Art that tackles the big themes

By T.J. McNAMARA

Sometimes amid the wealth of spectacularly colourful books on art that flood the bookshops there is one of particular importance that helps define an artist and an era in a way that goes far beyond decorative, coffee-table duty.

The monograph on Anselm Kiefer is just such a one - and it's available here at last.

Kiefer has always shunned publicity and has never achieved the popular fame of Picasso, but as the Spanish artist dominated the first half of the 20th century so Kiefer, a German, has a fair claim to be the greatest artist of the second half. He has taken the experiments and discoveries in style made in the early part of last century and combined them, giving them a sombre, symbolic power.

His work has been seen in New Zealand. A 1986 exhibition in Wellington called New German Art: Wild, Visionary, Spectral impressed most who saw it. The richest images in that remarkable show were by Kiefer, including one of his typical, bare, ploughed fields studded with fire and one of his paintings of vast, empty, pillared halls done in thick, clotted paint.

There are interesting parallels with the work of Colin McCahon and not just because Kiefer is greatly given to writing words on his paintings. Like McCahon, he concerns himself with a deeply spiritual world and also like McCahon, he is never afraid to deal with big themes and a struggle to achieve grandeur.

Many of Kiefer's paintings which are the pride of galleries in Europe are huge, with great carrying power. Seen from 50m away, down a long procession of rooms in a museum, they have tremendous visual impact; close-up, they are fascinating in their texture and the passion evident in every part of the handling.

The surface may contain thick conventional paint, pitch and tar and photographs, as well as found objects such as straw, melted lead, condenser plates and human hair.

Sadly, no book, however lavish, can convey the complexity of this surface.

Yet the book, which is arranged thematically, shows Kiefer grappling mightily with the big themes of history, life and death. The lettering on his paintings is not, like McCahon, a chant or prayer but a symbol and sign to evoke history and folk memory. When he paints a forest with huge, dragging strokes of paint and labels it Teutoburgerwald he evokes the battle where the ancient Germans defeated the Romans in a forest and established their independence and their delusive visions of military glory.

After 1945, the year Kiefer was born, there was a good deal of evasion of the past in Germany. Kiefer was determined to confront it and make his ambiguous art out of tension. Following his teacher, Joseph Beuys, he was initially preoccupied with gestural and conceptual art.

His first bitterly controversial works, documented in this book, were a series of Occupations where he had himself photographed giving the Nazi salute to the North Sea, the Colosseum in Rome and other sites where German hegemony once held sway.

Acknowledging, mocking and parodying the reality of Nazism cleared the platform for Kiefer's vast later achievement but it also meant his style was dark and melancholic. He turns mythology into allegory and his art deals with the varied manifestations of the human spirit throughout history in a way few modern artists have dared to attempt.

To convey his ideas Kiefer uses every possible medium involving painting, sculpture, photography, woodcuts and installations. He has spent 30 years layering, interweaving and reworking his themes. In the same way McCahon used the Nelson hills for his spiritual symbolism, Kiefer uses the broad fields of the North German Plain and the spirit of the forests that lie deep in the German subconsciousness.

The book contains Kiefer's paintings of vast barn-like structures made of heavy beams. Within these wooden structures, fires burn on altars ranged along deep perspectives. The fires are attractive but immensely dangerous. Such a painting is Germany's Spiritual Heroes (1973).

Kiefer also paints the gigantic structures of Albert Speer's fascist architecture as bombed ruins, sombre memorials for the Jews he considers an integral and necessary part of German society until they were made scapegoats.

His work was profoundly influenced by the great poem Death Fugue, written during forced labour by the Jewish poet Paul Celan. The poem contrasts the golden hair of Margarete, the German ideal, with the cremated, ashen hair of Shulamith, the Jewish beauty from The Song of Songs. Death Fugue tells of suffering and the sources of tragedy in the horrifying history of Germans and Jews.

In the best-known and perhaps the most splendid and moving of his paintings, Shulamite (1983), Kiefer takes the image of a huge stone hall built to celebrate Nazi heroes and makes it a sombre memorial to the Holocaust.

In other works he explores the position of the artist in a desolate century. He depicts roses placed on an artist's palette but represents the roses by twists of barbed wire that represent their thorns. The materials in Kiefer become the style.

Late last century Kiefer gave up painting for some years and when he returned to it he began to paint sunflowers. On the surfaces of his work he spread great spirals of sunflower seeds, suggesting both the cosmos and the microcosm of the fertility of seeds.

As well as seeds Kiefer is fascinated by lead and among other things he makes or sometimes paints are lead wings attached to a palette.

His art finds it hard to fly but out of his melancholia comes wonderful images that allow our individual imaginations to take flight, share suffering and exaltation and take courage. It makes this book worth its price.

* Anselm Kiefer by Mark Rosenthal (Thames and Hudson, $330). Some bookshops have it discounted at $250 for a short time.