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Lot Essay
‘Come and I will show thee, where the waters are suspended in the highest, where fire is burning in the midst of hail, where lightnings lighten out of the midst of snowy mountains, where thunders are roaring in the celestial heights, where a flame is burning in the midst of the burning fire and where voices make themselves heard in the midst of thunder and earthquake’—R. ISHMAEL BEN ELISHA
‘… for me [Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette] was an inspiring building in the sense that a very simple material, a modern material, could be used to create a spiritual space. Great religions and great buildings are part of the sediment of time; like pieces of sand. Le Corbusier used the sand to construct a spiritual space. I discovered the spirituality of concrete – using earth to mould a symbol, a symbol of the imaginative and the spiritual world. He tried to make heaven on earth – the ancient paradox’ —A. KIEFER
‘In the Sefer Hechaloth, the ancient book that came before the kabbala, there is no worry of directions. It describes stages, metaphors, and symbols that float everywhere. Up and down were the same direction. The Hechaloth is the spiritual journey toward perfect cognition. North, south, east, and west, up and down are not issues. For me, this also relates to time. Past, present, and future are essentially the same direction. It is about finding symbols that move in all directions’ —A. KIEFER
In Sefer Hechaloth (2001), Anselm Kiefer conjures heaven and earth from acrylic and emulsion. An inverted staircase, its form inspired by the stairs of Le Corbusier’s Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette – a formative location for Kiefer as a young artist – hangs free in an ivory sky. Below, a vast, turbulent ocean of bone-white and lead-grey impasto engulfs two thirds of the work’s surface. The eight steps are numbered unevenly, one through seven; from them plunge eight downward rods of rusting iron, as if to remind us of gravity in our encounter with this airborne stairway. Since the 1990s, Kiefer has explored the heavenly and material realms through immense, near-sculptural paintings. Keenly alive to the visual power of metaphor, he often employs ladders, stairs, spirals, and lightning rods – images born of his study of arcane religious texts – to link the two kingdoms. Here, in Kiefer’s distinctive cursive hand, Sefer Hechaloth is inscribed to the upper left. Also known as the Third Book of Enoch, this is an ancient Hebrew mystical work that pre-dates the Kabbala, and describes the ascension of an initiate through seven heavenly palaces to the Hechaloth, the palace in which the wise will be united with God. This allegorical journey combines the ascent to divinity with the descent into the depths of self-knowledge. As Kiefer has said of the book, ‘there is no worry of directions. It describes stages, metaphors, and symbols that float everywhere. Up and down were the same direction. The Hechaloth is the spiritual journey toward perfect cognition. North, south, east, and west, up and down are not issues. For me, this also relates to time. Past, present, and future are essentially the same direction. It is about finding symbols that move in all directions’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 165). The central image of this work – the flight of stairs in flight – is just such a symbol, encapsulating the extraordinary mythic scope of Kiefer’s oeuvre. We see a path to transcendence, but our bearings are lost; the subject is heavenly enlightenment, yet sky and sea are rendered in heavy swathes of lithic colour. Majestic and enigmatic, Sefer Hechaloth is a vista of both spiritual and earthly transfiguration, touching on the transformative mysteries of art itself.
To perform alchemy, for Kiefer, is to bring matter to a higher spiritual state. When asked if alchemy is a metaphor for his art, he corrects that ‘It is what I do … Alchemy is not to make gold, the real alchemist is not interested in material things but in transubstantiation, in transforming the spirit. It’s a spiritual thing more than a material thing. An alchemist puts the phenomena of the world in another context’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in J. Wullschlager, ‘Interview with Anselm Kiefer, ahead of his Royal Academy show,’ Financial Times, 19 September 2014). An alchemical fascination with materials such as lead, gold, charcoal and soil has been clear since Kiefer’s early work of the 1970s, which grappled with the unspoken traumas of Germany’s past: while still employing such symbolically potent elements, Kiefer’s later work has seen a progressive shift to wider, more universal concerns, exploring earth, heaven and artistic identity through complex references to history, theology and esoteric literature. A crucial early experience in this synthesis of scholarship and spirituality was a 1966 visit to the Dominican monastery of Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette, near Lyon. The artist stayed here for three weeks in solitude, ‘just thinking quietly – about the larger questions’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 29). The priory, designed by the legendary modernist architect Le Corbusier, features distinctive open stairways that are plainly echoed in the stair motif of Sefer Hechaloth, as well as in other sculptural and painted works of the same title. The stairs thus not only form a multivalent icon for the pathways of the soul, but also have a revelatory personal resonance for Kiefer himself. He recalls that the monastery ‘was an inspiring building in the sense that a very simple material, a modern material, could be used to create a spiritual space. Great religions and great buildings are part of the sediment of time; like pieces of sand. Le Corbusier used the sand to construct a spiritual space. I discovered the spirituality of concrete – using earth to mould a symbol, a symbol of the imaginative and the spiritual world. He tried to make heaven on earth – the ancient paradox’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 168).
