There are many sides to the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer. Those lucky enough to visit his studio complex at Barjac in the South of France encounter a staggering array of installations, underground tunnels, and tottering concrete towers resembling some contemporary equivalent to the fortifications of medieval Tuscany. But wisely, the Royal Academy has chosen to present Kiefer largely as a painter in a huge and triumphant exhibition of his work, running September 27 through December 14.
This was astute because the RA’s grand Main Galleries at Burlington House were built in the high Victorian age specifically to display paintings. No spaces in London — and few anywhere — do that job so well. They look fabulous filled with old masters, and equally splendid hung with Kiefer’s canvases. The result is to put him firmly and clearly where he belongs: in the great line of German art from Dürer to Caspar David Friedrich.
This is one of those exhibitions in which a major artist’s work and position in art history fall into place. You walk out feeling Kiefer is a giant figure in contemporary art. The show is visually stunning in an old-fashioned way, through the force of brush-stokes, paint surfaces, and, often, sheer scale.
These are some of the largest, most powerful, and also — as the president of the Academy, Christopher Le Brun, mentioned in his speech on the opening night — the heaviest pictures ever displayed at the RA. Kiefer’s paintings are weighted not only with extraneous materials — slabs of lead, desiccated sunflowers, even diamonds — but also with history.
Works such as “Osiris and Isis,” 1985-87, are overwhelming in their physical size (in this case 12 by 18 feet), and also in their subject matter. This is a picture of a massive stack of mouldering dun-coloured bricks. It reminds you of Egyptian pyramids and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, however it’s not exactly a topographical picture of these, but something more universal: ancient and modern at the same time. Among the objects attached to its surface are a television circuit-board and shattered fragments of porcelain bathroom fittings.
Although figures appear in some of his works (most frequently that of the artist himself), as a painter Kiefer is essentially a landscapist. More exactly — this is one of his links to Friedrich — he is a painter of landscapes and buildings that express states of mind and spirit. But where Friedrich painted bleak terrain lit by a distant hope of divine salvation, in his earlier work at least Kiefer presented a post-apocalyptical world of menace and destruction.
He was born in March 1945, a few months before the end of the Second World War. He grew up in a landscape of bombed-out ruins, the remnants of a culture that had catastrophically failed. The introductory room contains early works such as the watercolor “Winter Landscape,” 1970, in which a severed head in the sky drips blood on a desolate, snow-covered land (Kiefer can be small-scale and delicate as well as epic, a point the exhibition makes clear).
A lot of his work of the ’70s and ’80s was concerned with coming to terms with the horrors of Nazism. A painting such as “Interior,” 1981, based on a room in the New Reich’s Chancellery — designed by Hitler’s favorite architect, Albert Speer, and destroyed in 1945 — has a grim funereal chill. In the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust, there was a feeling that German culture had become irredeemably toxic. In 1949 the philosopher Theodor Adorno famously stated that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric.
In his first two decades as an artist, Kiefer was engaged in an attempt to use the language of earlier art to examine the disaster that had occurred — and so bring it back to life. The second room of the exhibition is full of paintings of interiors built of planks and beams patterned with vigorous wood-grain. Trees and forests are ubiquitous in German art and myth. In “Nothung,” 1973, Siegfried’s sword is impaled in the floor: a Wagnerian symbol, still penetrating threateningly into what was, in reality, the wooden loft where Kiefer worked in those years.
As time went on, and especially after his move to the South of France in the early 1990s, Kiefer’s focus broadened. He hasn’t forgotten the cataclysms of the mid 20th century. In the courtyard there are two huge vitrines — one of the few examples of sculptural installations in the exhibition — in which lead models of warships are lurking like so many metallic sharks. But here the reference is wider, as the title makes clear: “Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War,” 2011-14. Khlebnikov, a Russian Futurist, suggested that great sea battles occur cyclically at intervals of around 300 years.
The cycles of history of are one of Kiefer’s themes, as is time the destroyer, the burgeoning and death of everything — hence those sun flowers that interest Kiefer as much as they did Van Gogh — and the stars of the cosmos. These are weighty subjects, too ponderous you might think for any art to carry. But somehow, Kiefer does it. This exhibition is monumental, magnificently over the top, and marvellous.
