Anselm Kiefer

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 2007

Paris, Opera Bastille, Am Anfang (In the Beginning), 2009
Coblenz, Ludwig Museum im Deutschherrenhaus, Anselm Kiefer: Memorabilia, Milan 2012, p. 100 and p. 101, illustrated in colour

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The very small areas of lifting and other surface irregularities to the casted resin are in keeping with the artist's choice of medium and working process.
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A freestanding bridelike figure clothed in a hollow resin dress crowned by bricks in place of a head, Anselm Kiefer’s Frauen der Antike – Phryne (which translates as Women of Antiquity – Phryne) constitutes an extension of the artist’s long-standing practice of exploring the interwoven dialectics between history, identity, mythology, literature and art.
Women of Antiquity is Kiefer’s highly celebrated long-running series of ethereal sculptures which pay a homage to mythological and historical female figures, replacing their heads with symbolic objects to draw attention upon their unfair treatment in the course of history and mythology (Colin Herd, “Confronting the Past: Anselm Kiefer” in Aesthetica Magazine, Leeds 2011, p. 33). Some of these women might be demoniac and some might be saints, but all of the remarkably strong and determined characters represented in the series have in common their intellectual questioning of their epoch’s conventions, because of which they were considered unruly. Women of Antiquity encapsulates Kiefer’s project to restore not only their dignity and place in history but also that of all womankind. His depiction of the Greek lyrical poetess Sappho for example, bearing a tower of lead books on her shoulders, is the artist’s “monument to all the unknown women poets” (The artist interviewed by Jackie Wullschlager in “The Art of Anselm Kiefer Rises from the Ruins”, Financial Times, London 4 July 2009).
The current lot represents Phryne, the Ancien Greek courtesan whose beauty was praised to such an outstanding degree that the sculptor Praxiteles allegedly modelled his Aphrodite of Knidos after her. Athenaeus’ legendary account of her trial during which she was prosecuted for various moral charges reads that as Hypereides, the illustrious orator who defended her, was making no progress with his plea, he tore off her dress before the Court. Her astoundingly beautiful bare body thus exposed, the judges superstitiously feared condemning a priestess of Aphrodite and decided to acquit her instead (Christine Mitchell Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and her Successors, Ann Arbor 1995, pp. 43-4). Kiefer’s use of bricks in his depiction of Phryne may however allude to another episode of her life which, although heroic, is much less retold than the events of her trial. When the walls around Thebes were torn down by Alexander the Great in 335-336 B.C., Phryne offered to rebuild them upon the condition that the Thebeans inscribed on it “Alexander destroyed this wall, Phryne the courtesan had it rebuilt” (Matthew Dillon, Lynda Garland, Ancient Greece: Social and Historical Documents from Archaic Times to the Death of Alexander the Great, New York 1994, p. 174).
Consistent with Kiefer’s aesthetic of integrating earthy materials such as lead or cloth into his works, Women of Antiquity – Phryne, with its stack of bricks and network of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary references, epitomizes the artist’s highly symbolic and multilayered practice into a historically important and hauntingly beautiful work of art.