Secret life:

Anselm Kiefer's monumental steel paintings from private collections at the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg

A Drip, a goose, a pair of felt slippers, countless unknown stellar names. Behind, an Elizabethian theory of reflecting plants at the canopy, and the romance between northern thought worlds of Novalis, Arno Schmidt and Peter Greenaway. Then, as an author, "just" Ingeborg Bachmann plays a role, but shows herself capable to symbolize the whole world construction, especially respecting that Anselm Kiefer dedicates her a huge piece of color sludge, entitled "Bohemia is located at the Sea".

How fast is it to get from Bohemia and the Wadden Sea to the Lüneburger Heide, where we begin, with the head in the neck, near an observatory, to memorize the star images from "Drowning by Numbers" until a kind of deer like creature appears in the distance, a mixture of an animal and a woman, etc. ... In short: If you think of Kiefer at night, your Schmidt may become tongue-tied. Should we work us through the Wadden Sea from German poetry, mysticism, the English naturalist theory of Richard FLUDD - it goes without saying that new cult authors have to be discovered - even if the work analysis that has such been initiated, beginning at the German Shakespeare reception represented by Wieland to Novalis et cetera will be quite strenuous.

The Salzburger works themselves, in particular the somewhat impressing fourteen pieces series "The secret life of Plants" suggest quite convincingly the sinking into the hidden fabric of cultural ideas and alternatives. In front of the artwork, it is of course the simplest to search for other art to open the first door into the future. From gray image areas, although made of steel, and white lettering, although as color-drip, we conclude, especially if they are combined with felt slippers, that these steal slates allude to the slate plates of Joseph Beuys. (We may have previously assumed this, as Kiefer was a pupil of Beuys, but Kiefer has grown out of the student's shoes since long.)

Thus, let us consider what we learned in the Republic of Erudites "Wikipedia" about Joseph Beuys, post - Nazi, post - militarian and post - monumental sculptor. We read that we can pursue the literary association to Arno, his deer creature and the Lüneburger Heide even in felt slippers: "From 1947 to 1949 he worked on zoological films by Heinz Sielmann and Georg Schimanski about the life cycle of the game animals in the birch forest Lüneburger Heide, the northern wild swans, geese and ducks in the alluvium of the Ems and on the lives of the white stork in Schleswig-Holstein Bergenhusen. The goose is significant enough to us to suspect that even as a member of the erudited scholar's republic the goose in Kiefer's new works by 2007/2008 has to be understood as a reference to Joseph Beuys. The goose with Beuys in turn leads to Konrad Lorenz and the Institute of Marine Biology, the Department to the tide, the tide to the stars and everything together by the Lüneburger Heide directly to the stars.

But the slate plates and the dismissed professor have, in this course of association, become monumental steel plates and the already sold into private collections works of a strictly Incontestable – we found Kiefer just in October 2007 in the media, because the Louvre gave him an order endowed with 800.000 euros, that he fulfilled with the painting "Athanor". The painting shows a naked and nearly skeletal man against a black background, as lifeless on the ground. Article about "Monumenta"

The Paris Exhibition "Monumenta" is recalled by the Salzburg presentation of new works from private collections through some joint or similar pieces, such as Kiefer's image "Reise ans Ende der Nacht", based on a novel by the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Célines book appeared in 1932. The writer is compared with Ernst Jünger in the literature, and judged as almost more fascistic - but personally as well stylistically so deviantly death-seeking that this his attitude was unacceptable in fascism and made him become more like an avantguardist.

The art-piece itself is a rusty steel vessel on the high, moving lake, as wuthering but rigid made color paste on the picture surface. A kind of sculptural image thus, and again a reference to cult authors of the conservative elite of erudition, who participated as teens or through their fathers in the war and terrorist history of the German fascism. "Athanor", that is actually a name of an alchemical furnace, the "philosophical furnace", for the mystical stone that can in accordance with the doctrine be burned within this furnace. As ambient space for a naked, emaciated man, it is, in this context, an almost tasteless symbol for transfiguration, that especially generates uneasiness with pieces in Salzburg like the work "black flakes" from a private collection, that is dedicated to Paul Celan. It stinks and sticks, one could almost say, heretically, against this hidden approach of infatuation using "German culture".

Kiefer sticks on Germany and stages Beuys in his series "Secret life of plants" to a kind of all-predominant father, without taken his art work seriously, but in contrary slapping him with his own monumentalism. The infinity, which appears so beautiful in Kiefer's works, is just not a retrospective response to the social art of Beuys, but gets into the eye through literature, which came along much more unobtrusive, inconspicuous, entertaining and illegible and becomes only by the collapse of transfiguration in the series to a kind of goose decoction to which Greenaway's rope jumping star countress is easily prefered.

So that beautiful these works are, so romantically they invite with their monumentalism and astrodripping to response deeply, as ugly they are as steel gates to the re-opening of history.

Report and photos of MdM: Dr. Ulrike Ritter

From Wikipedia: "1999 was Anselm Kiefer honored with the Praemium Imperiale of the Japan Art Association for his life's work. In the preamble to the award it is stated: 'A complex critical preoccupation with the history goes through Anselm Kiefer's work. His paintings and sculptures created by Georg Baselitz provoced a riot at the Venice Biennale in 1980: The spectators had to decide whether the seemingly Nazi motives were meanty ironically or whether fascistic ideas should be transported. Kiefer worked in the conviction that the art of a traumatized and irritated nation could bring healing to a divided world. On giant screens he created his epic pictures, the history of German culture with the help of depictions calling up figures such as Richard Wagner or Goethe, and continuing the tradition of the history painting as a means of addressing the world. „Just a few contemporary artists have such a strong sense of commitment to the arts preoccupation with the past and present ethical issues, and is able to express the possibility that debt can be eradicated by human effort.“