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Lot Essay
Among the most significant exponents of expressionist painting in modern times, in Lorelei Anselm Kiefer creates a compelling mythological tableau. A powerful visual statement made through juxtapositions of materials and ideas, across its surface the artist constructs a complex matrix of spiritually and politically charged meanings. Searching to contend with the bitter political and social upheavals after 1945, Kiefer turned to German myth in the wake of Hitler’s National Socialism to signal the massively fraught path toward reconciliation and understanding, a path traveling the “difficult terrain between the possibility of transcendence and the necessity of remembrance…” (M. Auping, “Introduction,” in Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, Ft. Worth, Texas, 2006, p. 27). As the artist has stated, his metaphors and symbols “move in all directions,” whether literally directional or in terms of space and time (“‘Heaven is an Idea,’ Photographs and Interview with Anselm Kiefer,” in ibid., p. 165).
Turning to folk legends such as “Lorelei,” as here in this eponymous canvas from 2005, Kiefer adapts the nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine’s ode to a contemporary context. While Hitler and the Nazis used the myths and folk tales of German Romanticism in its idealized form as exemplars of wahrhaften deutschen Kunst (“true German art”), Kiefer, in contrast, adapts such German tropes to a more emotionally catalytic purpose—that of reparation and hope. Kiefer plays with the very accessibility of these German symbols. Here, the myth of the idealized siren Lorelei beckoning to sailors from a high rock on the Rhine causing them to impale themselves on the shards—turns into an allegory of lost power and dashed dreams. Through his own symbolic system, the artist is able not only to allegorize past atrocities, but also to cause the viewer to identify with the myth. Those who remember intuitively understand that multivalent signification is in play. Could it be that like the seaman in his tiny boat of Heine’s poem, who is mesmerized both by the waves of the Rhine and the flowing melody of the apparition, the German people were in thrall to the rhetoric of the German Reich, only to succumb to the manipulations of Hitler’s monomaniacal propaganda? Those who were dashed upon the rocks, so to speak, were seduced and destroyed, just as the seaman was deluded and distracted from his course homeward.
A wild, yet compelling beauty extends from a central floating vertical gridded rectangle, an allusion to a mullioned window with six panels through which, ironically, nothing can be seen. Clearly pinned to the canvas, this “window” alludes to historical painting—the window through which the viewer might glimpse an illusionistic transformation of the real world. In Kiefer’s work, the “window” is opaque, obscuring opticality itself: an object mysteriously present that prevents sight. This metaphor recurs repeatedly in Kiefer’s work, early on in his Wooden Room (1972) and later, most notably in the compelling Aschenblume (Ash Flower) of 2004 (private collection). Further, in his book “Markawa” (1996) a photograph of a building façade with a six-paned broken window calls up for the viewer the “Kristallnacht” (Night of the Broken Glass) during which panes of glass situated in synagogues and shops were systematically destroyed by the Nazis (M. Auping, ibid., p. 100).
Jasper Johns had treated the notion of juxtaposed obscurity in much the same way two decades earlier in his masterful Perilous Night, where strange objects, such as plaster casts of three arms severed at the elbow are tacked to the painting’s surface. Johns’s title might refer to the Isenheim Altarpiece, which depicts the night when Christ was resurrected and shows Christ’s sores and wounds. Like Johns, Kiefer has created a work of multiple juxtapositions through which symbolic meaning is conveyed. The motive of the Mondrianesque geometric form in Lorelei allegorizes a closure of sight and, further, of a denial or rejection of divine revelation, referring in part to a rejection of the sacred and the imaginative realms of the Lorelei tale for the dark depths of a desolate sea below. Striated “tresses” flow from the window’s gridded structure, not hair, in fact, but rather straw, a simulation so to speak, of the golden hair of the original Lorelei folk tale. Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, written while the poet was interned in a Nazi labor camp was, likewise, a powerful lodestar for Kiefer’s artistic inspiration. Among the over thirty paintings Kiefer created during the 1980s that refer to this set of poems written in 1944 and 1945, “Your Golden Hair, Margarete (Dein goldenes Haar, Margarete)” evokes the golden hair of the siren in the present work as well the Aryan “race” declared by Hitler, which Celan had contrasted with Shulamith, King Solomon’s Jewish lover from the Song of Songs (Old Testament).
All of which is to say that this extraordinary work, Lorelei, is interlaced with multivalent meanings, not least of which is the notion of travel from the imaginative (or the divine) to the profane. For what we intuit in the paneled “window” is a reversal of the myth of the spirit, Lorelei, who causes mankind’s destruction. Rather, we almost feel that a human figure, a savior of mankind, Christ, with reference to the Isenheim Alterpiece, could appear on this gridded structure, a cross, his blood dripping into the darkened sea. In this way, Kiefer masterfully creates strata of timelessness, universality, empathy, and cultural memory. As accumulations of impasto in toned umber, sienna, and black touched with white sprays, cause light (or knowledge) to struggle against the earthen-shaded sky and break against the overall desolation, history, myth, and imagination, which were once shrouded in failed memory, open onto a path toward a newer more hopeful vision of the future. As the artist claimed, “I make a hole [in history] and pass through” (A. Kiefer, quoted in Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Art, London, 2014, p. 46).
