Anselm Kiefer - A terrible beauty

Halfway through The Royal Academy's incredible Anselm Kiefer retrospective I came across an anecdote that made me chuckle, providing temporary respite from the terrifying beauty of the work on show. Yet it was this amusing aside that led me to reflect on the enormous levels of ambition needed to tackle the subject of memory and nationhood in 20th Century Germany.

To the right of Kiefer's painting, Die Orden der Nacht (The Orders of the Night, 1997), were the words that tickled me: "In 1985 Kiefer acquired the lead roof off Cologne Cathedral."  Without bothering to read on, I began to picture an aged man scrambling over and around those glorious Gothic spires, with the ultimate goal of nicking the lead off the 'church roof' and selling it for a tidy sum.  Immediately Morrissey's opening salvo to 'Vicar In A Tutu' scampered into my head - 'I was minding my business lifting the lead off the roof of the Holy Name Church' - and the sombre mood that the exhibition had cast over me temporarily lightened.

Die Orden der Nacht (The Orders of the Night, 1997)

Later I would return to that lead, my thoughts once again couching themselves in appropriately serious tones.  The immense weight of Kiefer's subject, German history saturated by the horrors of the last century, was an almost unbearable load for art to lift.  Therefore, to tackle that subject required material suited to the job.  Not for Anselm the short trip down to his local branch of Cass Art to pick up supplies - some gouache and a palette knife or a selection of pastels.  Or even, like Jackson Pollock, to casually dispense with retrieving his dropped cigarette from the prone canvas.  Instead, this artist lifted his material directly from one of the most iconic German creations and the country's most visited landmark.

Kiefer loves lead.  It is present throughout his work.  Not just as the material that finds its way onto those enormous canvasses, but also as the integral ingredient in his sculptural books.  On climbing the Royal Academy stairway, the very first piece that confronts you is The Language of Birds (2013). Composed of a core of burnt books fashioned largely from lead, heaviness and density seemingly binding them to the ground, two dark angelic wings, nevertheless, appear to be on the cusp of allowing the whole structure to take flight.  This paradox is the key to Kiefer.  A huge burden that must, despite every atrocity, attempt to soar.   

The Language of Birds (2013)

Beyond this avian overture, you proceed into the first room and are confronted by Kiefer’s early works, blunt, crude and controversial.  This period is exemplified by Eis und Blut (Ice and Blood, 1971), which depicts a uniformed Kiefer at the centre of a bleak, blood stained winter landscape, directing a startling Nazi salute straight towards the viewer.  After the war Nazi iconography and salutes were banned in Germany, resulting in a collective amnesia (Kiefer talked about how his parents would not even mention what had gone before) or at least a deflection of thought from the atrocities that had taken place.  Silence isn’t healthy.  Kiefer wanted to drag these skeletons, kicking and screaming, out of both his own and the country’s closet.  And his work of this period does exactly that, not only a confrontation with these dreadful symbols, but also a tussle with the dangerous fanatics who would also be looking to appropriate them.

Eis und Blut (Ice and Blood, 1971)

Indeed, these early works serve as crib sheets for the rest of the exhibition, indirect and oblique, but always hinting.  On entering the next space you are confronted by larger and more impressive canvases.  One of these – Sulamith (1983) - depicts a large, dank cellar. Drawn in and corralled by that Nazi salute, you can only think of death chambers.  This cellar may be entirely absent of people, as much of the work in this exhibition is, but there is always a ghostly sense of the human at its centre.  

Sulamith (1983)

And from this point on, Kiefer's art begins to mesmerise and overwhelm.  It is as if something vibrant, beautiful and alive is attempting to breath under the astonishing weight of history.  Sunflowers reach towards the ceiling, despite the burden of lead, mould and thick, sickly paint that engulfs them.  The seeds of these petrified flowers are gripped by the canvas, arrested, doomed never to bud.  Real diamonds wink out of an impenetrable dark, as tenuous and untouchable as the stars in the night sky (literally untouchable as the security alarmed strip on the floor will testify).  A patch of gaudy colour, the spectrum struggling to assert itself, occupies a small patch of a vast polluting swirl of leaden greys, blacks and near whites, ghettoised and strangled.  It is almost too much.  You find yourself looking for respite.  Coffee and cake in the Royal Academy cafe, an aside in a room full of drafted in Monets, or indeed a joke.  The church roof aside, it doesn’t happen.  This exhibition leaves you punch-drunk and buzzing, yet also deflated and sombre.

Morgenthau Plan (2013)

Curiously, German culture is monopolising my autumn. Throwing myself into the works of that other oblique artist, the novelist – carefree pigeon-holing here - W G Sebald, I've found myself appreciating the indirect and diffuse gaze of the ageing 20^th Century German.  Sebald's magnificent Austerlitz tells the story of an academic who somehow manages to avoid all the historical events of the 20^th Century.  Yet an epiphany, in of all places Liverpool Street Station, sets in motion a search for Jewish parents, last seen in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.  Discovery and remembering are incredibly painful, dangerous even.  But also necessary if sanity is to be – possibly - achieved.  It seems to me that both Sebald and Kiefer are searching for and attempting to resurrect the same ghosts. And it’s their indirectness that makes their work so powerful.  Indeed, it is Sebald’s words – or rather the words of his protagonist Jacques Austerlitz – that outline what the German artist is up against:  

“The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.”

Gazing into the future from the unremembered past

Kiefer’s work is also a battle with that darkness. Willing us to remember, urging us to find a glimpse of beauty amongst the atrocity, no matter how painful.  It is there, momentarily, but the weight of the subject – as it must - brings it all crashing back to earth, violent and horrifying.

Anselm Kiefer is showing at the Royal Academy until Sunday 14th December.