conversation with the artist
Interview by Jean-Michel Bouhours
Curator, chief of the modern collections department, musée national d’art moderne, curator of the exhibition
 
Jean-Michel Bouhours – Your last retrospective in Paris was back in 1984, an exhibition designed in Germany and shown at the musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris…
Anselm Kiefer - It was not a “retrospective” because I was still too young for that.
JMB - The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou invites the public to discover the ensemble of your work for the first time in France. What are your expectations about this exhibition?
AK - First of all doing a retrospective is very trying because you have to review your work all over again, go back to the past. I would rather look to the future. But there are surprises: you see the works differently after all these years, vision changes, the public, too. I myself become the beholder of works I made over forty years ago. My conception of time is that the more you go back into the past the more you go towards the future. It is a dual contradictory movement that makes time stretch out…

JMB - I have the impression that the exhibition is a difficult exercise for you: taking the works out of the studio whereas your working method rather implies keeping them, even burying them for a while so that time can do its work…
AK - Not at all, it helps me enormously. I like showing my works. For instance at Barjac I even constructed buildings to exhibit my works. I think it is absolutely necessary to take them out of the studio.
So then you can see what is wrong, what is good.

JMB - The need to put them at a distance, to be separated from the work, the need for them to be seen by others?
AK - I would even say collaborate with others.

JMB - Miró used the expression “assassinate painting” at a time when he was trying to introduce reality in his painting in the form of minerals and especially sand. Do you see a relationship between your work and these historic avant-gardes?
AK - Anti-art… At the end of the 1960s when I was studying at the Fine Arts Academy in Karlsruhe, I went into all the ateliers to urge them to stop painting! Sometimes you have to adopt a radical position to be able to start all over.

JMB -Hermetic systems, alchemy or the Kabbalah, their symbolism of materials enriched your painting by introducing new materials: lead, ashes, electrolytic chemistry...
AK - When I was a student in Fribourg I used food, pasta, I glued pasta on the canvas with nail polish.
It was a bit perverse, wasn’t it? But it wasn’t bad. I also used lentils, eggs… That was a long time ago.
I worked with non-conventional materials way before the 1980s. I am not a painter of Art for Art’s sake.
I don’t paint to make a picture. For me painting is thinking, researching […] and not research on painting.
I was pleased, for instance, when I discovered Jewish mythology in Jerusalem and at the same time alchemy, because the Kabbalah and alchemy converge… At last I saw a reason for painting.
One of my motivations for painting was also German history. It is research on myself, on what I am, where I was born, and so on. And then later I sought another reason, because I always had to have a reason. I cannot do a painting merely for it to be a painting. Matisse did not paint for the sake of painting.

JMB - The self-portrait is a question that arises at two moments in your work. At the end of the 1960s with the Occupations and Heroic Symbols series, you took on, you embodied what you considered your responsibility towards history. In the 1980s, no longer “standing straight as a ramrod” you were lying prone in the yoga “corpse” pose. From one of these moments to the other, is it not always the task of mourning?
AK - You’re right, it is a task of mourning but also a “Dada” task… Because when I have my hand raised, it’s a bit like Chaplin… It is not only serious, it is also… how do you say it?

JMB - Derision?
AK - Yes, a parody, a satire… Whereas when I am lying in this yoga posture it has to do with Buddhism, with the feeling of being drowned in Nature that recreates itself. You die, your corpse is dissolved in Nature and feeds the tree. It has more to do with the question of biological cycles, the history of the cosmos, yes, that’s it, the history of the cosmos.

JMB - Recently you returned to German history with the Morgenthau Plan, works that we saw three years ago at the Gagosian Gallery…
AK - It was a sort of despair because I had painted pictures of flowers, I love flowers so much, flowers everywhere… But I felt remorseful and the combination with the “Morgenthau Plan” gave the series another direction, more cynical. Morgenthau* wanted Germany to become an agricultural country and nothing else. It’s something like the dream of the Green movement today: flowers, wheat… It is somewhat cynical of me to want to treat a fearful episode in the history of the end of the Second World
War as a hymn to the beauty of Nature.

JMB -There is indeed a great contrast…
AK - Contrast? That’s too…

JMB - …weak?
AK - Professional! No, instead that is how I gave a new raison d’.tre to some paintings.

