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Lot Essay
‘Poland is not yet lost, So long as we still live. What the alien power has seized from us, We shall recapture with a sabre’ – Polish National Anthem
Noch ist Polen Veloren I (Poland is Not Yet Lost I) is the first of an important series of paintings made in 1978 in which many of the disparate earlier themes of Kiefer’s work began to come together, into complex layerings of history and mythology united in one powerful, resonant pictorial image. Marking an extension of Kiefer’s development of the Teutonic legend of Siegfried and Brunhilde into the tragedy of the Third Reich, the majority of Kiefer’s Noch ist Polen Veloren paintings invoke the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the beginning of the Second World War. This epoch-defining event marked both a beginning and an end for Hitler’s Germany – something which Kiefer addresses directly in this first painting of the series by focusing on the central image of a spiralling pool of water seemingly either bubbling up from an underground source or, alternatively, spiralling down the drain. The ambiguity as to whether this ‘spring’ is swelling or not is wholly intentional and refers directly to Kiefer’s recent series of works using the Donnauquelle or ‘Source of the Danube’ as a metaphorical image for the repetitive rise and fall of German power, culture, influence, nationalism and Empire throughout history.
Made also in 1978, Kiefer’s Donnauquelle works also refer to the artist himself and his own deeply held sense of his own identity and destiny being inexorably intertwined with this turbulent rise and fall in German history. Kiefer was born in March 1945, two months before the end the war, in Donaueschingen, a town founded on the point where two rivers meet to form the Danube and traditionally thought of as the source of the great river. His sense of self and identity as an artist seem, for him, to be integrally interconnected with the unique place and time into which he was born. It is for this reason that many of the spiralling forms of the Donnauquelle, as in this work, also take on the shape of an artist’s palette.
The palette is a frequent motif in Kiefer’s art, particularly from the 1970s, and, as the traditional attribute of the classical painter, was used by the artist as an allegory of pictorial representation. Kiefer himself doesn’t use a palette, but its image featured in his art, throughout the 1970s, as a vehicle for showing the profound ambivalence between notions of representation and the psychological reality of the scorched fields and broken buildings of a ruined Germany. It became Kiefer’s means of asking and painting the question ‘How can anyone be a German artist after Auschwitz?’
Noch ist Polen Veloren I, is the first work in a series of paintings that fuse these ideas with the legend of Siegfried and Brunhilde and the rise and fall of German culture and nationalism that Kiefer had addressed in paintings such as his Wege der Weltweisheit (Ways of Worldly Wisdom). In these paintings the destruction of German culture had been represented by a bleeding tree stump – its palette-like shape of spiralling rings symbolising not just the felling of a Teutonberg tree but also the spiralling rise and fall of German destiny in the same way as the palette-shaped spiral of the Donauquelle. In Noch ist Polen Veloren I this form takes centre stage, while also appearing, with lesser prominence in several of the other paintings in the series. It is underpinned in this work by the image of a German tank on the left and that of a horse on the right that symbolise the German-Polish conflict of September 1939 and the legendary charge at the Battle of Krojanty in which the famous Polish Cavalry gloriously but forlornly charged the invading German Panzers.
Like the endlessly rising and falling source of the Danube, this epic action was one of the first and last great actions of the war as it was one of the first military confrontations of the Second World War and the last great cavalry charge of the famous Polish Cavalry. Now an event that has passed into popular mythology, the charge at Krojanty was also an event that embodied the spirit of Poland and put into tragic but glorious action the words of its national anthem: ‘Poland is not yet lost, So long as we still live. What the alien power has seized from us, We shall recapture with a sabre.’
Noch ist Polen Veloren I (Poland is Not Yet Lost I) is the first of an important series of paintings made in 1978 in which many of the disparate earlier themes of Kiefer’s work began to come together, into complex layerings of history and mythology united in one powerful, resonant pictorial image. Marking an extension of Kiefer’s development of the Teutonic legend of Siegfried and Brunhilde into the tragedy of the Third Reich, the majority of Kiefer’s Noch ist Polen Veloren paintings invoke the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the beginning of the Second World War. This epoch-defining event marked both a beginning and an end for Hitler’s Germany – something which Kiefer addresses directly in this first painting of the series by focusing on the central image of a spiralling pool of water seemingly either bubbling up from an underground source or, alternatively, spiralling down the drain. The ambiguity as to whether this ‘spring’ is swelling or not is wholly intentional and refers directly to Kiefer’s recent series of works using the Donnauquelle or ‘Source of the Danube’ as a metaphorical image for the repetitive rise and fall of German power, culture, influence, nationalism and Empire throughout history.
Made also in 1978, Kiefer’s Donnauquelle works also refer to the artist himself and his own deeply held sense of his own identity and destiny being inexorably intertwined with this turbulent rise and fall in German history. Kiefer was born in March 1945, two months before the end the war, in Donaueschingen, a town founded on the point where two rivers meet to form the Danube and traditionally thought of as the source of the great river. His sense of self and identity as an artist seem, for him, to be integrally interconnected with the unique place and time into which he was born. It is for this reason that many of the spiralling forms of the Donnauquelle, as in this work, also take on the shape of an artist’s palette.
The palette is a frequent motif in Kiefer’s art, particularly from the 1970s, and, as the traditional attribute of the classical painter, was used by the artist as an allegory of pictorial representation. Kiefer himself doesn’t use a palette, but its image featured in his art, throughout the 1970s, as a vehicle for showing the profound ambivalence between notions of representation and the psychological reality of the scorched fields and broken buildings of a ruined Germany. It became Kiefer’s means of asking and painting the question ‘How can anyone be a German artist after Auschwitz?’
Noch ist Polen Veloren I, is the first work in a series of paintings that fuse these ideas with the legend of Siegfried and Brunhilde and the rise and fall of German culture and nationalism that Kiefer had addressed in paintings such as his Wege der Weltweisheit (Ways of Worldly Wisdom). In these paintings the destruction of German culture had been represented by a bleeding tree stump – its palette-like shape of spiralling rings symbolising not just the felling of a Teutonberg tree but also the spiralling rise and fall of German destiny in the same way as the palette-shaped spiral of the Donauquelle. In Noch ist Polen Veloren I this form takes centre stage, while also appearing, with lesser prominence in several of the other paintings in the series. It is underpinned in this work by the image of a German tank on the left and that of a horse on the right that symbolise the German-Polish conflict of September 1939 and the legendary charge at the Battle of Krojanty in which the famous Polish Cavalry gloriously but forlornly charged the invading German Panzers.
Like the endlessly rising and falling source of the Danube, this epic action was one of the first and last great actions of the war as it was one of the first military confrontations of the Second World War and the last great cavalry charge of the famous Polish Cavalry. Now an event that has passed into popular mythology, the charge at Krojanty was also an event that embodied the spirit of Poland and put into tragic but glorious action the words of its national anthem: ‘Poland is not yet lost, So long as we still live. What the alien power has seized from us, We shall recapture with a sabre.’