Anselm Kiefer

White Cube, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2005

London, White Cube, Anselm Kiefer Für Chlebnikov, 2005, pp. 82-83, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although slightly brighter and more vibrant in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully convey the rich texture of the surface of the work and the three-dimensional boats. Condition: This work is in very good condition. No restoration is apparent under ultra violet light.
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Executed in 2004, Anselm Kiefer's sensational masterwork Velimir Chlebnikov: Seeschlachten Alle 317 Jahre Oder Deren Vielfachen is a supreme example of the artist's canon, embodying his historically significant, world-renowned and uniquely poetic aesthetic dialect. It relates to a cycle of works that powerfully evoke warfare and the sea, exhibited in 2005 and 2006 in a pavilion recreating one of Kiefer's ateliers in Provence, which was installed in Hoxton Square in London and at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut. As ever, Kiefer's frame of reference is dense and complex, and cannot be unravelled via a single route of explanation. Indeed, the present work demonstrates the importance of each viewer's singular ontological response to Kiefer's corpus: although he speaks in a language that is elusive and indefinable, it remains powerfully direct and affecting. Despite the figurative elements of sea, sky and submarines, the purpose of this work harbours profound and multivalent philosophical and emotional import, which marks it as a truly phenomenal artistic achievement.

The high horizon reduces the sky to a narrow band across the top of the canvas, which simultaneously situates the viewer in a highly elevated position looking down on the scene from distance, and creates a sense of claustrophobia by filling the canvas with a vertiginous and urgent assault of media. The ominous sea lists and rolls under its cold white caps, and is vast and unfathomable to the point of being threatening. Deep hues of brown, blue, black and grey swirl rhythmically across the canvas, erupting with Kiefer's primordial sense of texture. Although the water has been sculpted with such corporeally earthy material - cracked pigment and sand - the lurching swells and sense of transient movement are physically enrapturing. The salience of texture has been explicated by Grace Glueck in discussing the full series: "A blending of paint and other materials like sand, rust, dirt and straw is worked up to create a gritty impasto, further toughened by deliberate exposure to the weather. The resulting seascapes give a sense of inexorable nature, perhaps symbolizing the struggle of humanity against the relentless forces of time and an indifferent universe" (Grace Glueck, 'Paintings by Anselm Kiefer, Inspired by the Poet Velimir Chlebnikov' in: The New York Times, 16^th June 2006).

The outlines of submarines have been cut out in lead, riding the swells and dancing over the waves with the jaunty, chugging buoyancy of a childlike toy boat. Of course, such jolly innocence could not be in starker contrast to the identity of the naval submarine as a highly-sophisticated agent of destruction and, since the escalations of the Cold War, the primary delivery system of nuclear annihilation. Also evoking the dominant role of the Nazi U-boat type submarine in the Second World War, this painting directly references the long shadow that conflict cast over the artist's formative upbringing in 1950s Germany. What Kiefer here portrays as simplistic and naïve silhouettes have historically been the silent and clandestine instruments of war and death. The dichotomy between the brutality and carnage of conflict and the face of its anaesthetised, even beautiful representation is thus set at the kernel of the work.

Kiefer aims to transform his painting's quotidian constituents – canvas, paint, lead, and dirt - into something of extreme metaphorical significance. This painting thus evokes the transformative effect and alchemical potential that is inherent to and characteristic of his best work. Kiefer's use of lead as an autograph medium acts as homage to his teacher, the iconic German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, who shattered precedent and forged groundbreaking sculpture by using similarly corporeal matter as media. That the submarines in this work are made of lead is of great significance: Kiefer frequently comments that lead has a much stronger effect on him than any other medium and has become itself a source of ideas. The unique metal also possesses certain qualities that make it become a subject in itself, as Danilo Eccher has commented: "Lead is for Kiefer, in keeping with alchemical tradition, the magic metal which preserves memory; which, with its own soft weight, creates a reduced, weary representation of the world in order to absorb the wounds in its wrinkled skin" (Danilo Eccher in: Exhibition Catalogue, Bologna, Galleria d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, Anselm Kiefer: Stelle Cadenti, 1999, p. 87).

The work's title, scrawled across the top of the canvas, announces the nature of Kiefer's undertaking. Firstly, it references Velimir Chlebnikov, a Russian futurist poet who concocted esoteric mathematical calculations with which he sought to explain the course of history. The second part of the title translates as "Naval Battles Recur Every 317 Years or in Multiples Thereof". This refers to one of Chlebnikov's somewhat fantastic mystical theories, which posited that every 317 years a climactic naval conflict occurs to fundamentally alter the path of Humankind. Kiefer's inscription across the top of the work is characteristic of his renowned conflation of text and image, as Daniel Arasse has observed: "The images of Anselm Kiefer are inhabited, haunted by words... This active presence of a verbal thought, at work in the work, manifests itself also by the themes (literary, historical or mythical) that Kiefer treats, and by the impressive dimension of his iconography, in the most classic meaning of the term, but made rigorously personal and up-to-date by his appropriation" (Daniel Arasse in: Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Galerie Yvon Lambert, Anselm Kiefer: Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles, 1996, n. p.)

Anselm Kiefer's great contribution to the history of art is his complex amalgamation of a variety of materials and paint within a narrative structure drawn from grand historical, mythological and literary sources. Indeed, in these ways he can be seen as a history painter fit for the twenty-first century. It is in this context that the obscure association with Chlebnikov should be understood, as Glueck has explained: "Although Mr. Kiefer dismisses Chlebnikov's historical-mathematical theories...he has long been intrigued by their metaphysical thrust. As an artist whose work has been keenly tuned to history and the past, he confronts the realization that civilization is still not a comfortable distance from chaos and may never be" (Grace Glueck, Op. Cit.). There is no denying the tremendous visual and intellectual impact of Kiefers' thickly painted canvas: the viewer is assaulted by images of war and destruction through a deeply sculptural visual language. With these connotations, the painting can be understood as foreboding an apocalypse, architecting a nightmare that humanity creates over and over again. In keeping with Kiefer's monumental subjects - German history, political extremism, spirituality, mythology, occult knowledge – the present work bespeaks a desire to embrace the past, as something which must be understood to interpret the present.