Through the 1970s, Kiefer continued to explore the relationship between the artist and the natural world. In Heaven—Earth (1974), a tree curls up the left-hand side of the canvas, and under the tree’s branches is an outline of a painter’s palette, framing a traditional landscape. Within the palette is a vertical axis along which are scrawled Himmel (heaven), malen (painting), and Erde (earth). As in Wagner, the tree is a symbol of archaic origins and power but the palette, and the vertical line, seem tentative, uncertain of the real relationship between heaven and art and earth. Painting of the Scorched Earth (1974) has a similar composition, with a tree and a palette, but it opens out onto a blackened and smouldering landscape—suggesting that the fires of war spoiled the landscape in which nineteenth-century romantic painters found inspiration, then compromised the purity of that relationship to nature.
The scorched earth in these paintings also appears in some of Kiefer’s gorgeous early book projects. Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen (1975) is a sixty-page book; to produce it, Kiefer burned his own paintings and then cut them down to neat, oily, black pages. Cauterization implies that the destruction of Germany, the burning of its flesh, was necessary in order to renew it. “Collective catastrophe marks the point where history threatens to revert to natural history,” Sebald writes in his essay “Between History and Natural History.” “In the midst of the ruined civilization, what life is left assembles to begin at the beginning again in a different time.” For Kiefer, the distinction between natural history and mythic history, between the flow of matter and the flow of spirit, between heaven and earth, is hopelessly blurred.
By the 1980s, Kiefer’s work had become grander, more unabashedly sensuous, and more elegiac. In The Milky Way (1985-87), the beholder, diminutive in front of the massive canvas, seems to be gliding fast and low over a thick, fleshy pink-and-gold field that pales as it recedes into a burning horizon. Like the preludes and interludes of Wagner’s Ring, where the music seems less an illustration of a story than a physical enactment of the processes of fate, the surfaces of Kiefer’s paintings are not so much illusions as the cascading and active nexus of natural forces. There is a cut in the foreground of the canvas, a white gash in which Kiefer has written die Milchstrasse (the Milky Way), and pointing into that cut is a lead funnel rigged by wires to the top of the painting.
The landscape in The Milky Way is both apocalyptic and sumptuous, a despoiled promised land of milk and honey and fire. The lead funnel could easily be a mysterious object rescued from the rubble of a destroyed city (” This state began with a nation rummaging in the refuse,” novelist Heinrich Böll said of West Germany), but it could also be a magical instrument used to anneal the rift between heaven and earth—or both. The lead from which the funnel was made, the lead that appears so frequently in Kiefer’s work, is a powerfully symbolic material. It is the materia prima of the alchemist’s esoteric trade, the material that streamed from rooftops during the firestorms in Dresden, and the material out of which the movable type in the old Jewish printing presses of Vilnius was made and which, according to legend, was later melted down into bullets by resistance fighters.
The Hierarchy of Angels (1985-87) is an aerial view, soaring over a grid of fields that swim with dark, molten blues and blacks. The horizon is a foaming seascape, white waves and black water, and the sky is smeared with burnished gold. Tilted across the centre of this huge canvas is an airplane propeller fashioned from sheets of lead and craggy chunks of metal named after various seraphim and cherubim. The propeller draws the viewer into the point of view of a bomber bearing down on a landscape, but it could also represent the whirling universe, and the chunks of lead could be lost angels, avenging angels, bombs, or mere debris. Kiefer’s art is emotionally disorienting in part because catastrophe and redemption are so closely intertwined and ultimately unresolved.
Kiefer’s more recent work, though not exactly lighter, is less oppressed by the weight of the past and has an almost Byzantine luxuriance. The Heavenly Palaces (2002) consists of a long view down a corridor between heavy golden pillars as the heavens, speckled white and lead-grey, come crashing down through the roof. In Sefer Hechaloth (2002), named after an ancient mystical Hebrew text mapping the ascent of the spirit to the palaces of God, shelves jut out from a blue-grey ground, forming a jagged staircase, and on each step is a burned book, as though destruction, or purification, by fire were a precondition of transcendence.
Paintings like the 2004 version of The Heavenly Palaces are full of longing that is at once carnal and spiritual. The ground is a fluid grey shot through with gold, and it flows back to a flat horizon. Above are old, rusty birdcages, and in some of them rest stones. These are closed, battered palaces, and what they contain is finally impenetrable. Melancholia (2004), on the other hand, is nearly classical in style. Above a stormy sea, shimmering with gold, hangs a glass polyhedron, hermetic symbol of the philosopher’s stone that appears in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 masterpiece of the same title. In Kiefer’s work, the instruments imposed on a landscape—perspective line, painter’s palette, finely carpentered polyhedron—stand in for the mind’s effort to grasp the vastness and flux of the natural world. And the mind is inevitably dwarfed, inundated, and powerless. According to eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, an experience of the natural sublime occurs when the imagination cannot encompass the infinity of nature. But Kiefer’s work is less about an oceanic feeling of the sublime than it is about knowledge and consciousness.
Anselm Kiefer’s art is beautiful, and ugly, and punishing, and exhausting, and, at moments, sublime. After viewing Heaven and Earth last February, on a day as bitterly cold as the one I spent in Vilnius, I took a break by watching a short video documenting the unloading and installation of Ash Flower (1983-97) in Montreal. The painting reproduces the interior perspective of a Nazi ceremonial hall designed by Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer. It is smeared over with layer after layer of ash. Attached to the centre of the painting, upside down, is an immense dried sunflower, clods of dirt sticking to its roots. Workers carefully slid the enormous wooden crate from the back of a truck in the midst of an intense blizzard that filled the screen with a swarm of white. Inside the museum, the installers opened the crates and lifted the fragile panels as though they were sacred relics. Anxious curators looked on. Watching the video, I thought not of the ruined Torah scrolls in Vilnius or of the Holocaust, but of Germany itself. Outside once shattered but now immaculately restored buildings in cities like Hamburg, Nuremberg, and Cologne, one often finds plaques that say “Destroyed: April 1944/ Restored: June 1966,” sometimes accompanied by a photograph of the building taken shortly after the bombing, as though the war had occurred in order to demonstrate the efficiency of German construction crews.
This may be just another expression of the “inability to mourn,” but Germany remains haunted by the ghosts of its own destruction, and in a larger sense so do we. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” compiled in 1940, the same year he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazi invasion of France, Walter Benjamin wrote: “This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
We in North America are perhaps made nervous by the scale and ambition of an art like that of Anselm Kiefer, or of Richard Wagner for that matter. We are often more comfortable with an aesthetic that addresses easily grasped issues with precision and critical clarity—an efficient, bureaucratic art that has relinquished the wild nineteenth-century ambitions of Hegel, Marx, and Wagner. We are fussy; we have chronically cold feet. Yet the fact that Heaven and Earth travelled (at great expense, no doubt) to Montreal, and that the complete Ring cycle will open the new Toronto opera house this fall, suggests that we long for something deeper. Perhaps we sense that the catastrophe of history is piling up at our feet too, and we need a language to understand it; perhaps we too suffer from an inability to mourn and need to be awoken; perhaps we need an art that is larger and more harrowing. Vaulted halls encrusted with ashes, palaces with the heavens crashing through, Wotan lamenting the decline of the gods, Valhalla engulfed in flames.
