Der Rhein

Some landscapes in the Ashmolean's exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Early Works, with quotes from the accompanying wall texts. 

Der Rhein (The Rhine), 1982 

'The Rhine has been a German national symbol while also providing a border to France. During the Romantic era of the early 19th century, countless travelogues by writers such as Friedrich Hölderlin and paintings by J.M.W. Turner helped develop a fascination with the beauty of Rhine landscapes. The river also played a major role in Wagner's opera cycle, The Ring. Kiefer's woodcut collage, however, is equally concerned with the political connotations of the Rhine, merging its landscape with National Socialist architecture.'

The building in Der Rhein relates to a series paintings showing Nazi architecture Kiefer made in the early eighties - the exhibition included a watercolour, Innenraum (1982) of Albert Speer's New Reich Chancellery, destroyed in 1945. Christie's sold a similar woodcut to Der Rhein for £313K in 2012 and their description includes this quote from Kiefer: ''I grew up on the banks of the Rhine. France was on the other side. As a child, I saw the river as an insuperable obstacle, something you couldn't swim across. It thus acquired a mythical status for me. When you came to this barrier you could turn left or right but not go straight ahead, except in your imagination." The Rhine (Melancholia) is the name of an Anselm Kiefer installation I wrote about in 2014, 'a collage of black-and-white woodcuts on canvas with acrylic and shellac compiled over more than two decades, between 1982 and 2013.' 

Unternehmen 'Trappenfang' (Operation Bustard Hunt), 1976 

'The title of this painting references a WWII military codename, 'Unternehmen Trappenjagd' ('Operation Bustard Hunt'). The words summon the aftermath of an attack, a landscape scarred by the treads of troop movements and tanks. In May 1942, Germany bombed the easternmost tip of Crimea, the Kerch Peninsula, amplifying the destruction by artillery and tank divisions. Looming above Kiefer's scene is not a bustard but a large painter's palette, linking war memory with an emblem of artistic identity.'

Kiefer often uses high horizons with paths heading towards them, invoking ideas of motion through time. This horizon has a snow covered village, a dark church spire and a bleak grey sky. Looking here at how he was painting fifty years ago, I thought how similar it is in many ways to Kiefer's most recent work, which we have seen in shows at the White Cube gallery. His Superstrings for example, which I discussed here in 2019, are 'desolate landscapes of earth, snow, muddy water, stubble, straw and leafless trees.' I said then that I could see a connection between such paintings and Van Gogh's ploughed fields, something that may well be apparent in the forthcoming Royal Academy exhibition that will pair the two artists. 

Ausbrennen des Landkreises Buchen (Burning of the Rural District of Buchen), 1974 

'This book features photographs of Buchen, where the artist's studio was located, and carbonized sections of former paintings. The photos initially focus on farmland and streets, before showing staged explosions. The final pages present charcoal-encrusted paper. Devoid of people, the photographs allude to the economic decline of Buchen. The explosions also reference the presence of the German armed forces.'

Matthew Biro's Phaidon monograph on Kiefer has a section on this work. 'Leafing through the book engenders a sense of moving through Kiefer's rural environment', but what starts as apparently simple representations of specific geographic regions end up with images overpainted in black wash, singular 'originals' rather than repeatable photographic reproductions. At this time Kiefer was interested in ideas of destruction: 'in addition to burning a town, as it were, Kiefer also flooded Heidelberg in two volumes from 1969 and covered the Brandenburg Heath with sand in four tomes from 1976'. The Ashmolean exhibition had the original 1974 Buchen book, but Kiefer made seven more on the same theme the following year. I referred to one of these in a previous post and quoted Martin Gayford: 'this is how the traditions of Friedrich and Schinkel looked and felt to Kiefer in the aftermath of the Third Reich: burnt out, haunted by overpowering, terrible events.'

Stefan I, 1975

Poet and translator Stefan Anton George was embraced by the Nazis as a hero, despite his criticism of National Socialism and self-imposed exile to Switzerland. In Kiefer's surreal paintings he appears to be resting on his death bed. The works allude to the charged complexities of German cultural heritage and present an attempt to redeem George from political exploitation. 

I can never resist a giant figure in a landscape (see various previous posts) and the exhibition had two watercolours of Stefan George as a mountain. In the other one a sun is setting behind slopes that incorporate his head, and there is an inscription 'aller Tage Abend, aller Abende Tag' (the Evening of All Days, the Days of All Evenings). This is a reference to Ernst Bloch's Principle of Hope, which encourages positive social change, a book with a utopian message that was influential when these paintings were made.

Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter (Art Will Survive its Ruins), 1975 

'Kiefer travelled to Norway's North Cape, where summer sunlight appears never ending. The location was associated with a 1943 battle, when a German battlecruiser was sunk by a British ship. Over 1900 people drowned. Kiefer's title refers to German post-war discourse on art which had been censored, denunciated or misused to propagate Nazi ideologies. As the German title of Kiefer's work suggests, art almost 'drowned'. The North Cape, however, shaped through several ice ages, is representative of survival.'

I have written here before about the North Cape, subject of some eerie nineteenth century landscape paintings by the Peder Balke. Kiefer visited in 1974 and described the experience in an interview with Klaud Dermutz. 'I’d spent some time that summer on North Cape and there you have that phenomenon in which the sun barely sets. It grazes the horizon and then rises again. This made a deep impression on me, the way the sun at first appears to set but then doesn’t. On the watercolour Nordkap [North Cape, 1975], I wrote ‘die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter’ [art just barely avoids going under or just barely survives]. It’s very difficult to define art, impossible, in fact. It can’t really be grasped. Art is like a fish you pull out of the water that then slips away from you. Art is always very endangered, constantly under threat.'