Anselm Kiefer’s paintings here are head-on depictions of architecture seen from inside and out. On a black-and-white printed paper inset, a daubed landscape in black, red, brown, and ocher shows a cone-shaped building; a kind of palace seems to radiate force from its walls to the surrounding countryside. As ever, the paint is smacked, smudged, and smeared, applied thickly like plaster and mixed with sand and straw. Yet the buildings themselves, cut paper shapes, deny expressionist emotion. Though the artist himself is absent Kiefer summons up the idea of art in his titles, inscribed as usual on the pictures themselves; the palace painting is called Dem unbekannten Maler—“To the Unknown Painter.” These curiously uncommunicative buildings, then, are imaginary monuments to Art. Other subjects are recognizable—Albert Speer’s Chancellery, for example, built for Hitler. Metaphors are mixed. A vast, empty hall lit by flaming torches is dedicated to Heliogabalus, teenage murderer and self-styled Roman Sun-god emperor, while lightning strikes a square dedicated to “the Supreme Being.”
The provocation is direct. Could Kiefer be hinting that because an appropriate time has elapsed, Hitler’s regime is now as valid a topic for artistic use as any other in history? Or could he be proposing that fascist architecture be regarded as a set of temples to culture? The buildings seem more ideational than real in these paintings; measured and gray, lifeless and life-denying, they wait to be reinhabited. In the summer and fall of 1969 Kiefer traveled through Europe, stopping to have photographs taken of himself in riding breeches and boots, arm raised in a Nazi-style salute, in front of the Colosseum in Rome, the ruins at Pompeii, and other historic sites; in a statement six years later he said that he had “occupied” Switzerland, France, and Italy. It would not be fanciful to suppose that just as Kiefer, however comically, felt able to assume the guise of a one-man conquering army, he could also plot his own “revolution”—the restoration of the artist to a position of genuine respect in society and of authority in world affairs. The problem arises when he chooses Nazi imagery to serve his purpose. Just as he has hovered between the real and the metaphorical in his work, representing earth and mixing actual earth with his paint, situating himself between two and three dimensions, he now locates his theme between idea and reality by using existing, recognizable places alongside imagined ones.
In his watercolors it is easier to appreciate Kiefer’s ability to work on lyrical, didactic, historical, and autobiographic levels simultaneously. He mythologizes the everyday—his village, his wife, the surrounding fields—and brings them alongside historical events. As Kiefer as an individual identity is blended with the landscape, with the dead, with his nation and its history, he effortlessly undertakes a private research of his own into the tangled roots of the ideas he explores—preeminently, perhaps, the extinction and rebirth of a recognizably Germanic culture. Painting for him is both a means of creation and destruction.
Viewed in this light there are three possible interpretations of the latest paintings. Firstly it could be argued that Kiefer runs the risk of failing to make existing imagery his own, and hence of being trapped by what Walter Benjamin saw as the estheticization of politics, the god to which men like Speer originally erected their flimsy temples. (Perhaps the references to tyrants in more distant history exculpates him on this score.) Secondly, there is the paradox that artistic calls to arms can only remain calls to arms. And thirdly, we could accept that the act of painting, more public than that of making watercolors, involves a certain simplification, or perhaps a change of gear. “Speak,” commanded Paul Celan, one of Kiefer’s favorite poets, “but keep yes and no unsplit.” Could it be that the only way to do that is by a kind of moral equivocation?
—Stuart Morgan
