Anselm Kiefer: an act of remembrance

Anselm Kiefer’s sprawling studio complex, just east of Paris, is a jungle of hangars and the artist’s haunting lead sculptures. An eagle’s wings spread out from an open book atop a towering totem pole. A square of off-white sunflowers sways in the chilly breeze. A life-size model of a second world war plane appears to have crashed into the side of a building. Perhaps I should have brought my bow of burning gold and arrows of desire.

Eventually, the rangy German artist, dressed in a paint-splattered smock, emerges from his warren of offices and we get into his Mercedes and drive a couple of minutes to what must be the mother-hangar. Inside the cavernous space are 20 or so gargantuan paintings that did not make the cut for his latest show. Giant crates containing the 19 that did have been loaded on to trucks bound for Paris.

The new paintings, which are inspired by the German-language poetry of Paul Celan, are on display in For Paul Celan at the Grand Palais Ephémère in Paris. (As its name suggests, this is a pop-up version of the Grand Palais, which is undergoing a refurbishment.) Kiefer, now 76, has had a life-long obsession with Celan’s poetry, and as we wander among the leftover paintings he offers some of his favourite couplets. “I used to know a lot by heart,” Kiefer says. “Now it’s fading away with my age. But I still remember some pregnant lines.”

Kiefer first encountered Celan’s poetry as a teenager at school in the city of Rastatt, not far from the Black Forest. The poem on the syllabus was “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), which Celan wrote not long after his parents perished during the Holocaust. Its depiction of the horrific conditions in a concentration camp contains the recurring line, “Black milk of daybreak, we drink you at night.”

For Kiefer, whose parents and schoolteachers had told him almost nothing of the Holocaust, the poem was a shock and a revelation. At the beginning of the 1980s, Celan’s poetry also became a muse for his painting. “It’s not so much in my head but my heart where I receive Paul Celan’s poetry,” he says. “Sometimes it’s really difficult to understand, especially the later poems, but I always understand something even when there are no more metaphors that can be interpreted.”

In the exhibition there is a painting of a desolate, snow-ridden landscape that Celan started in 2018 and completed last year during the pandemic lockdown. The upper part of the painting, which is titled “Because You Found the Woe-Shard,” is dominated by lines of Celan’s poetry scratched out in spidery script. “I want the vertical part of my paintings to be marked like a school blackboard,” Kiefer says. “You could say that I created stages where Paul Celan can act.”

Some of Kiefer’s most striking recent work, which he connects indirectly to Celan’s poetry, features masses of tattered fabric affixed to the surface of his canvases. Kiefer had the idea for them when he read a book during lockdown about how the Nazis exhumed the bodies of their victims when the Russian front came to Germany. “There were all these corpses in the earth and prisoners had to pull them out so as not to have proof of what the Nazis had done,” Kiefer says. “The bodies were half-decomposed already and sometimes a mother [would find] her dead baby. Can you imagine this? That’s what I was thinking of when I attached these dirty, painted pieces of clothing to the painting.”

In many ways Kiefer’s entire oeuvre is an act of remembrance. “I want to show that I am still connected with these horrible things,” he says. “If we don’t remember what we have done, we will do the same thing again.” It is why he decided to resurrect “Occupations”, one of his most controversial works, for the show in Paris. The photographs in “Occupations” caused a scandal when they were first shown in 1969 at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Art as part of Kiefer’s diploma show.

The series consisted of the artist wearing his father’s Wehrmacht uniform (and other costumes) and performing the Nazi salute in front of European monuments, thus “occupying” France, Italy and Switzerland. Critics of the action were not slow to come forward. The Belgian artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers asked, “Who is this fascist who thinks he’s an antifascist?”

Back home it was even worse. “In Germany when people saw that, they called me a neo-Nazi,” Kiefer says. “When I did the [Venice] Biennale in 1980 all of the Germans wrote badly about me. It was Jewish-American collectors who came and bought my paintings and made my career.” 

The latest iteration of “Occupations” will show the photographs mounted on lead inside a steel box which visitors can enter. On the exterior, Kiefer has inscribed passages from Celan’s poem “Wolfsbohne” (“Wolf’s Bean”), which contains some of the most explicit verses about the sense of loss that the poet felt when his parents died. “Celan doesn’t use easy metaphors like Goethe, whose poetry is simpler to interpret,” Kiefer says. “He doesn’t write, ‘My mother was killed in Auschwitz,’ instead he says, ‘The hair of my mother never turned grey.’”

Celan drowned himself in the River Seine at the age of 49. Three years ago Kiefer’s own search for peace of mind led him to the writing of the Italian philosopher Andrea Emo. “When I started to paint — for the first 20 years I always felt destroyed,” Kiefer says. “I couldn’t believe that I couldn’t do the painting.” Reading Emo confirmed to him something that he had always sensed but struggled to put into words. “He said that there was not first nothing and then something but always both at the same time. That was always my feeling — when I start a painting, it’s already the annihilation of the painting.”

Annihilation or not, Kiefer pushes on: “I found out that I couldn’t do a masterpiece and that all I can do is continue. So these paintings that you see here will be put away and I will change at once.”

To January 11, grandpalais.fr