Anselm Kiefer is obsessed with the way history has shaped the life and culture of the German people. In his search for an adequate artistic language to articulate his painful insights, the 43-year-old West German artist has become, almost despite himself, an avatar, a throwback to the grandiose, power-seeking visions that he strives to explain.
His ambition may be fatally flawed. But the traveling Kiefer retrospective, which will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles between June 14 and September 11 before ending its tour this fall at New York's Museum of Modern Art, surely confirms to the broad American audience what critics and connoisseurs have been saying in the art press: that Kiefer is the most powerful new artist to have emerged in the last twenty years.
Including seventy-two oils, watercolors, mixed-media canvases, sculptures, drawings, and an art form he has made his own--the artist's book--the exhibition is fascinating on multiple levels. Kiefer's works function as richly textured, visually provocative compositions and surfaces, as complex symbolic representations of German history and culture, and as trenchant, if pessimistic, commentary on the human condition today.
Modernist History Painting
A century and a half ago, history was the most prestigious subject matter for painting. But the Impressionists rejected history and narrative in favor of nature and scenes from everyday life. Leisure activities--dancing, boating, gardening, and parties--replaced the great deeds of historical and mythical heroes on artists' canvases.
In their turn, the Modernists rejected retinal contact with the world as a basis for art in favor of a preoccupation with the dark secrets of the human psyche or the hidden structures of nature, newly revealed by science. In fact, as its name suggests, the Modernist revolution has been literally and metaphorically one long retreat from history.
But Kiefer's works tend to be powerful in proportion to the degree to which they engage our sense of the past. Even though he employs all the trappings of Modernism in his complex works--collage, assemblage, photographs, scrawled words, unorthodox materials like straw and molten lead--the formal means are always subservient to the historical subject matter.
Most immediately impressive are his huge canvases. They superficially recall those of the American Abstract Expressionists in their giant scale and thickly encrusted, dripping application of paint. But instead of being homages to the ideal of expansive energy, they depict battered, desolate landscapes and interiors that lead back, not only in space, but also seemingly in time. Each unit of perspective space suggests a further reach back into the depths of German culture.
In Germany's Spiritual Heroes (1973), for example, Kiefer scrawled the names of famous Germans between each heavy upright beam in a crude wooden hall that recedes into one-point perspective distance, so that the architecture functions as a metaphoric measure for periods in German history. Above each name burns a fire.
The painting
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