Von Schlieffen

Christie’s is delighted to present two contemporaneous portraits by Anselm Kiefer. Painted in 1977, the year of Kiefer’s inclusion in both the 10th Biennale de Paris and Documenta 6, Von Schlieffen (lot 249) and Für Julia (lot 248) are arresting studies of emotion and psychology. Both are gestural and expressive, covered with thick, animated brushwork that drips and dances across the canvas. In Von Schlieffen, Kiefer has painted Alfred von Schlieffen, the officer and head of general staff who developed the plan of attack that the Germans later used at the outbreak of World War I. His face consumes the canvas and even under the impasto paint, von Schlieffen’s stare is direct and inscrutable. If in Kiefer’s paintings of the era ‘political poets and military men predominate’, then Für Julia, as a painting of the artist’s wife, is a study in intimacy (M. Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat. Art Institute of Chicago, 1987, p. 55). The two married in 1971, and Julia became a recurrent model for Kiefer; he also inscribed many of his paintings to her. Tactile grey paint boldly covers Für Julia and like Von Schlieffen, this painting is emotive and dramatic, a sensation conjured both by the image and the way that Kiefer has layered his paints. As with his ongoing interrogation of Germany’s past, in these paintings Kiefer dares his viewers to look without idealising. In doing so, he offers new ways of seeing both the heroes of history as well as the everyday reality of his own life.