation of German Expressionist art to the museum helped shape the institution's curatorial emphasis. H.W. Janson's mid-century tenure as curator for Washington University's Gallery of Art directed the gallery's concentration away from American and toward European art. This momentum has led to several impressive exhibitions of German art in the latter half of the 20th century, including recent shows such as Beckmann and Paris (1999) and German Art Now (2003) at the St. Louis Art Museum and Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany (2007) at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University.
The majority of the 129 works in The Immediate Touch are from the Earl and Betsy Millard collection, which Betsy Millard gave to the museum in 2003. The remainder comes from other local collectors, including the late Sen. Thomas Eagleton and his wife Barbara, Donald Bryant Jr., Alison and John Ferring, George Schelling, Anabeth and John Weil, Mrs. Alvin R. Frank and an anonymous lender. These collectors have varying degrees of focus on German art, but the Millard collection is particularly strong in this area, and in its concentration on drawings.
Drawings and other works on paper are hot commodities among today's art collectors. Francesca Herndon-Consagra, curator of The Immediate Touch, explains that drawings are relatively affordable, allowing the cultivation of larger collections. They're also usually more portable and manageable in size. And they represent a very direct encounter between artist and materials, revealing insight into an artist's process that often can't be gleaned from work in other media.
The Immediate Touch stages the intersection of three separate aspects of contemporary art, each fascinating in its own right: works by German-speaking artists, practices among St. Louis' art collectors and approaches to work on paper. It's an impressive accomplishment. But it might have been a trainwreck of an exhibition experience. After all, there was no guarantee that the works by these collectors would exhibit well together. And just how does one bring coherence to a show of 129 extremely varied works by 39 artists from three countries, produced over five decades?
Herndon-Consagra managed the challenge beautifully. The exhibition opens with works by Josef Beuys, whose influence on post-war art, particularly the artists in this exhibition, has been profound. In pursuing his practice of "social sculpture," Beuys produced thousands of drawings. The ones on display here are noteworthy for their gentle touch, and surprising for coming from such a forceful personality. After Beuys, the exhibition unfolds, not chronologically, but geographically, tracing developments among artists in Duesseldorf, Berlin, Dresden and Munich, and concluding with the artists from Austria and Switzerland.
All along the exhibition route, there are juxtapositions and groupings that reveal the complexity of this story. In the Duesseldorf gallery, several works by Kiefer, including two large books, are surrounded by the more restrained geometries of Guenther Foerg's window drawings, a spare and biting collage by Blinky Palermo, and a minimalist-conceptual drawing from Hanne Darboven's "35 x 35" series. Across the room are works by artists who are better known as sculptors. Wolfgang Laib's "A Wax Room for a Mountain" (1994) features a small ziggurat in saturated red; the drawing is related to a project Laib built in the French Pyrenees. Rebecca Horn's 1984 preparatory drawing for "Body-Space-Reflexes" likewise reveals the conceptual underpinnings of one of the artist's sculptural works.
Works by Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter are logically shown together in the following gallery. Richter is represented by a series of small works that allow insight into the process and content behind the larger paintings in the Museum's permanent collection. Polke's drawings in this gallery are characteristically wry, filled with a mock sincerity that perfectly sends up the consumer-oriented optimism and faith in science of the 1960s. Polke is rightly well-represented in this exhibition, in 17 of his own works and in his evident influence in the works of Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and George Herold elsewhere in the show.
The Berlin gallery gathers figural works by several artists with varying relationships to German Expressionist traditions. Georg Baselitz's untitled drawing from the "Hero" series (1965) nervously traces the outlines of a shattered man, raw and deteriorating. A series of abstract self-portraits by A.R. Penck position the former East German artist in relation to early 20th century German and French styles. The five works from Penck's "Standart" series (c. 1969), lent from two separate St. Louis collections, give some indication of the elaborate symbolic language that the artist developed and later abandoned.
Works by Erwin Pfrang, Rudi Troeger and Frank Guenzel, all trained at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, are rendered in the more conventional drawing medium of graphite. Their subjects are carnivalesque, their all-over compositions busy clouds of activity. These artists may not be as familiar to American audiences as the others in the exhibition, and they round out this exhibition by representing a relatively traditional drawing element.
The Immediate Touch concludes with works by Swiss and Austrian artists -- a highpoint of the exhibition, to be sure. While the Swiss works are fairly restrained, works by the Austrians are characteristically energetic, physical, even violent. Arnulf Rainer makes muscular marks on photographs, and in his 1981 piece from the "Gruenewald" series, the tortured body of Christ from the Isenheim Altarpiece is further worked over with frenetic lines in graphite and oilstick. Herman Nitsch likewise appropriates religious imagery, this time Rogier van der Weyden's 1450 image of the "Entombment,"and flays the central figures, who float in a pool of viscera. The anchor of the room is Nitsch's large untitled field of intense red oil paint; drips, scuffs, and shoeprints are evidence of the artist's physical encounter with the work, which has the violent beauty and allure of a crime scene.
For all that The Immediate Touch tells us about St. Louis collectors and the amazing variety of work by German-speaking artists in this period, the show is mainly a curatorial tour de force. Herndon-Consagra, the Museum's Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, specializes in Old Master works, and admittedly knew little about the contemporary art that comprises this exhibition before taking on the project. That turns out to have been a good thing, as she brings an outsider's eye to these works that sensitizes her to things contemporary art historians might take for granted. In addition, Herndon-Consagra loves paper, and it shows in the way she has floated most of these works in their frames, allowing close inspection of the paper's edges, texture, and weight.
The accomplishment of The Immediate Touch is certainly more than just the exhibition. This is made clear by the show's comprehensive catalog, which contains invaluable essays by Herndon-Consagra and Sydney Norton. The text on the individual artworks is insightful and heavily informed by the numerous interviews Norton conducted with the artists, which represent a significant contribution to the scholarship in this field.
But The Immediate Touch needs to be experienced as an exhibition to be fully appreciated. The works possess an intensity -- yes, an immediacy -- that simply doesn't translate in reproductions. In this exhibition, they are presented so as to foreground these physical qualities. The exhibition also possesses a rhythm and flow that significantly enhances the understanding of the works. It's a significant curatorial achievement, and a fitting swan song for Francesca Herndon-Consagra as she prepares to leave the Museum for her new post at the Pulitzer.
Ivy Cooper is an artist and professor of art history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.