JMB -The question of cycle and cosmos is fundamental in your work. You associate the process of artistic creation with that of destruction and ruin…
AK - Yes, the cycle. Not like in Catholicism and Communism: it is not a line going straight up to Heaven like this [an upward gesture]. That is an eschatological idea. Catholics have a Heaven, Communism leads to Heaven, it’s the end of history. For me this is impossible. Why the end when we don’t know about the beginning? What was there before the Big Bang? Several Big Bangs? We don’t know.

JMB - In the exhibition there is a room of vitrines. You made several in the late 1980s in Germany, an ensemble presently installed at Höpfingen, one of your former studios. It has become a definitive and permanent installation.
AK - Yes, they will stay there forever.

JMB - So we could not show them in Paris; and you decided to launch a new cycle of creation?
AK - At first, I wanted to make a big corridor featuring my “Arsenal”**; I rearranged my collection of materials, watercolours, all sorts of things. This arrangement led to the vitrines. Then I thought it was not right to show the “Arsenal”, I didn’t want to show my tools that way. I preferred to use the arrangement of these collections to create vitrines, selecting objects that react with one another or against
one another and give me ideas.
* Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin Roosevelt. He advocated a plan aimed at preventing Germany from becoming
again a military power after the war.
** The “Arsenal” is a storeroom in Kiefer’s studio near Paris containing the elements, materials collected by the artist that might be utilised later in his works.

JMB -The vitrine derives from the cabinet of curiosities, modernism often played with it, from the Surrealists to Joseph Beuys…What does the vitrine represent in your work? Why a vitrine rather than a picture?
AK - The vitrine is like a glimpse.

JMB - A flash of wit, a flash of lightning?
AK - .A short-circuit. When I stroll about my studio in the evening, feeling a bit tired, when I am no longer working, I am no longer in a logic but in another world. I am strolling inside my brains. I see the synapses.
The vitrine, is a detail or an Ausschnitt…

JMB - …a cut-out, an extract…
AK - ... and the synapses meet. That’s it, yes.

JMB -You have spoken of the “Arsenal” like an inferno, a relegation of the waste of society, objects rejected and awaiting a redemption…
AK - Redemption means discovery. I discover something, I discover something else, I put them together and sometimes it’s successful because it works.

JMB - Does that mean they become charged with meaning?
AK - It’s like this: for a long time people searched for the entrance to Hell. Some looked for it in Naples, on the Vesuvius, etc. They really searched for it and were disappointed at not being able to locate it geographically. Then science, Newton, all that happened, and now we have stopped searching…

JMB - In the Forum, the Centre Pompidou lobby, we are showing an installation resembling what you created at Barjac. This work calls to mind the cinema, a sort of huge projection room with its strips of film, its ribbons of images…
AK - “Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder” (In climbing, climbing towards the heights, fall into the abyss).
This title comes from a quotation from Goethe in Faust, when he descends to the realm of the Mothers.*
I took all the pictures I have made since I started taking photographs and glued them onto lead ribbons.
Like films, but it’s a paradox because the raison d’.tre of a film is to be transparent, to let light go through it to be projected. Glued on lead, these pictures are no longer viewable, visible. It is the exhibition of my life because they are photographs I took throughout my life, thousands of photos. And yet I hide them, it’s a cache.

JMB - The work is not visible from outside, unlike cinema where the very transparency of the film allows the image to escape, be projected on the outside…
AK - It is not a projection, we might call it an introspection.

JMB - Speaking in general, in your work is there a design, an eschatological aim, a representation of the end of time?
AK - It does contain some quotations: Ragnar.k for instance. In Nordic myths Ragnar.k is the end of the world. But for me it is not the end but more a cycle. Today, we worry about changes, animals disappearing, upheavals in Nature. And yet thirty million years ago a meteorite extinguished three-quarters of the existing species. It was a loss of almost all the living world and however another evolution began about which we hardly know anything at all… An Austrian poet, Adalbert Stifter, described stones as if they were humans and humans as if they were stones.** Stones may have a consciousness that we don’t understand. One day a biologist told me about his experiments on plants and music: in the glasshouse, with loud speakers, on one side he had Mozart’s music played, on the other some disco. The plants turned toward Mozart… This doesn’t means we should prefer Mozart but that plants can hear and discern.
* mysterious underground deities.
** Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal, 1845. English translation by Lee M. Hollander, in The German Classics of the 19th and 20th century, vol. 08, 1914.

