Anselm Kiefer

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1994

Tübingen, Kunsthalle; Munich, Kunstverein, Anselm Kiefer: Bücher 1969-1990, 1990-91
London, Tate Gallery; Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie & Württembergischer Kunstverein; Tübingen, Kunsthalle; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen; Vienna, Bank Austria Kunstforum, Sammlungsblöcke. Stiftung Froehlich, 1996-97, p. 255, no. 126, illustrated
Liverpool, Tate Gallery, Contemporary German and American Art from the Froehlich Collection, 1999
Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst, KunstSammeln, 1999-2000
Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst (on temporary loan 2001-2006)

Dem unbekannten Maler (To the Unknown Painter) is an intense image that is both great in its scale and in the power of its ideas.  As in his paintings, this woodcut examines issues of personal and national identity; specifically their accountability and relationship to icons and events in cultural history. Locating his ideas within the shared territories of German consciousness, he looks to stories of myth, legend and history and seeks to redefine their meaning through new association. The present work is a product of Kiefer’s new-found interest in the 1980s in that most potent German symbol – the Rhine – and his use of it in his subject matter. No river resonates in national myth, literature and history as does the Rhine in the German national story; it has held primary importance in German identity from Roman times. Nineteenth-century German nationalism revived the significance of the river, beginning with Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn of the Rhine in 1801-2 and ending with the conquering of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1. In the twentieth century, the river formed the backdrop to many of the battles in the First and Second World Wars and became a totemic symbol of the build-up to war when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland in the early 1930s. In the late 1960s and 1970s, controversies raged about industrial pollution of the river in North-Rhine Westphalia and the role of the river took on yet further resonances in German consciousness. Kiefer in the present work takes this super-charged imagery of the Rhine and adds to it further layers of meaning and associations.

 

This woodcut marks the transition in Kiefer’s subject matter from the landscape to the building as the setting for historical events, as Kiefer gradually turned his attention from land to architecture. Above the Rhine, almost floating, Kiefer places in the upper section of the woodcut, a large ruined neo-classical building. This building is based on a model of the street façade of Hitler’s unrealized ‘Soldiers’ Hall’, designed by Wilhelm Kreis; Kiefer here relocates this huge Nazi building from central Berlin to the banks of the Rhine. By connecting the most profound symbol of his country, the river Rhine, with an architectural manifestation of its lowest point in history, he transforms the associations of both to create a new function. The new function is that of a courtyard of honour for the Unknown Painter, exploiting a category of war ideology that compared the painter to the Unknown Soldier. Through graphic, roughly-hewn images depicting desolate landscapes, Kiefer chisels at the German psyche and sense of identity following the devastation of the Third Reich. Moreover, the monuments to the Unknown Painter becomes both a symbol of the culturally orientated thinking in German post-war history and a reminder of Germany’s pre-Nazi stereotype as a land of writers and thinkers, whilst forcing the viewer to see all this through the prism of Germany’s Nazi past. Dem unhekkanten Maler thus becomes a highly uncomfortable amalgam of symbols, acknowledging Germany’s place in history as the land of both Goethe and Goebbels. Painstakingly rendered, the grainy darkness of the piece serves to reinforce the sense of devastation; it seems that not only is the building ruined but so too is German identity. It is a sombre, disquieting reckoning, symbols layered upon symbols, associations building on associations to create a truly meaningful work of art.