Anselm Kiefer: Heart and Soul of Germany Past

An American tour devoted to the work of contemporary West German Neo-Expressionist Anselm Kiefer opens today at the Museum of Contemporary Art and is widely regarded as the international art event of the year. The reclusive 43-year-old artist is seen in art circles as the emergent figure of his generation and possibly a talent of the magnitude of, say, Jackson Pollock.

Important as such subcultural considerations may be, they fail to justify general interest in the artist unless there is more to him than mere giftedness.

He makes immense, brooding paintings of Nazi architecture, blasted fields of scorched and steaming earth, leaden Icarus wings uneasily bearing an artist’s palette aloft, a variety of beautiful watercolors, huge books and photo-conceptual projects including one notorious series, not on view, where he photographed himself in various locations giving the odious stiff-armed Hitler salute. In one panel he stands absurdly Sieg Heiling in a bathtub.

Once all that is taken in, one is convinced that Kiefer is indeed about more than mere ability. The work is about the divided German conscience after World War II and, by extension, all the larger questions that have plagued the human spirit ever since--questions of guilt, responsibility and the possibility of redemption and right action in a world that seems to offer no powerful values to guide us to the answers, no binding mythology. There is bound to be a spectrum of reactions to an artist with the courage and intellectual means to raise such grand and troubling questions. My own was an immense sense of relief, of catharsis. At last.

Kiefer is a traditional German artist par excellence. He shares a sense of moral agony that goes back to Grunewald’s Isenheim altar and a flinty mental toughness that flinches not at all in the face of dilemmas most people would prefer to let lie. In that way he recalls Freud’s courageous descent into the subconscious.

The artist is said to be quite frankly unpopular at home. He recalls all of the original Expressionists who clawed away at the conventions of good German burgers in the work of Die Brucke, Der Blaue Reiter and Die Neue Sachlichkeit before the land succumbed to the kitsch mythology of a terrible tin god who suppressed their work and killed the Jews.

Very German that Kiefer believes that art has high idealistic purpose and is obliged to address chaos and annihilation. Kiefer’s art is in fact so German that we Americans might be tempted to dissociate ourselves from it as pained by traumas that have nothing to do with us, opening an easy escape route to purely artistic appreciation. But we are involved--in reality because we have been a profound presence in West Germany for four decades. We think of ourselves as benign, allowing the country to redeem itself and become a prosperous ally. But Kiefer’s art is about matters more deeply buried and more general. Its anguish--like a derelict on the street--asks quite simply of anyone who will listen, “How would you feel?”

Not long ago a friend returned from a first visit to West Berlin. He was astounded by a small incident. He was talking to a chap from a Third World country about how Germany was resisting aiding us with our trade imbalance.

“Well,” said the Third World chap, “why don’t you just order them to do it? Aren’t they your colony?”

That could be chalked off to naivete but in a film by the German director Wim Wenders his wandering-truck-driver hero tells of a girl he knew when young. Years later whenever he thinks of her he imagines he hears a certain American pop song.

“They have even colonized my mind,” he says ruefully.

Politics are not at play here, only a rather gloomy wonder at what it must feel like to have a colonized mind.

Imagine that the United States lost the war. It is partitioned between Japan in the west and Germany in the east. The former allies become antagonistic and build a huge wall along the Mississippi River. Even at that, both realize they cannot control such huge populations and so encourage a flourishing economy. Everything looks pretty much as it does today, perhaps even better since we are out-trading our former conquerors and they are miffed.

All seems to be well. Yet thoughtful people are nagged by questions of why we lost, where we went wrong. This sense of psychic imbalance is exacerbated by the fact that all children born after the war have been taught that our leaders in the bad old days committed the greatest atrocity in human history by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Holocaust was successfully covered up.

The implausibility of this scenario only serves to heighten its psychological status as a walking guiltmare. Living in such haunted mental precincts would give most citizens a case of massive and understandable denial: “It’s not my fault. I wasn’t even born then.”

Gestern war Gestern und Heute ist Heute. Yesterday was yesterday and today is today. Let’s forget it and live in the present.

Anybody who contradicts that comforting and realistic proposition is bound to be unpopular. But if you are Kiefer, what do you do? You decide to look it in the eye and make an art frankly based on the German past, probing those hard and illusive anxieties of conscience. Not only does Kiefer’s art allude to German art, it is so dense with layers of Teutonic myth, Wagnerian opera, history, poetry, literature and politics that you literally cannot tell the players without a program. (Fortunately, one is at hand in the excellent catalogue essay by curator Mark Rosenthal. It not only provides a key to Kiefer’s iconography, it stands as a work of literature in itself.)

