Anselm Kiefer

Helen van der Meij Gallery, Amsterdam
Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1993

Amsterdam, Helen van der Meij Gallery, Anselm Kiefer Woodcuts, 1982
London, Tate Gallery; Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie & Württembergischer Kunstverein; Tübingen, Kunsthalle; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen; Vienna, Bank Austria Kunstforum, Sammlungsblöcke. Stiftung Froehlich, 1996-97, p. 83, no. 128, illustrated in colour
Liverpool, Tate Gallery, Contemporary German and American Art from the Froehlich Collection, 1999
Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst, KunstSammeln, 1999-2000, p. 78, illustrated in colour
Basel, Fondation Beyeler, Expressiv!, 2003, p. 163, illustrated in colour
Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst (on temporary loan 2001-2006)

Having played a major role in the work of Albrecht Dürer and, much later, Edvard Munch, woodcut printing is amongst the most traditional and skilled of all artistic mediums of Northern European art. In Kiefer’s work also it serves as a primary means of expression, although his use of it is as much for its historical and traditional associations as for providing visual illustration to the stories announced by his titles, inscriptions, and illusions.

Kiefer’s woodcuts do not conform to conventional printmaking practices. Often large and consisting of many individual sheets printed from different blocks, he joins numerous single sheets to make each composition in a way that evokes comparison with one of the most famous prints of the German Renaissance, The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian (1515), (fig. 1), which was formed by 192 separate woodcut blocks. Rather than using a conventional printing press, Kiefer makes his images by rubbing the back of the paper by hand. He also carves the blocks himself using the tools he inherited from his carpenter grandfather usually in soft lime wood to further enhance the sensuality to his images. The individual pages are arranged together on a paper or canvas support and glued together in almost seamless assembly to form the complete image.

Having carved a woodcut, Kiefer makes many individual prints from it and stores them for use in the assembly of his larger works. Often this occurs years after the printing of the constituent woodcuts, and even though some of the final assembled works often closely resemble one another, each image is unique and composed of different component prints. This is often enhanced by the overpainting he gives to the images. Unlike conventional printmakers, Kiefer has never editioned any of his prints and he does not count the number of impressions, nor is he concerned with consistency. As a result, the inking, paper size and quality of the image vary dramatically with no one version any more correct than any other.

From the early 1970s, Kiefer’s creative output has concentrated on subjects of German history - its myths, territory and cultural inheritance in literature and philosophy, a country which used to be called the ‘country of writers and thinkers’, and the way these aspects were exploited by the Nazis during the Third Reich. In 1973-74 Kiefer experimented with woodblock printing for the first time and created two folios: Das Deutsche Volksgesicht, Kohle für 2000 Jahre (The Face of German People – Coal for 2,000 Years) and Das Niebelungen Leid (The Nibelungs’ sorrow). Essentially wallpaper pattern samplers altered with emulsion, fire, and imprints from markedly grainy wood planks, these works showed Kiefer using the woodcut medium for its Germanic and historical associations. Following a break of a few years, in 1977 Kiefer returned to the medium of woodcut in earnest, with a 68-page artist’s book entitled Die Hermannsschlacht: The Battle of Teutoburg Forrest. The individual image blocks used for this book would also provide the foundation for two major series of works - Paths of Worldly Wisdom - The Arminius’s Battle (Wege der Weltweisheit – die Herrmanns-Schlacht) and Brünhilde-Grane.

This re-use of images is important for Kiefer in tying together the histories of the stories he presents. This adds to his woodcuts a cyclical and evolutionary nature that lends itself to the idea of an ongoing national and cultural identity. This was epitomised by his most important woodcut, Wege der Weltweisheit – die Hermannsschlacht (1978), shown opposite, which acts as an aesthetic manifesto for his technical and visceral investigation into the woodcut medium. In it Kiefer presents a pantheon of famous and infamous figures from German history, like Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), who wrote the political tragedy Die Hermannsschlacht about the massacre in the Teutoburg Forrest, and Horst Wessel, the Nazi party member and Storm Trooper. Political poets and military men predominate, along with individuals whose credibility was damaged by Nazi approval or by their sympathy with that regime. Kiefer emphasized wood and trees as backdrop, which was an essential component of his imagination. The cycles of nature, indicated by tree rings, overlay the patterns of thought symbolized by the figures, so that human history grows in an ongoing process. Many of the images are taken from dictionaries and books, and the often unsympathetic and wooden quality of the portrayals renders the figures subject to the twists and turns in the path of human history. At the same time they are a kind of fodder for the fire that burns at the centre of the woodcut. The vines and branches tying the figures together emanate from a pile of burning logs at the Hermannschlacht, in the centre of the picture as flames and smoke infuse the entire scene with a feeling of turmoil.

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 unbekannten 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.