JMB - The Centre Pompidou recently held an exhibition on Le Corbusier’s work. At the crucial time when you were becoming an artist you visited Ronchamp and then spent three weeks of meditation at the monastery of La Tourette…
AK - I saw the chapel of Ronchamp in the Franche-Comt. when I was 17 or 18. Three years later, I stayed at La Tourette.
The monastery priest, a Dominican, an intellectual, had become a friend of Le Corbusier. He was not a fundamentalist, he was open and had discussions with Le Corbusier who was an atheist. Many details in this monastery inspired me. There is in particular a terrace with a wall that is so high that the monks cannot see the scenery, they only see the sky. […] It is both spiritual and cynical.
A building like Ronchamp is so inspiring, beautiful and radical, to the point of authoritarianism, almost a fascist idea. […] An artist can have this sort of idea, like Le Corbusier who wanted to level Paris, but if it becomes real, it’s idiotic, monstrous.

JMB - And you yourself, once you settled at Barjac in 1993, you introduced in your work this concrete to which Le Corbusier “initiated” you?
AK - Yes, at Barjac I often used pure, raw concrete. As for a sculpture: you make a wooden core, a formwork, you pour the concrete inside, then you uncover it, the process remains apparent, it’s interesting. I also used containers as forms, to create a wall. I worked without an engineer, without an architect, I constructed tall buildings. Just like when I was a child, when I played with the bricks of some bombed out ruins near our house.
For example, the Barjac amphitheatre, it is very tall, I even wanted it to lean a little… It did not have much of a foundation and so I anticipated this movement, but in the end it holds. I placed the containers and
I started, without foundations, with one or two assistants, in a very primitive way.

JMB -You hardly ever refer to the exact sciences. Do they not seem poetic enough to you?
AK - The exactitude of science is always a preliminary exactitude. Sciences are exact only for a certain time, and at a certain level of knowledge. Then another theory belies the one before. In my paintings that I leave on display there I am also seeking the ultimate exactitude.
Science inspired me a great deal, even if the sciences today are very much separated from one another and scientists as well. They are not able to articulate the two systems, the macrocosm and the microcosm.
Einstein wasn’t able to and tried all his life. We are searching for a complete vision of the world. For this, we need a prescience, a great image.
 

Exhibition themes
Ruin Value
A German History
Germanic Myths
Alchemy of glass
Paul Celan and Ingeborg
Bachmann’s poetry
Mourning and History
Mourning and History
The Kabbalah
From black to colour
Rhetoric of War Paper To Paint? Landscapes
For Madame de Sta.l : Germany Entrance
 
In the lobby of the Centre Pompidou the visitor will see a monumental installation by Anselm Kiefer.

It will be admission free. Inside this “tower-house” the visitor discovers a world made of lead, Anselm Kiefer’s favourite material, water, and thousands of photographs taken by the artist throughout his career, thus forming an archive of biographic data.
 
To deal with History Anselm Kiefer borrows the words “Occupations” and “Scorched Earth” from the rhetoric of war. In 1969 the artist made a series of photographic self-portraits where he appears dressed in the uniform his father wore in the Wehrmacht and performing the Hitler salute. For these Occupations he repeated the scene in several locations throughout Europe as for an inventory. The series of paintings
Heroische Sinnbilder [Heroic symbols] stems from this earlier work, midway between photography and performance, adding references to German culture, Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich or the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. These self-portraits, at first seen as glorifying the German Nazi past, reveal in the gestures and situations a form of derision. The artist prods the collective German amnesia to assume the responsibility of a legacy that must not be silenced. The paintings of scorched earth like the burnt books allude to the European landscapes devastated by the madness of war.

Paper
Anselm Kiefer has a special relationship with books while his graphics remain a less known aspect of his art. It was partly revealed in 1998 when the Metropolitan Museum purchased and exhibited fifty-four works created since 1969. The works on paper shown here span the artist’s entire career and document the variety and complexity of his techniques. The artist cuts out, retouches, combines supposedly incompatible materials or uses watercolour on sheets of plaster-coated paper. The themes of his painting recur in the works on paper and are keys to their interpretation. Watercolours do not act as sketches but rather as verifications or derivations from a work in progress. They allow Kiefer to observe his creative process with detachment. In the production of watercolours two significant moments stand out in the artist’s career: the 1970s and 2010s with the series Extases féminines, steeped in an eroticism occasionally tinged with mysticism.
 
To paint? landscapes
Anselm Kiefer does not use a palette to paint his canvases but this motif borrowed from classical art is often present in his works. The palette may hover between sky and earth, hung on a rope or held by an angel, recalling the unstable balance of creation and Kiefer’s ambivalent view of art: its power to save or destroy. Like a photographic lens it frames and conveys the artist’s vision, turning an ordinary landscape into the site of History. “Impure blood floods our furrows” Kiefer quotes in reference to the deep furrows circumscribed by a palette in Malen [To Paint]. Wings uplift the palette towards spirituality even if it is made of lead emphasising how difficult it is for art to soar. In 1978 a lead palette was Kiefer’s first use of this metal in his work. Several years later this symbolic motif becomes increasingly rare and that of the book appears.
 
