The visionary artist Anselm Kiefer has restlessly challenged and redefined recent German history and cultural shibboleths in an extraordinary body of work that spans more than six decades. Two months ago he turned 80, an anniversary marked by the staging of exhibitions from Amsterdam to the Ashmolean and the publication of this impressive study devoted to the notable women that thread their way through his work, endlessly shape-shifting.
Women are to be found everywhere in Kieferland: haunting, teasing, beckoning, seducing; imperious, impassive, poetic and unknowable. There are martyrs, queens and heroines of the revolution, Brunhilde and the Valkyries, Madame de Stael and Marie-Antoinette. There are women from the Bible – Mary, Lilith, Shulamith – and women from antiquity – Daphne, Gaia, Calypso, Medea and Sappho. But what to make of them? How to understand the role they play in his pictorial universe? Conversations and writings by the artist are gathered with a thoughtful essay by Petra Giloy Hirtz, alongside magnificent reproductions of Kiefer’s work.
We learn for a start that this is a man wholly in tune with his feminine side. When young, he would sometimes dress as a woman, photographing himself in a crochet dress for his then hero, the jailbird writer Jean Genet. ‘I have actually always followed women,’ he claims, and he included photographs of himself in women’s dress raising his arm in a Nazi salute among his ‘Heroic Symbols’ series – a provocative exploration of Germany’s Nazi past which scandalised the public at the start of his career. Cross-dressing was in itself a protest against fascism and its machismo, aligning Kiefer with the cancelled and the persecuted.
Following women led him of course into the realm of eroticism, in sensual water-colours that blend landscape and human forms in seductive harmony. In contrast, Kiefer’s later canvases become scumbled battle sites, poised in tenuous balance between creation and destruction. Each, as he puts it, ‘symbolises my personal struggle’, and so they appear. Some depict turbulent fields of roses and poppies, others wastelands of debris and ruins, their surfaces strewn with brushwood, straw, earth, minerals, hair, string and other detritus. Through many there weave the scrawled names of heroines and anti-heroines, bringing the weight of history and religion to bear on these otherworldly palimpsests.
There are martyrs, queens, heroines of the revolution, women from the Bible and women from antiquity
Brought up in the Catholic faith, Kiefer knew the Latin Mass by heart before he could even write. For him the Virgin Mary is ‘like a land I grew up in, like a land that I once visited and travelled to’. The sensuality of her cult, her association with creativity, makes her a symbol of the cosmic rhythms of our world, while the blandness of her character renders her a foil for any artist to envision as they will. Not so the biblical Lilith, a harbinger of destruction who lives in abandoned ruins – a reproach to the supposed perfection of God’s universe. She haunts Kiefer’s canvases of devastated cities reduced to ashes, ‘the circular movement of all time’. Another lodestar is Brunhilde, the archaic, mythical creature who immolates herself in the funeral pyre she builds for her murdered lover Siegfried. In resurrecting Brunhilde in numerous guises, Kiefer challenges her misappropriation – along with swathes of German myth and culture – by National Socialism, and celebrates her instead as an example of truth and love.
He also sculpts on a biblical scale: his tottering towers, or ‘Heavenly Palaces’, people the surreal landscape of his former studio at Barjac, a ruined village in the south of France, which also acts as a stage for his ‘Women of Antiquity’, a procession of life-size women in white plaster crinolines. Each figure is accessorised with a different head: a ship, a birdcage, a jumble of wire, a pile of bricks, a geometric construction, playfully drawing on ancient knowledge to allude to their identities. It would be a challenging parlour game to guess them all. They attest to Kiefer’s familiarity with myth and culture, a focus on learning that takes its physical form in the leaden books, weighty with knowledge, that form an integral element of his work through the decades.
The virtue of Hirtz’s book is that it doesn’t strain every sinew to decode each reference and allusion in such a densely allegorical oeuvre. To do so would be counterproductive, for Kiefer’s work thrives, indeed depends, on ambiguity. Hirtz gives us just enough information and background to do the work for ourselves, armed with the artist’s own observations and memories, and to immerse ourselves in images that throw out tantalising trails of interpretation. In focusing on the feminine, she offers a new perspective – another key to unlock the secrets of this ever-radical artist’s achievements.
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