This sense of paradox in creating ‘heaven on earth’ has a direct compositional bearing on Kiefer’s work. If the stairs symbolically ‘move in all directions,’ Kiefer literally applies this approach to his canvas. ‘I work on my paintings from all sides, so when I am working on them there is no up or down. The sky can be reflected in the water or material can come down from the sky. That is part of the content of the paintings. Heaven and earth are interchangeable. The writing is an attempt to fix movement or a place, to suggest a fixed state, but the imagery denies. It is active’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 173). In Sefer Hechaloth, the similar colours and textures of sea and sky seem to affirm that the two are indeed ‘interchangeable;’ the steadying axis of Kiefer’s textual additions is contradicted by the disorienting drift of the stairs. As Michael Auping has noted, ‘Staircases generally offer a clear path from one place to another. Kiefer’s stairs – which lead in all directions, often simply into the sky – may be a wry caution about taking metaphors literally’ (M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 124). In this grand and numinous work, then, nothing is fixed. Soaring lyricism is checked by earthbound gravitas, transcendence undercut by bewildering inversion. Ultimately, Sefer Hechaloth asserts that there is no easy path to heaven. In the very act of creation, however, Kiefer has undertaken a journey of self-discovery analogous to that of the Sefer Hechaloth’s initiate. Like Le Corbusier’s monastery, Kiefer’s painting is a spiritual space. Through his richly physical technique and masterful command of symbol, Kiefer elevates his materials and unmoors us from the world, offering a vision of a personal, artistic road to the divine. ‘The palaces of heaven are still a mystery … I am making my own investigation. You know this book the Sefer Hechaloth? Obviously, this is not just about travelling through palaces, but travelling through yourself in order to know yourself; the old saying Erkenne dich selbst’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 176).
‘… for me [Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette] was an inspiring building in the sense that a very simple material, a modern material, could be used to create a spiritual space. Great religions and great buildings are part of the sediment of time; like pieces of sand. Le Corbusier used the sand to construct a spiritual space. I discovered the spirituality of concrete – using earth to mould a symbol, a symbol of the imaginative and the spiritual world. He tried to make heaven on earth – the ancient paradox’ —A. KIEFER
‘In the Sefer Hechaloth, the ancient book that came before the kabbala, there is no worry of directions. It describes stages, metaphors, and symbols that float everywhere. Up and down were the same direction. The Hechaloth is the spiritual journey toward perfect cognition. North, south, east, and west, up and down are not issues. For me, this also relates to time. Past, present, and future are essentially the same direction. It is about finding symbols that move in all directions’ —A. KIEFER
In Sefer Hechaloth (2001), Anselm Kiefer conjures heaven and earth from acrylic and emulsion. An inverted staircase, its form inspired by the stairs of Le Corbusier’s Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette – a formative location for Kiefer as a young artist – hangs free in an ivory sky. Below, a vast, turbulent ocean of bone-white and lead-grey impasto engulfs two thirds of the work’s surface. The eight steps are numbered unevenly, one through seven; from them plunge eight downward rods of rusting iron, as if to remind us of gravity in our encounter with this airborne stairway. Since the 1990s, Kiefer has explored the heavenly and material realms through immense, near-sculptural paintings. Keenly alive to the visual power of metaphor, he often employs ladders, stairs, spirals, and lightning rods – images born of his study of arcane religious texts – to link the two kingdoms. Here, in Kiefer’s distinctive cursive hand, Sefer Hechaloth is inscribed to the upper left. Also known as the Third Book of Enoch, this is an ancient Hebrew mystical work that pre-dates the Kabbala, and describes the ascension of an initiate through seven heavenly palaces to the Hechaloth, the palace in which the wise will be united with God. This allegorical journey combines the ascent to divinity with the descent into the depths of self-knowledge. As Kiefer has said of the book, ‘there is no worry of directions. It describes stages, metaphors, and symbols that float everywhere. Up and down were the same direction. The Hechaloth is the spiritual journey toward perfect cognition. North, south, east, and west, up and down are not issues. For me, this also relates to time. Past, present, and future are essentially the same direction. It is about finding symbols that move in all directions’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 165). The central image of this work – the flight of stairs in flight – is just such a symbol, encapsulating the extraordinary mythic scope of Kiefer’s oeuvre. We see a path to transcendence, but our bearings are lost; the subject is heavenly enlightenment, yet sky and sea are rendered in heavy swathes of lithic colour. Majestic and enigmatic, Sefer Hechaloth is a vista of both spiritual and earthly transfiguration, touching on the transformative mysteries of art itself.
