anselm kiefer and the alchemy of art

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Anselm Kiefer and the Alchemy of Art:

Turning Lead into Gold

Edwin Cridland

B.A. (Hons) in Visual Art

School of Art, Design and Printing

College of Arts and Tourism

Dublin Institute of Technology

Supervisor: Kieran Corcoran

2014



Table of Contents

Page

List of Illustrations ii

Acknowledgements iv

Declaration v

Abstract vi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: After the Catastrophe 4

Chapter 2: The Mythology of Murder 12

Chapter 3: Alchemy and Qabbalah 21

Chapter 4: The Alchemical Oeuvre of Anselm Keifer 30

Conclusion 40

Bibliography 45

i



List of Illustrations

Figure1. . Fludd, Robert, illustration from, Utriusque Cosmi historia II, 2: Tomi

Secundi Tractatus Secundus, Sectio proma: De Theosophico, cabalisticao et

Physiologico utriusque mundi discursu, Frankfurt, 1621

Figure2. Page4. Kiefer, Anselm, The Secret Life of Plants, 2001, paint, corrosion and

mixed media on lead, 10ft 2in diameter, 6ft 7in x 4ft 10in each page, Private Collection

Figure3. Page5. ‘These Atrocities: You Are Guilty’, Allied propaganda leaflet circa

1945, retrieved from Google Images

Figure4. Page6. Faience button seal (H99-3814/8756-01) with swastika motif found on

the floor of Room 202 (Trench 43), Harappa, 2000-2001

(retrievedfrom:http://www.harappa.com/indus4/315.html)

Figure5. Page8. Dreher, Peter, Das Glas bei Nacht , No. 2143, 2005, part of the series;

Tag um Tag ist Guter Tag, oil on canvass, 10in x 8in, private collection

Figure6. Page9. Schmutzler, Leopold, Working Maidens, oil on canvass, 1940,

Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Rainer Maria Schopp, recovered from

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org

Figure7. Page10. Kippenberger, Martin, With the Best Will in the World I Can See NoSwastika, 1984, oil and plastic on canvass, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection

Figure8. Page11. Kiefer, Anselm, Resurrexit, Oil, acrylic, and charcoal on burlap, 9ft 6

3/16in x 70 7/8 in, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 1973

Figure9. Page13. Kiefer, Anselm, Ways of Worldly Wisdom: Arminius's Battle, 1978

Figure10. Page14. Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda poster circa 1935 (retrieved from

http://kdgeorge.com/propaganda/german-propaganda-art)

Figure11. Page17. Kiefer, Anselm, Siegfred forgets Brunhilde, 1975

Figure12. Page19. Kiefer, Anselm, Shulamith, 1983

Figure13. Page20. Crowley, Aleister, imsignia of Ordo Templi Orientis,circa 1935

Figure14, Page21. Fludd, Robert, Divinorum Neglectus, from Utriusque Cosmi historia

II, 1621

Figure15. Page22 Fludd, Robert, Integra Naturae Speculum Artisqu e imago, Utriusque

Cosmi historia II, 1621

ii

http://www.peter-dreher.de/tagumtag1.htm



http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/

http://kdgeorge.com/propaganda/german-propaganda-art

http://kdgeorge.com/propaganda/german-propaganda-art

http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/




Figure16. Page24. Fludd, Robert, Mundus Intellectualis: Utriusque Cosmi historia II

1621

Figure17. Page28. Kiefer, Anselm, Seven Heavenly Palaces, Hangar Bicocca, Milan.

Figure18. Page29. Fludd, Robert, Union of spirit and matter from Utriusque cosmi

majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica atque technical historia, 1617

Figure19. Page30. Kiefer, Anselm, Margarete, 1981

Figure20. Page31. Kiefer, Anselm, Sulamith, 1983

Figure21. Page32. Kiefer, Anselm, Nigredo, 1984

Figure22. Page36. Kiefer, Anselm, Merkaba, if 2011

Figure23. Page37. Kiefer, Anselm, The High Priestess/Zweistromland , lead and steel,

1989

Figure24. Page38. Van Eyck, Jan, Hubert, the Adoration of the Lamb, 1432

Figure25. Page41. Kiefer, Anselm, Shulamith, soldered lead, with female hair and

ashes, 1990

Figure26. Page43. Kiefer’s complex of tower like structures at his former studio at

Barjac, Provençe, France, 2010 from the documentary about Kiefer’s work Over Your

Cities Grass Will Grow by Sophie Fiennes

iii

http://tayandhergay.blogspot.ie/2011/10/anselm-kiefer-seven-heavenly-palaces.html






Acknowledgements

I would firstly like to thank my Supervisor, Kieran Corcoran for his great

patience with such a poor scholar as I and in particular, his kindencouragement without which this work would certainly never have come

to fruition. I thank also all those who paved the way, leaving the comfortand safety of the Pale behind them to bring their learning to this wild, wet

and very windy outpost of civilization at the edge of the Atlantic. Noel

Fitzpatrick, Niamh-Ann Kelly and Tim Stotts introduced me to a

fascinating subject of which I had been previously, completely ignorant. A

subject which in fact ought to be of deep concern to all who strive to practice the visual arts. Then there are all those who were able to shed light

on any matter however trivial it may have seemed; Ber Burns the energetic

Head of the Sherkin establishment, Majella Collins, ‘Number One’ who

like myself, is a martyr to the tyranny of degenerated cervical vertebrae but

who nevertheless is always available for any who need her and then about

eighteen or nineteen fellow students whose collective wisdom is always

worth taking into account. Finally, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Fergus

