His gigantic painting called – in another Joyce quote – Meednight Sunflower is a mesmerising vision of tall sunflowers with black petals. Van Gogh’s shadow looms in his new show on an extravagant, stunning scale. All these painters who were not appreciated in the Third Reich, but then after the war the Germans tried to make it better.” ![]() “I had an aunt who was a watercolourist and so the painters and artists were always present, in books, in what they told me: Klee, Kandinsky, Van Gogh. He grew up in a cultured, art-loving family. When I ask if it was playing in bombed rubble that made him an artist, he says it wasn’t quite as raw as that. The first person who got it, he tells me, was the great performance artist and sculptor of felt and fat Joseph Beuys, who simply declared: “It’s a good action.” He doesn’t mean it now and didn’t then: his Fawltyesque performance was a mockery of the will to power. Kiefer stood to attention in romantic landscapes, by the sea or in front of classical temples, to be photographed giving the same straight-armed salute he does for me now. It’s an impromptu restaging of the controversial “Action”, as he terms it, with which as a young artist in 1969 he announced his intention to look Germany’s history straight in the eye. Even though I’m familiar with his oeuvre I’m startled when he performs a Nazi salute for me. Yet his daunting works have sometimes been accused of the sins they criticise. They are sublimely pungent, ripened monuments with a scope and seriousness that leaves most contemporary art looking flat and simplistic. His paintings and installations encompass the nightmares of the past with relish. ![]() Kiefer’s childhood in a ruined country, next to his family’s ruined house, made him the artist he is: one who has excavated the bomb site of modern history. I was next to the ruins, it was fantastic. Because my family had moved into the house next to this bombed house. So I built all these houses with the bricks from the ruin. It’s interesting, no? And then as a child I had no Spielzeuge – no toys. If they hadn’t been in the hospital they would be dead, me included. ![]() And then this night our house was bombed. “When I was born I was in the hospital with my mother in the cellar. It comes from being born in 1945 in the last apocalyptic months of the war, in Donaueschingen, a pretty town in the Black Forest.ĭaunting works … Anselm Kiefer checks over the installations in his new show. The concrete wreckage looks tragic to me as grey dust rises from the rubble under dim lights, but Kiefer explains that he sees ruins as a beginning, not an end. ![]() The title of the concrete mass is a quote from the book, that he’s scribbled across the gallery wall: “Phall if you but will, rise you must.” For Finnegans Wake sees history as a cycle of rise and fall, fall and rise, and that vision infuses this show. All are brought together in celebration of James Joyce’s punning, mythic, dreamlike modern text Finnegans Wake. You come across golden snakes, bronze books, toy soldiers and a vitrine in which a heart is weighed against a feather (illustrating the ancient Egyptian belief in judgment after death – “If your heart is heavier than a feather you go to hell!”). The shattered floor is one of a series of installations and paintings that proliferate and interbreed in the addictive labyrinth that is Kiefer’s new London show. If my parents hadn’t been in the hospital having me, they would be dead, me included.
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