Anselm Kiefer

Acquired directly from the artist by Martin Visser, Bergeijk
A gift from the above to Benno Premsela in April 1987

Colours: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: In a steel bar artist's frame. With foot prints on the wooden backing. This work is in excellent condition.
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Anselm Kiefer (Germany, b. 1945) is the prototype of a contemporary artist who practises complex eclecticism. His extensive oeuvre of paintings, watercolours, woodcuts, books and sculptures is full of references to German history, the Bible, classical antiquity, opera's of Wagner and Teutonic myths, sagas, legends and historical figures, like the 18^th Century French Queen Marie-Antoinette. Kiefer covers the uneven surfaces of this large canvases in layers of sand, tar, gold-leaf, the scorched bark of trees, straw, dried ferns and fabrics. Furthermore other media, like photography, woodcuts and sculptural elements are incorporated in his works. Since the eighties Kiefer has produced more and more big sculptural works in which art is represented as an alchemical process, made visible in the use of lead.

The early attention paid to Kiefer's work in the Netherlands by the late German curator and formerly director of the Kunsthalle Bern Johannes Gachnang and the Dutch art critic and formerly director of the Stedelijk Museum Rudi Fuchs aroused the interest of Dutch designers and art collectors Martin and Mia Visser. In 1974 they visited Kiefer's one-man show at 't Venster Gallery in Rotterdam and in 1975 they bought their first Kiefer a watercolour titled Ludwig II von Bayern, at Michel Werner's Gallery in Cologne. Over the course of the next years Martin Visser acquired a large number of paintings and drawings.  Also as curator of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Visser purchased a number of important works by Kiefer. In Visser's view, Kiefer is one of the greatest artists represented in his private collection.
Kiefer's Marie-Antoinette was a gift to designer and interior decorator Benno Premsela from Martin Visser. Premsela received the Kiefer for his help with the negotiations of the bequest of Visser's private collection (including over 20 works by Anselm Kiefer) to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands.

In the eighties Visser developed a preference for Kiefer's works in which was made use of lead. Although not present in all his works, lead has nevertheless become a defining feature of Kiefer's oeuvre, similar to a trademark or a signature. In 1986 Kiefer constructed a large piece in lead (280 by 470 cm.) titled Die Frauen der Revolution, (see image) consisting of an assemblage of smaller steel frames with dried lilies-of-the-valley and roses under glass. Below each frame he wrote the name of the woman to whom that particular work was dedicated. The present work shows the French Queen Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793), and is similar to a fragment of the larger Die Frauen der Revolution that since 1987 is part of the Collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. With the lead, the dried roses and steel frame Kiefer has given Marie-Antoinette after all a place in the gallery of honour in Die Frauen der Revolution (Women of the Revolution), despite her conviction of treason and the execution of the Queen and her husband on the guillotine on 16 October 1793.

(op. cit.: P. van den Bosch, The Collection Visser at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Nuth 2000, p. 202)