Gusts of Teutonic air swept into London this fall and winter. The 2000 Turner Prize went to German-born London resident Wolfgang Tillmans; a strong selection of works by Germans—from Otto Dix and Max Beckmann to Hans Haacke and A.R. Penck—was included in the National Portrait Gallery’s survey of twentieth-century portraits; and three postwar heavyweights had major gallery shows—Georg Baselitz at Gagosian and Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke successively at Anthony d’Offay. Here was an opportune moment to reconsider the work of all three artists, who, along with Gerhard Richter, have represented, in Britain as elsewhere, the north face of European painting over the last two decades.
Recent German art is still viewed with some apprehension in Britain, even with that indelible native testiness reserved for international success. An endorsement of the often highly specific content of German art has not accompanied the undeniable, liberating influence of its technical procedures. In Britain, it was French and then American content that manured, even smothered, its artists during the twentieth century. Two world wars strangled the infiltration of German visual modernism, just beginning to be felt in the years before 1914 and again in the ’30s. The summer of 1938 saw the unprecedented exhibition in London of modern art from Germany, a huge show from Lovis Corinth to Beckmann, organized in support of the “degenerate art” by artists then scuttling from their homeland across the safer floors of the Continent (though few holed up in Britain). After 1945, the going was slow, and the old British resistance to German art seemed more entrenched than ever. Even early German modernist painting and sculpture went largely ignored. It was not until 1960, for example, that Blue Rider painters such as August Macke and Franz Marc were comprehensively seen in Britain. Beckmann had no great public airing until his 1980 show of triptychs at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. (It was not until the following year that the Tate acquired its first work by him.)
These two events were part of the new German invasion, fueled by exhibitions of contemporary Berlin art at the ICA and the Whitechapel in 1978 and subsequent showings of Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, and Richter. In 1981 the Royal Academy mounted its celebrated exhibition “A New Spirit in Painting” (funded in part by the West German government and the Berlin Senate), which at last opened blinkered British eyes to a whole range of new German art. It included Baselitz and Kiefer (by then internationally notorious from their showing in the controversial German Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale, viewed, above all in Germany, as ideologically and aesthetically reactionary) as well as Polke, Richter, and Lüpertz. The dealers quickly homed in and, as the “New Spirit” organizers had intended, American hegemony was challenged. But much to the annoyance of the German audience, who found their work flagrantly nationalistic, Baselitz and especially Kiefer were quickly espoused in the United States by, in the main, Jewish collectors who appeared to see their work as historically conciliatory. The critical beating meted out in Germany to these two artists at that period died down only after a cooler mid-’80s reappraisal.
Although the reception in Britain was not unwelcoming, the immediate impact on British painting was dire, and the two traditions clashed head-on. Mercifully the influence was short-lived (though it still rumbles on in Scotland). The real benefits for the British were a broadening of the scene, a reassessment of the possibilities of paint, and the reevaluation of somewhat marginalized British figurative artists (leading, however, to wand-waving attempts to turn local ducks into international swans). A little later the contrasting influences of Beuys and Richter began to predominate in the art schools. The Young British Artists emerging in the late ’80s and early ’90s had little or no use for the Sturm and Drang of Baselitz and Kiefer; their loyalties lay with the more distancing, even playful effects of Polke and Richter. The German moment of influence was pretty much over, though dealers and collectors remained in thrall.
The three recent London exhibitions allowed a look at a trio of godfather figures now old enough to be entering their late phases (though by no means on walkers). They remain internationally grand but are subject to almost wholesale dismissal under the chilly critical gaze of artists who were in diapers when Baselitz flipped his world head over heels. Born in 1938, Baselitz is the Nordic elder statesman of the three, the tamed and cultured “wild man” of Schloss Derneburg. As David Sylvester notes in his very brief catalogue preface, Baselitz is unsurpassed by any living European painter in his “creativeness … sustained decade after decade.” Jumping from his habitual selling point at Anthony d’Offay, Baselitz showed his recent work in the newly attentive pastures of the Gagosian. There were five large paintings (all 2000), each with carved wooden frames, and a substantial number of impressive prints (1998/1999 and 2000). The paintings are extremely schematic, with much rubato black outline drawing and scattered black dots on unsucculent grounds, mainly in creams, whites, and grays. Dogs (slothlike, being upside down) feature in four of the paintings and possibly the fifth, their domestic role contrasted with bare mountainous scenery; this canine theme continues in the majority of the prints. The frames, uniformly notched and gouged by the artist, provide a deadening surround rather than a reviving contrast to the whimsical images on the canvases, as though a hobby has supplanted a profession. Invention is not necessarily the same as creativeness, and the rebarbative urgency of Baselitz’s greatest work is missing. Even so, “late phases” have a way of turning around years later to spit, “I told you so.”