Probably no artist since Max Beckmann has so tellingly used deep learning to lend density to his art. Take the painting “Das Rote Meer (The Red Sea),” a kind of absurdist rumination on ritual and sacrifice turned into posturing and mayhem. The tale from Exodus is set into a blood-filled bathtub that alludes to the Nazis. In “Isis and Osiris” Kiefer sets up complex resonances between the Egyptian myth where a god was dismembered--recalling in turn the Egyptian enslavement of the Jews--and the way the Nazis mutilated their national body in killing the chosen people, only to be themselves ripped asunder in defeat. It’s a gloomy painting longing for the restoration of the modern psyche by some force as magical as the power of Isis, who rejoined the hacked-apart body of the man who was her brother and husband.

Complex as Kiefer’s art can be, it looks at the basics. It is powerfully elemental in its insistence on Earth, Water, Fire and Air. (Very little air. A curiously suffocated environment.) Kiefer uses materials from clay to wood, straw and lead to make mourning, eroded surfaces. But these are not just the decorative mushings of a bad Abstract Expressionist. Kiefer transforms material into symbol as an alchemist makes gold of lead. Wood and straw speak of naturally vulnerable and helpful elements that can ignite and destroy.

The only real hope in this art is directed toward myth, if anything. The rest is shrouded in brown pessimism, irony that smiles with bile in its mouth and a sense of dread just over the left shoulder. The hollowness of fame and history comes clear in “Women of the Revolution” with its empty frames and scrawled names. The folly and destructiveness of heroism stands in the vacant halls of “Deutschland’s Geisthelden” even as it pays homage to the artist’s personal heroes. In “Resurrexit,” the possibility of salvation seems slight in a world where a staircase leading to the life of the mind promises only madness, while a path leading to the revelations of nature is blocked by the serpent of knowledge.

Impressed as we are by Kiefer’s intellectual and moral seriousness, at the end of the day art communicates directly by vision. If it is not mutely eloquent in the first instant no amount of subtext can bring it off.

This exhibition was co-organized by the Chicago and Philadelphia museums, where it has already been seen. It will move on to New York’s Museum of Modern Art after finishing here Sept. 11. It also seems worth mentioning for a change that its principal backers were the Ford Motor Co. and the Lannan Foundation.

It consists of 70 works that change somewhat at each location. Provocative entries in the catalogue are not present here, so any evaluation has to be based on what is at hand.

At first go, Kiefer’s art can seem dry and lifeless and may look a trifle more morbid than usual in contrast to the cheery surface of a summer day in Los Angeles.

His watercolors are consistently lovely, bringing back the freshness of lyric German idealism, adding mystical and self-conscious elements. “Kranke Kunst (Sick Art)” brings a sour note that carries over to some works using the pallette motif. Artistic idealism curdles into artist’s monomania.

Some of Kiefer’s looming architectural paintings have seemed to have staying power seen elsewhere, but most here come dangerously close to illustration. His early involvement with Joseph Beuys and Conceptualism may have left him with a weakness for visual one-liners. As important as their message may be, there is no reason to return to them after we’ve gotten it.

The art most likely to keep Kiefer alive after the current wave of fashionable adulation has guttered out are paintings that return us to the dilemma of the colonized mind.

Hard as Kiefer has tried to make a German art, the work that succeeds best visually and so--in the long run--expressively could not exist without two American artists, Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns.

Kiefer’s paintings of claustrophobic fields owe an enormous debt to Pollock’s field paintings. Others that include objects like lead wings and books are indebted to both Johns’ formal practice and his detached mind-set.

What Kiefer has done with these American sources, however, is to snatch the dangling ganglia of the German mind back from the colonizers and root it firmly in native soil. One suspects he may have even done so with wonderful malice aforethought.

There is no formal innovation in even the best of Kiefer’s art, but given his love of subtle readings and desire to sabotage history, that too may be part of the content. He has met the two great postwar American artists on their own ground and visibly transformed their accomplishments into something German that transcends linear art history by the urgency of its inquiry. In good German fashion he has put abstraction in the service of the real to speak of the transcendent. A painting like “Jerusalem” uses its Johnsian wrong-way skis with grand philosophical absurdity. “Emanation” finds a presence of blasted sheet lead roaring from the sea like a tornado god of creation and destruction. A landscape faced with a great leaden book speaks of the power of enshrined myth to hold back chaos.

In these frivolous, corrupt days, art lovers have to be grateful for work worth taking seriously even if, in the end, Kiefer’s moral accomplishment is indeed greater than his artistic achievement. Which counts more seems clear enough.