Germanic myths
In 1973 Kiefer began to paint a series of works in the studio he set up in the attic of a former schoolhouse at Hornbach in the Odenwald district. In vast wooden atelier scenes the artist associated History, religion and the great Germanic myths through symbols arisen from the collective memory. In Bilder-Streit [Iconoclastic
Controversy] tanks set on fire the floorboards that are transfixed by Siegfried’s sword in the painting Notung.
His works are haunted by the 13th-century Nibelung characters revisited by Richard Wagner before the Nazis adopted them. In Quaternität [Quaternity] the everlasting flames of the Trinity blaze as the figure of Satan, a coiled snake in the shape of infinity, draws near. The flames threaten the all-wood studio, a civilized version of the forest so charged with symbols for Kiefer and many German artists. Fire is also a highly ambiguous motif: it destroys and regenerates. In this attic, the painter’s lair often identified with Athanor, the alchemist’s cosmic furnace, reality undergoes obscure transmutations.
 
German History
This group of works questions the 19th-century construction of the German national identity and its appropriation by Nazism. The Battle of Teutoburg Forest (1st century), which became a national legend in the 19th century, inspired Kiefer for a series of works. Nazi ideology turned the event into the emblem of the Germans’ courage and combativeness. When Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz represented Germany
at the Venice Biennial in 1980, drawing from their national history, they opened a Pandora’s Box: the German past the entire nation wanted to forget. In his Wege der Weltsweisheit series [Ways of Worldly Wisdom] Kiefer insists on the need to face up to the Nazi past. As a palimpsest Kiefer painted on a forest background a web of curving lines connecting the portraits of his country’s intellectuals with “heroes” of
Nazism, pointing to the complexity of a nation’s cultural bonds.
 
Ruin value
In the early 1980s German history still haunted Anselm Kiefer’s works representing neo-classical architectures built by Paul Ludwig Troost, Wilhelm Kreis or Albert Speer, the Führer’s favourite architect.
Most of these edifices, that Kiefer painted as ruins, had in fact been destroyed by the Allied bombings, like the New Reich Chancellery erected in 1938, the symbol of Nazi power that Kiefer used in his painting Innenraum [Interior]. Aspiring to surpass the great civilisations of Antiquity the Nazi regime reinstated neoclassicism.
Albert Speer in his Theory of Ruin Value recommended designing buildings that after several millennia would become grandiose awe-inspiring ruins. This futuristic archaeology staged by Kiefer appears intermittently in art since Brueghel. It challenges German amnesia fostered by the fact that the massive bombings of German cities in 1945 erased all traces of symbolic seats of Nazi power.
 

Mourning and History
Kiefer’s travels in Israel in 1984 and 1990 helped him put his own historicity in perspective and reactivate a profound mourning process. For the German artist Yiddish culture and the Oral Law of the Talmud signify lost cultures. Seraphim, the Hebrew name for the figure of the angel, in the work thus titled is painted at the bottom of Jacob’s ladder in the form of a snake, an animal sometimes deadly in Judaic symbolism.
As Freud claims, the identification of the Ego with the lost object hinges on mourning and melancholia. In Anselm Kiefer’s work this identification is expressed in a hermetic interpretation of the world.
Kiefer’s burnt books equally call to mind the au-to-daf., the lost culture, the Talmud’s prohibition to write the Oral Law. After 1995 Kiefer’s work resumed the self-portrait, lying in the corpse pose known as shavasana in the Hatha Yoga. This figuration of death and resurrection recalls esoteric representations, in particular those of the alchemist and spiritualist Robert Fludd, the great Renaissance humanist, who professed the harmony between macrocosm and microcosm.
 
Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann’s poetry
Anselm Kiefer readily declares that he would have liked to have been a poet, precisely because the poetry that he admires, particularly that of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, implemented, immediately after the war, a reinvention of the German language. Disagreeing with Adorno’s prohibition –“Writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. […] All culture after Auschwitz is but a heap of rubbish.”–, Paul Celan wrote a hermetic poetry that by refusing images does not cover up Auschwitz. Bachmann wrote in the poem Exile:
I with the German language
The cloud around me
That I keep as my house
Drifts across all languages
[“Ich mit der deutschen Sprache/ dieser Wolke um mich/ die ich halte als Haus/ treibe durch alle Sprachen”]
 
Born where Austria, Italy and Slovenia join, Bachmann like Kiefer had to face the issue of geographic, linguistic and cultural frontiers. The poetess denies the principle of the ontological frontier between the I and the Other, claiming she would like to write under the name “unknown poet”. Echoing Kiefer’s “unknown painter” [“unbekannten Maler”], this expression refers to the Nazis’ official attribution of
Germany’s emblematic poem Die Lorelei whose author Heinrich Heine was Jewish.
 
The Kabbalah
While mourning his own culture disfigured by Nazism, already evoked in Margarethe (1981) and Sulamith (1983) after Paul Celan’s poem, Kiefer was drawn to Jewish narrations and the Old Testament. Travelling in the early 1980s in the Fertile Crescent that ranges from Egypt to Ancient Mesopotamia, the artist explored the ancient myths and observed their equivalences and ambivalences. He sometimes combines them, proving the universality of concepts. In several works we find Lilith and her serpent, or Seraphim, sefirot… Kabbalist mystique became a privileged source of inspiration from the 1990s onwards, introducing him to a new spirituality that led to the more recent meditative works. The Kabbalah that interests Anselm Kiefer is that of Isaac Luria (1534–1572) where Creation goes through three stages:
Tzimtzum [Contraction], Shevirat HaKelim [Breaking of the Vessels], Tikkun [Repair]. Luria’s Kabbalah implies incompletion. Anselm Kiefer transposes it in the notion of artist’s failure, his creation being by nature imperfect. A failure burdened with a melancholy that urges him to tirelessly pursue his quest.
 
From black to colour
The radical opposition between the blackness of the painting Für Paul Celan: Halme der Nacht [For Paul Celan: Stalks of the Night] and the vivid colours of the flowering meadows in the series of paintings referring to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire symbolises the cycles of a perpetual regeneration. The clotted paste with which the artist shaped his self-portrait uses texture to convey a cosmological and metaphysical relationship between Being and the Universe. The bare twig-like tree growing out of the torso, a recurrent alchemical theme in Kiefer’s work, leads us to the renewal expressed in the paintings on floral themes. “It’s a green hollow where a river sings”, Rimbaud wrote. The artist paints “wild flowers” as we might speak of grasses gone wild, forming “luminous and serene fields”
(Baudelaire). The generosity of Nature is conveyed in thick, brightly coloured impastos. The shadow of Van Gogh whose traces Kiefer sought in 1963 seems more present than ever.
 
For Madame de Staël: Germany
Anselm Kiefer’s latest works evoke Madame de Sta.l. An opponent of the Emperor Napoleon and firm believer in the republic, in 1808 Germaine de Sta.l travelled in Germany where she met the writers Goethe, Schiller and Schlegel. Germany, her penetrating portrait of Germanic culture published in 1813, called for change in the field of art, a new inspiration, a new style, laying the foundations of French
Romanticism. The theme of the forest, the cradle of German myth is revived by Anselm Kiefer in a novel way: whereas former representations of the forest kept the beholder aloof, these works strive instead to immerse him in an environment that enlarges the space of the painting. In the midst of these scorched trees, wonderful mushrooms, collages seemingly taken from a mycology treatise, suddenly spring up,
recalling the artificial paradises sought by the French Romantics. At the heart of this installation, a bed covered with lead bearing the name of Ulrike Meinhof, a member of the .Baader Gang. or Red Army Faction, reminds us of the political offshoots of the Romantic movement.
 
Steigend, steigend, sinke nieder [In climbing, climbing to wards the heights, fall into the abyss ]
The Centre Pompidou Forum presents a monumental work of Anselm Kiefer.
The title refers to Goethe, suggesting a dual motion of ascent and descent: “In climbing, climbing towards the heights, fall into the abyss.” Six containers piled on three levels and hollowed in the centre form a well inside, strips of lead fall straight, or in spirals, from the top towards a large basin of water. It recalls the artist’s Saturnine Room at Barjac in the South of France from the 1990s. Prints of photographs drawn from the artist’s archive of over a 100 000 images are applied onto the lead bands.
Since lead blocks out light, these perfectly opaque strips are the opposite of Celluloid cinema film.
Saturnine cinema, echoing iconoclasm and the prohibition of images, instead of emitting light reflects it upon matter: for the artist the flow of his thoughts. The cascading images are memorial or mental and become metaphors of the artist’s journey in Time.