Two articles on Anselm Kiefer

Schama, Simon. Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writings on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother. London: Vintage, 2011.

page 278
Anselm Kiefer
Guardian, 20 January 2007

Schama introduces this article by letting us know Kiefer tackles the big subjects, "the stuff that matters".

He is writing about Kiefer's show Aperiatur Terra at White Cube in London. Schama lightly states that Kiefer appears to have turned gardener, with paintings such as Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant iustum (2006) shown below. But he's not gardening gently.

This work is thick with paint, which Schama describes as volcanic material. The flower heads are bright and hopeful, but human intervention is shown by the track to the horizon, and the earth is a greenish-black paint, the "corrupted hues of chemical pollution" as Schama describes. Kiefer incorporates into his paintings organic and inorganic matter such as straw, hay, twigs.

Schama tells us that the bright poppies could be soldiers, or their fiery graves, or combat flares. There is no peaceful gardening here, only "dirty fields of death".

Schama concludes with "Kiefer's work happens to engage with almost everything that weighs upon us in our tortured age - the fate of the earth, the closeness of calamity, the desperate possibility of regeneration amid the charred and blasted ruins."

page 284
In Mesopotamia: Anselm Kiefer

Catalogue essay for Karfunkelfee and The Fertile Crescent
White Cube, 2009

Schama introduces this article by remembering his childhood after the war and comparing it to Kiefer's description of his own: "German planes had done this to my city; our plane had done that to Kiefer's." He states that is what kids did after the war: they ran around the streets, kicked ruins, and then went home and built with toys.

Schama continues by stating that Kiefer is a 'tumbler of edifices'. In all Kiefer's works on the destruction that power & domination score into the earth, houses of shelter suffer stress fractures and finally totter, collapsing back into the environment they came from - bricks, sand, clay. Kiefer illustrates this by using the elements to help the erosion of his structures outside. The author also describes some of Kiefer's gallery work as having a 'self-destabilisation'. a 'fall-off from the wall' feel.

Kiefer concentrates on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for stories of colossal construction and destruction - Albert Speer, 9/11. But Kiefer is also demonstrating small signs of hope - from the cracks, nature grows. Schama likens this to symbols of creation. A drawing together of 'beginnings and endings', 'cradle and graveyard',

There are also many allusions to folk tales, fairy tales and myths. Stories and poems from German culture feature strongly in Kiefer's work. 

From a Gagosian show in 1998, of which none of the monumental works sold, Kiefer tells Schama - their feel of self-destabilisation did not fit well with a gallery opening night of wine and 'black kit'. Schama writes that the time was one of minimalism being king of contemporary art. But Kiefer is one artist who would never be satisfied with a plain grid with no painter's marks evident. Kiefer has a fascination with construction and destruction using hand-made bricks in his artworks, and as Schama states, not unsurprising for a German artist whose life began amongst the rubble of destruction.