Turning to folk legends such as “Lorelei,” as here in this eponymous canvas from 2005, Kiefer adapts the nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine’s ode to a contemporary context. While Hitler and the Nazis used the myths and folk tales of German Romanticism in its idealized form as exemplars of wahrhaften deutschen Kunst (“true German art”), Kiefer, in contrast, adapts such German tropes to a more emotionally catalytic purpose—that of reparation and hope. Kiefer plays with the very accessibility of these German symbols. Here, the myth of the idealized siren Lorelei beckoning to sailors from a high rock on the Rhine causing them to impale themselves on the shards—turns into an allegory of lost power and dashed dreams. Through his own symbolic system, the artist is able not only to allegorize past atrocities, but also to cause the viewer to identify with the myth. Those who remember intuitively understand that multivalent signification is in play. Could it be that like the seaman in his tiny boat of Heine’s poem, who is mesmerized both by the waves of the Rhine and the flowing melody of the apparition, the German people were in thrall to the rhetoric of the German Reich, only to succumb to the manipulations of Hitler’s monomaniacal propaganda? Those who were dashed upon the rocks, so to speak, were seduced and destroyed, just as the seaman was deluded and distracted from his course homeward.
A wild, yet compelling beauty extends from a central floating vertical gridded rectangle, an allusion to a mullioned window with six panels through which, ironically, nothing can be seen. Clearly pinned to the canvas, this “window” alludes to historical painting—the window through which the viewer might glimpse an illusionistic transformation of the real world. In Kiefer’s work, the “window” is opaque, obscuring opticality itself: an object mysteriously present that prevents sight. This metaphor recurs repeatedly in Kiefer’s work, early on in his Wooden Room (1972) and later, most notably in the compelling Aschenblume (Ash Flower) of 2004 (private collection). Further, in his book “Markawa” (1996) a photograph of a building façade with a six-paned broken window calls up for the viewer the “Kristallnacht” (Night of the Broken Glass) during which panes of glass situated in synagogues and shops were systematically destroyed by the Nazis (M. Auping, ibid., p. 100).
Jasper Johns had treated the notion of juxtaposed obscurity in much the same way two decades earlier in his masterful Perilous Night, where strange objects, such as plaster casts of three arms severed at the elbow are tacked to the painting’s surface. Johns’s title might refer to the Isenheim Altarpiece, which depicts the night when Christ was resurrected and shows Christ’s sores and wounds. Like Johns, Kiefer has created a work of multiple juxtapositions through which symbolic meaning is conveyed. The motive of the Mondrianesque geometric form in Lorelei allegorizes a closure of sight and, further, of a denial or rejection of divine revelation, referring in part to a rejection of the sacred and the imaginative realms of the Lorelei tale for the dark depths of a desolate sea below. Striated “tresses” flow from the window’s gridded structure, not hair, in fact, but rather straw, a simulation so to speak, of the golden hair of the original Lorelei folk tale. Paul Celan’s Todesfuge, written while the poet was interned in a Nazi labor camp was, likewise, a powerful lodestar for Kiefer’s artistic inspiration. Among the over thirty paintings Kiefer created during the 1980s that refer to this set of poems written in 1944 and 1945, “Your Golden Hair, Margarete (Dein goldenes Haar, Margarete)” evokes the golden hair of the siren in the present work as well the Aryan “race” declared by Hitler, which Celan had contrasted with Shulamith, King Solomon’s Jewish lover from the Song of Songs (Old Testament).
All of which is to say that this extraordinary work, Lorelei, is interlaced with multivalent meanings, not least of which is the notion of travel from the imaginative (or the divine) to the profane. For what we intuit in the paneled “window” is a reversal of the myth of the spirit, Lorelei, who causes mankind’s destruction. Rather, we almost feel that a human figure, a savior of mankind, Christ, with reference to the Isenheim Alterpiece, could appear on this gridded structure, a cross, his blood dripping into the darkened sea. In this way, Kiefer masterfully creates strata of timelessness, universality, empathy, and cultural memory. As accumulations of impasto in toned umber, sienna, and black touched with white sprays, cause light (or knowledge) to struggle against the earthen-shaded sky and break against the overall desolation, history, myth, and imagination, which were once shrouded in failed memory, open onto a path toward a newer more hopeful vision of the future. As the artist claimed, “I make a hole [in history] and pass through” (A. Kiefer, quoted in Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Art, London, 2014, p. 46).