Anthony d’Offay’s as yet unrefurbished premises in Haunch of Venison Yard off Bond Street were, in their distressed grandeur, an ideal setting for the dusty, crusty surfaces of Kiefer’s new paintings (and three enormous books). The suite bears the title “Laßt tausend Blumen blühen” (Let a thousand flowers bloom), 2000, adapted from an exhortation of Mao Tse-tung; nearly all the paintings bear an iconic image of the Chinese leader. Kiefer (b. 1945) has always been a rhetorical, even stagy painter, master of the visual coup de théâtre and a brilliantly varied technician. No matter that his densely layered references are frequently beyond the average reach: He has, in the past, made surprisingly sensuous and mesmerizing images through which we imagine we can gain entry to his arcane mindscape of ancient and recent history, philosophy, botany, Nordic myth, National Socialism, alchemy, and Wagner. The present suite opens with a vast, horizontal field of flowers in bloom and decay, a Monet Water Lilies rotting in mud and sand, as though Bruckner had orchestrated a piece by Ravel. All the other works include an image of Mao, usually in heroic mode, taken from the public statues that abound throughout China (which Kiefer visited a few years ago). These images are painted either on panels attached to larger canvases or trompe l’oeil on the canvas itself; Mao’s surroundings evoke tracts of unpromising landscape or, as in Leviathan, the girdered roof of Kiefer’s new studio at his home near Provence. In another work, half-concealing Mao, wintry briars and blackened roses on long stems bush outward from the canvas in an invasive display of muddle and death. Here Kiefer becomes the unwitting Burne-Jones of the most recent fin de siècle. It is surprising that Thomas McEvilley, in his catalogue essay, makes no mention of the late-nineteenth-century excesses of European Symbolism, of which Kiefer is a direct descendant. The critic is much more acute on the historical reality of the by now stale icon of the saluting Chairman. But where Warhol, for example, in the early ’70s grasped both the undoubted stardom of the man as well as that minatory smile, Kiefer plunges us back into the clichés of corrupting power, replaying his earlier messages.
The throbbing histories of Kiefer—pompier machines for our times in which twentieth-century events replace erring Babylon or declining Rome—are worlds away, in time and consciousness, from the elusive, bittersweet humor of Polke. Both artists, however, share an obsession with interpenetrating layers of color and textures nurturing fragmented imagery. Poke’s history painting is of a more recent vintage-the history of consumerism, irony, techno-know-how, and the decor of modern malaise. His current show at d’Offay’s Dering Street premises contains two groups of work—sketchbooks from the early ’60s to the early ’80s and a related series of works on paper from 1999–2000. With page after page of small-scale drawings, notations, and collages, the sketchbooks teem with mordant wit, the knowing observations of a precious student. Their Pop-ish tenor, already late in the day by the ’60s and ’70s, gives them a superficially outmoded look, as though Richard Hamilton’s well-known 1956 collage Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Horn So Different, So Appealing? had lingered beyond its shelf life. A 1971 sketchbook notes a robotic soldier with a gun, an allusion perhaps to Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956) the movie that had influenced Hamilton. In 1999, the robot returns, and several paper works on view include similar heavily armed, large-booted figures enmeshed in Polke’s familiar dots, patterns, and veils of alchemical color. The essential collagist thrust of Polke’s work—whether menacing or erotic, lyrical or ironic—was early in place and finds further expression in these impenetrable and decadent works. With museum shows in Edinburgh and Copenhagen, Polke’s star is lingering in the heavens a little longer and brighter than his two colleagues’, but no one could deny the shroud of nostalgia wrapped around this exhibition. Even so, what a relief to find some jokes here—a neo-Dada naughtiness—after the portentous ruminations of Kiefer and the over-solemn wag of Baselitz’s tail.
Richard Shone is associate editor of The Burlington Magazine.
“Sigmar Polke” is on view at Anthony d’Offay Gallery until February 24.