To perform alchemy, for Kiefer, is to bring matter to a higher spiritual state. When asked if alchemy is a metaphor for his art, he corrects that ‘It is what I do … Alchemy is not to make gold, the real alchemist is not interested in material things but in transubstantiation, in transforming the spirit. It’s a spiritual thing more than a material thing. An alchemist puts the phenomena of the world in another context’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in J. Wullschlager, ‘Interview with Anselm Kiefer, ahead of his Royal Academy show,’ Financial Times, 19 September 2014). An alchemical fascination with materials such as lead, gold, charcoal and soil has been clear since Kiefer’s early work of the 1970s, which grappled with the unspoken traumas of Germany’s past: while still employing such symbolically potent elements, Kiefer’s later work has seen a progressive shift to wider, more universal concerns, exploring earth, heaven and artistic identity through complex references to history, theology and esoteric literature. A crucial early experience in this synthesis of scholarship and spirituality was a 1966 visit to the Dominican monastery of Couvent Sainte Marie de la Tourette, near Lyon. The artist stayed here for three weeks in solitude, ‘just thinking quietly – about the larger questions’ (A. Kiefer, quoted in Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 29). The priory, designed by the legendary modernist architect Le Corbusier, features distinctive open stairways that are plainly echoed in the stair motif of Sefer Hechaloth, as well as in other sculptural and painted works of the same title. The stairs thus not only form a multivalent icon for the pathways of the soul, but also have a revelatory personal resonance for Kiefer himself. He recalls that the monastery ‘was an inspiring building in the sense that a very simple material, a modern material, could be used to create a spiritual space. Great religions and great buildings are part of the sediment of time; like pieces of sand. Le Corbusier used the sand to construct a spiritual space. I discovered the spirituality of concrete – using earth to mould a symbol, a symbol of the imaginative and the spiritual world. He tried to make heaven on earth – the ancient paradox’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 168).
This sense of paradox in creating ‘heaven on earth’ has a direct compositional bearing on Kiefer’s work. If the stairs symbolically ‘move in all directions,’ Kiefer literally applies this approach to his canvas. ‘I work on my paintings from all sides, so when I am working on them there is no up or down. The sky can be reflected in the water or material can come down from the sky. That is part of the content of the paintings. Heaven and earth are interchangeable. The writing is an attempt to fix movement or a place, to suggest a fixed state, but the imagery denies. It is active’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 173). In Sefer Hechaloth, the similar colours and textures of sea and sky seem to affirm that the two are indeed ‘interchangeable;’ the steadying axis of Kiefer’s textual additions is contradicted by the disorienting drift of the stairs. As Michael Auping has noted, ‘Staircases generally offer a clear path from one place to another. Kiefer’s stairs – which lead in all directions, often simply into the sky – may be a wry caution about taking metaphors literally’ (M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 124). In this grand and numinous work, then, nothing is fixed. Soaring lyricism is checked by earthbound gravitas, transcendence undercut by bewildering inversion. Ultimately, Sefer Hechaloth asserts that there is no easy path to heaven. In the very act of creation, however, Kiefer has undertaken a journey of self-discovery analogous to that of the Sefer Hechaloth’s initiate. Like Le Corbusier’s monastery, Kiefer’s painting is a spiritual space. Through his richly physical technique and masterful command of symbol, Kiefer elevates his materials and unmoors us from the world, offering a vision of a personal, artistic road to the divine. ‘The palaces of heaven are still a mystery … I am making my own investigation. You know this book the Sefer Hechaloth? Obviously, this is not just about travelling through palaces, but travelling through yourself in order to know yourself; the old saying Erkenne dich selbst’ (A. Kiefer in conversation with M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 176).