It might be just too easy to describe the work of Anselm Kiefer as monumental. In his 200 acre ‘workshop’ near Barjac in the Cévennes, he has dotted the landscape-cumplayground with towers of shipping containers and 12-foot lead battleships. At another site outside of Paris, his assistants use bikes to travel between vast walls lined with his paintings. One of his most indicative paintings, Margarete (1981), comes in at 110 x 150.
Kiefer’s work reaches monumental proportions not just in size, but in its very subject matter. Born in Germany in 1945, Kiefer has throughout his career revisited themes such as the Holocaust, German and Egyptian mythology, art, death and destruction.
His pieces overflow with references. Margarete owes its name to the German guard in ‘Todesfuge’, a poem by the Romanian Jewish writer Paul Celan, who survived the Nazi work-camps and eventually committed suicide in 1970. Seeing the painting and an English translation, ‘Death Fugue’, side-byside in Kiefer’s astonishing retrospective at the Royal Academy last year cast a powerful spell. Raw materials are a common feature in Kiefer’s work; high spires of real straw loom over the onlooker in Margarete, representing the subject’s golden Aryan hair and the unsettling idea of racial purity. The tips of the straw end in flames, to suggest funereal candles and Kiefer’s belief in the spiritual, circular connection of earth and sky, joined by these smoking pyres.
That this crop rises from charred, ashcovered earth adds as much to the painting’s expressive and textural layers. We are haunted by the blackened hair of Celan’s Jewish prisoner Shulamith and the devastating effects of war on German land. The name ‘Margarete’ hangs scribbled among the straw tendrils of rising smoke, as a painful memorial or a chilling ode to Kiefer’s tainted heritage.
Although its rough surface and elongated, ghostly movement did not particularly warm my cockles, Kiefer has managed to capture a feeling of resurrection. The horrors of the Third Reich and Celan’s own experiences now yield art and poetry, not silence, torture and fear, challenging Adorno’s famous claim about ‘poetry after Auschwitz’. For Kiefer, “Creation and destruction are one and the same,” and the monumental spires of Margarete point far beyond tragedy and into the greater universe.
