Executed in 2014, Der Morgenthau Plan delivers a solemn manifestation of Anselm Kiefer's powerful trans-historical dialectic on a monumental scale. Suspended like a deific icon within an expansive textured field, the imposing surface of the present work resides over a golden landscape peppered by wheat and white flowers capped with a strident cobalt sky, simultaneously blooming and stark, morbid and overgrown. Suffused with a multiplicity of associations, Der Morgenthau Plan displays Kiefer's aesthetic forged from the evisceration of the past and symptomatic of the psychological affliction of warfare. Through the transformation of quotidian constituents into something of extreme metaphorical significance, the German artist emphasises the transformative potential of matter to become an object of intensely evocative power. Born in the German state of Baden-Württemberg in 1945, Kiefer was raised in a Catholic family and spent his youth playing in the ruins left in the wake of World War II. This visual and psychological landscape would prove to be highly influential to the artist. As his practice developed Kiefer began to use myth and religion as lenses through which to examine the legacy of Nazism and the Second World War, seeing in both dialectics of control. He saw German soil as marked by its history, and his paintings often constitute an attempt to render tangible that indelible stain.

Rendered in Kiefer’s characteristic grand scale and contemplative tones, Der Morgenthau Plan offers a vast and panoramic painting that references the historical and political implications of the post-World War II proposal to de-industrialise Germany, known as the Morgenthau Plan. Henry Morgenthau, who played a major role in designing and financing Roosevelt's New Deal, was the United States Secretary of the Treasury during the majority of the Roosevelt's administration. Following World War II, the Morgenthau Plan was a proposal to weaken Germany by eliminating its arms industry and removing other key industries important for military strength. This included the destruction of all industrial plants and equipment in the Ruhr. It was first proposed by Morgenthau in a 1944 memorandum entitled “Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany.” An investigation by Herbert Hoover concluded the plan was unworkable, and would result in up to twenty-five million Germans dying from starvation. From 1947, United States policies aimed at restoring a stable and productive Germany and were soon followed by the Marshall Plan. Historically referencing the Morgenthau Plan in some of his earlier watercolours, Kiefer returned to the motif, commenting: “When I was painting these flowers in my house in Paris, an idea occurred to me: I could combine the motif with the Morgenthau Plan. Then the flowers will regain their innocence taken” (Sebastian Preuss, “Anselm Kiefer: I Can’t Paint,” Weltkunst, no. 109, December 2015, p.3).

Der Morgenthau Plan typifies Kiefer’s unique ability to create vibrantly abstract yet simultaneously representative surfaces, building up great vistas with areas of indefinite tonal forms and varied textures. Rich layers of oil, acrylic emulsion, shellac and resin – materials that reference the subject of the painting – introduce a sculptural element to Kiefer’s work. The resulting encrusted, impastoed surface fluctuates between opaque abstraction and lucid vision, a mutated memory. The effect is immersive, all-encompassing and a highly emotional experience for the viewer. Through the symbolic weight of the ploughed landscape, Der Morgenthau Plan engages with a great German tradition, championed by his fellow countryman, the nineteenth-century Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, of foregrounding an emotional response to the natural world. In tandem with the impressive scale of the work, Kiefer turns to the sublime, a key tenet of German Romanticism.

Kiefer’s apparent battle scenes offer the viewer a spiritual contemplation of the landscape as a potent reflection of the conditions of man. The thick impasto and expressive brushstrokes, as well as the subject and setting, echo the works of Vincent van Gogh, namely Wheatfields with Crows, painted in the last week of his life, which evokes a sense of melancholy through the image of crows over a desolate field. In a similar vein, Der Morgenthau Plan is textured with layers of paint, thickly applied, creating a rugged, tactile quality, topography used to explore the themes of life and death, while mirroring the devastation of the destruction consequent to World War II.The present work thus exudes a sense of stillness and silence that intoxicates the viewer with a sharp sense of melancholy. Kiefer's ability to transform a painting’s material reality into an object of substantial metaphorical significance lies at the heart of the artist's invention.

Entirely immersing the viewer in its desolate, unearthly landscape, the present work emanates the artist’s idiosyncratic sense of esoteric lyricism. Kiefer’s Der Morgenthau Plan masterfully intertwines history and memory to explore the consequences of destruction and the potential for renewal. Kiefer reflects on the scars left by war and the complex relationship between land and national identity. This monumental work not only engages with the historical implications of the Morgenthau Plan but also serves as a broader meditation on the cyclical nature of human existence, making it a profound reflection on collective memory and the aftermath of trauma.