Finding Poetry in an Anselm Kiefer Art Exhibition

In 2014, I was in London, and I’d just recovered from my back going out that I spent a good 24 hours immobilized on the floor of our hotel room. A house doctor was called in, and he gave me a muscle relaxant via hypodermic. My back “felt like a solid brick,” he said. It took about 10 hours to work, but I could finally start moving around again.  

The floor of a hotel room is not the way to experience London. The maids were, however, very polite as they vacuumed around me. 

 

Two days later, I was moving normally again, and I went to see an exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’d heard of the German artist Anselm Kiefer; the St. Louis Art Museum has two of his works. One is a massive painting called “Fuel Rods.” The other is a sculpture, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels,” comprised of a huge shelf of burned books and thousands of pieces of glass scattered on the floor. It commemorates “Kritstallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass,” when German Nazis attacked Jewish businesses, buildings, homes, and people across Germany on Nov. 9-10, 1938.

 

The London exhibition was simply entitled “Anselm Kiefer.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: One of the Anselm Kiefer paintings in Sculpture Hall at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Winter penance – poem by Franco Amati at Garnage Notes.

 

The Kreutzer Sonata – poem by Donna Hilbert at Every Day Poems.

 

Into the Wasteland – Malcolm Guite at The Rabbit Room (video).

 

“The Shadow on the Stone,” poem by Thomas Hardy – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Art Matters: Asking the Questions No One Can Ask

We recently watched a German mini-series (English subtitles) called Generation War, the story of five young friends in Berlin and what happens to them from 1941 to 1946. Two are brothers, soldiers in the Wehrmacht, sent east to fight the Russians. One girl is a café singer with dreams of a singing career. Her boyfriend is a Jewish tailor with his own dreams of fashion design. And the fifth wants to be a nurse, “representing German women” and helping to tend the soldiers wounded at the front.

It was a riveting series. When it first aired in Germany in 2013, it caused no end of controversy, including a protest by the Polish ambassador over the anti-Semitic depiction of Polish partisans fighting the Nazis. Overall, the series renewed a public conversation lying rather dormant over German war guilt.

The series, and the conversation it inspired in Germany, might not have been possible without the paintings of Anselm Kiefer.

Breaking of the Vessels by Anselm Kiefer (1990)

Until 2014, the sum total of my knowledge of Kiefer and his art was limited to a multi-media sculpture in the St. Louis Art Museum, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels” (photograph above). Few St. Louisans know the work’s official title, but ask anyone who’s been to the art museum “Where can I find the broken glass?” and they know exactly what’s being sought. It’s currently in the main entry hall of the museum. Kiefer created it in 1990.

Last year, I was able to see a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (“Breaking of the Vessels’ wasn’t included; I can’t imagine anyone shipping all that broken glass, and there’s a lot of broken glass). His work is overwhelming and often overpowering. It was the kind of exhibition, and the kind of art, you can leave as a changed person. I walked out with the exhibition catalog and a biography of the artist.

Kiefer was born in 1945, not the most auspicious time to be a baby in the wreckage of Nazi Germany. He grew up in southwestern Germany, and graduated from the University of Freiburg in 1969; he began his studies in law and romance languages but switched to painting. Through a series of art installations and also artworks presented as books, the artist asked the question that no one in the German art world was asking or even wanted to ask: what does it mean to be a German artist after the Third Reich?

Anselm Kiefer

Kiefer’s art essentially forced Germans to consider that question. It was part of a broader question: What does it mean to be a German after the Third Reich? That was the conversation Kiefer started. And it was a conversation that had to happen, or Germany and Germans would have forever lived in the dark shadow, and the dark sin, that was Nazism.

The Royal Academy exhibition included numerous striking works: A large oil and acrylic painting entitled “Interior,” representing a rather decayed and ruined version of Albert Speer’s Mosaic Room in Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery; “Man in the Forest,” a man in a nightshirt holding a burning bush in the deep forest; and “Iron Path,” showing railroad tracks through a muddy, gray landscape (railroad tracks have a special meaning in our understanding of Nazi history).

This is what art can do, and this is one of the reasons why art matters. It isn’t just about beauty and the creative act. Art can take us to places we need to go, but that may be politically or culturally difficult if not impossible. Art can force us to acknowledge that “there’s an elephant in the room.” And art can keep asking the questions, which is what Kiefer continues to do with his art today.

More on Anselm Kiefer:

Anselm Kiefer by Matthew Biro provides a good overview of the artist’s works and development.

Anselm Kiefer by Richard Davey and Kathleen Soriano, the book produced for the exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Related to the theme “Art Matters:”

What I Learned from a 400-Year-Old Painting

The High Calling has a community linkup with the theme of “Art Matters.” To see what others have to see, please visit The High Calling.

Top painting: “Interior,” oil, acrylic and paper on canvas by Anselm Kiefer, 1981; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Legend reborn

Erupting from the sands

and scrub, friend of scorpions

and snakes, it bleats

an incessant murmur of muted

mechanization, pulsing,

feeding on electrons streamed

live and in color, coming

to a theater near you as soon

as it finishes its Broadway run

A temple, a pyramid, a ziggurat

of sacrificed doom, exerting

an incessant magnetism,

Osiris steps into his coffin

once again, confident he knows

better, this time. Isis waits,

knowing this time she becomes

the goddess of the underworld,

the sword of the caliphate,

living the nightmare

she creates

Painting: Osiris and Isis, oil and acrylic emulsion by Anselm Kiefer (1985-1987); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The painting was included in the Royal Academy of Arts exhibition "Anselm Kiefer" in London, which was shown Sept. 27 to Dec. 14, 2014.

Passing of the interior

Booted geese walked here once

until the time of their slaughter

an epic place, a monument

to a nightmare, intended as

the epicenter of empire,

marble polished with the hearts

of millions, washed in blood,

according to the literal interpretation

it did not, could not, survive, once

good men did something.

so it is always

Painting: Interior by Anselm Kiefer; oil, acrylic and paper on canvas, 1981. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Kiefer’s painting is taken from photographs of the Mosaic Hall designed by Albert Speer for Adolf Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery (above). The massive structure was bombed during World War II and later torn down.

Burning bush

Artist, dressed in a shroud,

shoes removed, carries

a burning bush; illuminates

a forest consumed by flame,

the hiding places and denials

of dark woods exposed. And so

becomes a narrator,

a storyteller, a light bearer,

a commandment carrier;

opens eyes but first

his own. Cannot look full

into the face. Only a partial view

from the back allowed.

or else death. The ground hot,

holy.

Illustration: Man the Forest by Anselm Kiefer (1971), private collection, San Francisco. This was one of the paintings included in the Anselm Kiefer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art in London this past fall.