2023-10-12 12:43:14
His exceptional life began early. When he was six or seven, i.e. in the immediate post-war years, or maybe only eight, Anselm Kiefer said that he had an apparition of Mary: “She was wearing a light, beige, blue dress.” From then on, it stayed He is an unavailable loner, called to proclaim like an Old Testament prophet.
From the early 1970s onwards, Kiefer’s pictures, his sculptural works and installations, completely against the spirit of the times, always had a tendency towards a celebratory backdrop, and the pieces that take place in front of them deal with the artist as a visionary – and enchant his congregation into moved extras. Christoph Ransmayr, the Austrian writer, describes an encounter with the painter in Barjac in southern France with these words:
“Even up close, Anselm Kiefer, the host who leads us through his night-dark country, is barely visible. Sometimes we just follow a voice, the sound of retreating footsteps, a thin shadow. Few of us know this path, and hardly anyone has ever walked it during the new moon. We, walkers in the darkness, seek Kiefer’s proximity or at least within his calling distance. (…) We are the entourage of a master from Germany.”
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The master from Germany was 28 years old when he mounted two pictures on top of each other to form an altar piece. A forest picture, bare fir trees, dead wood. And a picture of his roof truss studio in the Black Forest, lined with fir planks. In the empty room there are three pedestals with flaming fires and three words, as if written with a finger made of ashes: “Father”, “Son” and “St. Spirit”.
Even back then, people were wondering what the obvious devotional image was about. What should you see, feel, experience? An attempt at animation with the holy words from the off? A pronunciation experiment with what seems to have become unspeakable? Anselm Kiefer – cunning and wise – has still not given us the answer to this day.
Whispers from the German reverberation room?
But there was always plenty to see, feel and experience. And to read too. The early “attic pictures” with swords or spears in the floorboards would hardly have caused a stir if the handwritten additions (“Parsifal”, “Notung”, “my father promised me a sword”) had not ignited the suspicious imagination.
What is that dark murmuring from the old German reverberation room? Only words and images in unity create the mood. And it begins just when you lift your eyes from the rough panels, which begin to creak in a stage-like manner in response to the acoustic signal “Notung”, and you involuntarily think of a Bayreuth production from the blessed era before the invention of the Direction Theater.
Attic painting by Anselm Kiefer
Source: Norbert Schmidt/picture alliance
It was also a long time ago when the art student at the Karlsruhe Academy wanted to understand the madness of the still virulent Nazi past, tried on his father’s Wehrmacht uniform and painted and photographed himself in romantic landscapes with Hitler’s right arm raised. This provoked a generation that preferred to keep quiet about what was happening.
Anselm Kiefer goes on a sentimental educational journey
If the law was interpreted to the letter, Kiefer’s action was hardly covered by freedom of art and freedom of expression. The screaming was correspondingly loud. Although it soon became apparent that the painterly self-experience remained strangely without consequences. It was the rebellious sixty-eights who asked the critical questions. Anselm Kiefer, however, took off his war cloak, pulled his arm back in and got out of this story.
View of Anselm Kiefer’s 2007 exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris
Source: VINCENT NGUYEN/AFP
Created heavy lead books, illegible folios from prehistoric times without writing. I preferred to go on a sentimental educational journey with sentence debris from the post-war poetry of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. With his increasingly powerful images he roamed vast, bare, uninhabited spaces, deserts, lunar landscapes or furrowed fields. Poppies have sown themselves here and there, blooming and withering.
Impasto masses of color, interspersed with sand, stones, lead and diamonds, solidify into a crusty relief, grown together with leaves, panicles, dry branches, withered sunflowers, brittle stalks, gilded ears of corn. His increasingly gigantic installations resemble stage sets for pieces that are about nothing less than sublimity, even if you don’t know the text.
“Shevirat ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels)” by Anselm Kiefer in the Jewish Museum Berlin
Quelle: Winfried Rothermel/picture alliance
It is veritable creation. Nobody paints such enormous landscapes, nobody builds such enormous spaces out of ridged rocks, covers them with snow and fog and clouds and lets the brittle paint grow up on them like lichens, nobody keeps the sensual flow of painting on a canvas that sometimes has six meters, as surely as Anselm Kiefer.
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Justification of terror
The Kiefer method is the open association space and the declamatory slogan: “Notung”, “Lilith”, “Orion”. Traumatic experience, feeling and mysterious birth. In the quote, the painter assures himself of a magic that makes his picture, as it were, shudder before itself. An artistic long-distance journey between Jewish narrative, ancient Egyptian historical symbols, fascist aesthetics, German fantasy of redemption and the overwhelming starry sky.
Many things are conceivable, everything is possible, nothing has been decided
The jaw image becomes more and more significant the more virtuosically it juggles its interpretations and evades what it could mean. The enormous sensual power that these works release leaves no room for thought. With hermetic pride they declare themselves incapable of discourse. What takes place is shock, overwhelmingness, emotional capture.
Anselm Kiefer in a scene from the 3D film “Anselm – The Rushing of Time” by Wim Wenders
Quelle: Road Movies/dpa/picture alliance
Which is why it is no small surprise that the artist is now joining in with the loud polyphony of the daily newspaper with nude watercolors. More suggesting than showing, avoiding the explicit, searching like in a dream. The characterless figure, the erotic body without a story, hardly even appeared in the work, which had become almost impossible to miss.
With a sure feeling for the possibilities offered, Anselm Kiefer once again evades definition and interpretive access. It is these subtle strategies that give the work in all its manifestations its distinctiveness.
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The fact that you can never say exactly what the fascination really consists of and where it actually comes from has given this work a worldwide reputation and status. The reception was quite different. While Kiefer became an admired star in the USA and especially in France and has up to now authenticated the indomitable tale of the depth of German Romanticism, in this country the work was controversial from the start.
“Controversial” in art is like saying that a genetic trait gives a species a reproductive advantage. The attention and corresponding market success was guaranteed from the Hitler arm pictures onwards.
Probably no other German artist has been able to save the myth of the healing exceptional personality into the present so easily, overcoming all the criticism of pure and cynical reason. When he was awarded the Japanese World Culture Prize “Praemium Imperiale” in 1999, the statement said that Kiefer worked “with the conviction that art could bring healing to a traumatized nation and an irritated, divided world.”
Beauty and terror in Kiefer’s work
Cure? It is not wrong to say that the artist suffers from the world and wants to evoke the big picture, the magic of torn cohesion, with grandiose painting, with irredeemable promises of meaning once again, if possible for the last time. But one doesn’t do Kiefer justice if one breaks down his violent synopsis and notices with dismay that he uses the same means to paint a homage to the gentle Adalbert Stifter and, next to it, dedicates a picture commemoration to the “Morgenthau Plan”, which transformed post-fascist Germany into a pre-modern one wanted to transform agrarian society. Kiefer’s picture drama only knows beauty and terror in the numinous dimension.
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The sensual approach is enormous, perhaps unique in contemporary art. And what remains astonishing to this day is how decisively Anselm Kiefer bucked the trend with his work and allowed all the fashions in which contemporary art celebrates its self-renewal to pass him by. And when everyone thinks that here on the WELT stage is the right opportunity for the great word of art, then with his watercolors Kiefer smiles and opens a crack into his untouchable otherworld.
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