Hortus Philosophorum (Garden of Philosophers)

Executed in 2009, and acquired by the present owner two years later, Anselm Kiefer’s Hortus Philosophorum is an eloquent consideration of the proliferation of knowledge. In delicate gouache, charcoal and collage, Kiefer has created stacks of books: a key motif for the artist, and one that has dominated his lead sculptures in particular for the last three decades. From these hefty tomes burst forth bouquets of plants; the painting’s title translates as ‘garden of philosophers’ in Latin, a concept which Kiefer has eloquently evoked in his leaning towers of verdant knowledge. Hortus Philosophorum was painted in conjunction with Kiefer’s homonymous exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, held in 2009 in Rome, for which he created eight lead book sculptures layered with plants. Books themselves, both as objects and images, have long fascinated the artist, offering ‘a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge’. As he explains, 'The story of our beginnings always begins in the oral tradition, but eventually finds its way into the form of a book. This has its double side. It preserves memory but it also makes the story rigid’ (A. Kiefer, interviewed by M. Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh., cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 174). A similar work from the series is held in the joint collections of Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland.

The ancient narratives that shape society have long been a central preoccupation for Kiefer. Born at the end of the Second World War, the artist engaged early on with the symbolism of Nazi Germany and related ideas about the corruption of power and ideology. He has since broadened his outlook, summoning through his palimpsestic compositions parables drawn from ancient Greek mythology, the Kabbala and the Bible, as well as literature, philosophy and cosmology. Both Hortus Philosophorum and its related exhibition drew upon the motifs and materials that have, over the past decades, become recurrent in the artist’s practice: among them divine knowledge, temporality, the use of lead and plant matter and the imaging of myth, religion and history. Wistfully conjuring the Romantic possibilities of art and learning, Kiefer’s Hortus Philosophorum articulates a poetry of decay: as if born of a distant past, the stacked books slowly surrender to cosmic time.