安塞姆‧基弗

Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Anselm Kiefer: Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, 2000
New York, Flag Art Foundation, Size Does Matter, 2010, p. 14, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is cooler with very light blue tones in the original. The illustration also fails to convey the thick, textured quality of the paint surface. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. There are several networks of stable cracks throughout which appear original to the artist's working practice. No restoration is visible under ultraviolet light.
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Executed in 2000, Untitled (Young Mao) delivers a monumentally solemn manifestation of Anselm Kiefer's powerfully elegiac trans-historical dialectic. Belonging to the body of work inspired by the artist's travels in China during 1993, the present monolithic painting confronts the tyrannical legacy of China's communist regime. Echoing the artist's intrepid scrutiny of Germany's Nazi heritage, Kiefer turns his critical attentions to Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Focussed on an icon-like portrait of the young Chairman Mao, the washed pigment, leaden encrusted and scorched surface evokes the waning of a diminishing and archaic regime. Very closely aligned to further works from the same year housed in The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Collection, this work at once calls forth the ingrained iconography of Mao's emblematic visage installed on the façade of the gate at Tiananmen Square, whilst simultaneously alluding to Mao's famous speech of 1957: "Letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy of promoting the progress of the arts and sciences". Though encouraging freedom of expression and a healthy culture of voiced grievances, Mao's generous gesture was shortly proved false and the intellectuals that dared speak out against his authority were promptly incarcerated. The false promise and stunted growth of Mao's 'hundred flowers' is here conveyed through the barren and bloomless tree-like structure faintly present in the background; herein, this painting simultaneously confers the waning of a revolution and the stymied culture that it tyrannically  engendered.

In pursuing a project of symbolic layering and allusion, a distinctly melancholic response to recent historical trauma is conferred: for Kiefer, to move forward one has to look back. Many of the artist's early works from the 1980s polemically dealt with a host of themes directly associated with the Third Reich. While this tenet reverberates today in Kiefer's contemporary praxis, the mature works increasingly cast a broader, more totalising cultural arc that searches for universal truths. Within the monolithic Untitled (Young Mao), Kiefer masterfully mediates between these two strands: the artist-alchemist wields fire to poetically connect and transmute the universal and the specific, microcosm and macrocosm. Taking on the persona of the artist-alchemist, Kiefer scorches the terrain of his paintings to engender and incite new life and meaning. As redolent within the cracked matière, cauterised palette and leaden weight of the present work, Kiefer's longstanding employment of alchemically symbolic process and material is markedly prescient. However, the alchemist, as canonically defined in Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus, is a morally ambiguous character. In wielding such Faustian allusions Kiefer knowingly skirts the peripheries between good and evil. Occasionally playing the part of Devil's advocate, the artist drives forth provocative subject matter as a means to acknowledge and incorporate historical trauma to move beyond the pain of affliction.

Within the multifaceted wealth of allusion contained in Kiefer's Untitled (Young Mao), a metaphoric invocation of the legendary Jewish figure of Lilith is markedly present. Embodying a sustained interest, Lilith is symbolically recurrent throughout Kiefer's oeuvre, most often indicated in the form of a dress or smock. According to Judaic myth, Lilith was the first wife of Man, borne from the same earth as Adam as opposed to Eve who sprung from his rib. Reputed to be a demon of the night, the rebellious Lilith was cast from God's fold for demanding equality with Adam. Operating within the impure realm between the mortal and the divine, Lilith (akin to Kiefer's signature material of lead) is associated with Saturn and the melancholia that comprises its attribute. Interestingly, this association is also tied to the disposition of the artist: as outlined by Michael Aupig, "those with a melancholic character, a disposition often associated with artists, are called 'Lilith's sons'" (Exhibition Catalogue, Fort Worth, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, 2005, p. 100). Herein, the faint suggestion of a dress-like smock also symbolically evokes the role of the artist as a melancholic agent of creation.

Within the myriad strands of interconnection that constitute the present work, Kiefer embroils the viewer in a complex matrix of signifiers alchemically and morally balanced between good and evil. In esoterically dissolving such boundaries and hinting at the linkages between the deepest reaches of myth to the most sensitive and recent of collective traumas, Kiefer's Untitled (Young Mao) is an atemporal and masterfully solemn response to sacrifice, suffering and loss. Broadcasting a unique conflation of China's brutal communist regime with a host of archaic and symbolic referents, the present work implores the viewer to deconstruct and unravel a complex yet poetic strata of arcane allusion.