Murphy who very kindly gave a great deal of his own limited time to save

me from disaster and who kept this enterprise rolling through the boggiestterrain.

iv



Declaration

This thesis is submitted by the undersigned to the Dublin Institute of

Technology in part fulfilment of the examination for the degree of BA in

Visual Arts. It is entirely the author’s own work and has not been

submitted previously for an award to this or any other institution.

Signed:

Date:

v



Abstract

The thesis explores the work of the contemporary German artist AnselmKiefer. He has in the past, attracted criticism in Germany because of his

insistence on confronting the subject of the Second World War but is as

well known for his frequent allusion to Alchemy and the mysticalQabbālāh and Merkaba. The nature of these arcane arts or sciences is

briefly examined as well as their relationship to modern science and also

to ancient spiritual practices as well as to Jungian psychotherapy. Kiefer’s

connection with the artists Peter Dreher and Joseph Beuys is also

considered. The unusual scope and scale of his work and his use of

unconventional materials seem to provoke questions about his image as amodern alchemist and also what it may mean to practice art in the twenty-

first century.

vi



Introduction

Anselm Kiefer is considered to be one of a number of important German artists of the

post-war period who, in the last decades have risen to prominence in the Art-world.

Kiefer stands out from his contemporaries, however, due to his insistence on “talking

about the War”, as it were, through the medium of his work. His overt and frequently

contentious engagement with and exposure of the stark truth of what has been

euphemistically called ‘the Catastrophe’ is underpinned by a conceptual framework that

can be found to run throughout his artistic output. This structure embraces both Nordic

and Germanic mythology as well as both orthodox and apocryphal traditions derived

from Biblical and Talmudic scripture. Gnostic ideas are also woven into the framework

along with mystical traditions such as the relatively well known Qabbālāh but also less

well known, earlier pre- Qabbālist traditions such as that of the Merkaba and the Seven

Heavenly Palaces. Additional references to early civilisations and allusions to a number

of arcane institutions including the Rosicrucian and Masonic Orders significantly

broaden the scope of the artist’s frame of reference.

In addition to his reputation for confronting uncompromisingly his country’s recent past

under the government of National Socialists Kiefer is equally if not better known for hisinterest in alchemy. ‘Kiefer the Alchemist’ is certainly part of the artist’s personal myth

as a perusal of any of his exhibition catalogues or any number of articles and interviews

published in art magazines would easily reveal. It could be argued that an idea of

alchemy as the common denominator is posited in these works, a suggestion perhaps

that alchemy could be the glue to bind together the various disparate themes described

in the first. Taking this idea one step forward Kiefer’s works can be seen as being in

some way modern alchemical operations that attempt to achieve a new Magnus Opus

the aim of which is, by bringing all these ideas and systems together, to forge a new

cultural heritage and to give impetus to a spiritual renewal that might yet redeem the

world and purge it of the uncleanness, the evil even, of which the Holocaust can be

considered to have been the apotheosis.

The aim of this thesis is to tease out these tangled threads that they may be observed

with greater clarity, gaining by this means further insight into the matter of what exactly

the artist is presenting here and what the implications of it may be. To further this end

1



Chapter One (After the Catastrophe) will be bibliographical in nature. An investigation

of the intellectual and moral environment obtaining in post-war Germany at the time of

the artist’s birth and throughout his youth will attempt to place his works in a historical

and societal perspective.

Chapter Two (Early Work), will be very much an extension of Chapter One but shifting

the point of focus to examine Kiefer’s early work and consider the various artistic ideas

that may have influenced him during his student years from both tutors and

contemporaries. Additionally the very powerful influence exerted by the artist’s

discovery of and engagement with the works of the Romanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan,

will be touched upon.

The third chapter (Alchemy and Qabbālāh), will take a new direction and make an

attempt to present a number of arcane mysteries associated with Alchemy and

Qabbalah1 in an intelligible way. One of the great difficulties of researching matters of

an esoteric nature is the paucity of explicit material of reliable provenance and another

is the existence of a great amount of spurious material, couched in the same terms and

produced with scant regard for authenticity, in association with a number of

contemporary, ‘New Age’ cults. This problem has been recently compounded by theadoption of arcane imagery and terminology into the mythological world of computer-

gaming. It is fortunate that the writings of Carl Jung concerning the possibility of using

alchemical ideas in the fields of psychology and psychiatry are readily available and that

Jung himself was in a position to access material not generally available.

The fourth chapter will attempt to bring together the ideas developed in the earlier

chapters within the context of the artist’s body of work. It is hoped that a coherent

overview of Kiefer’s output may be so generated and in an insight gained into his use of

alchemy, or to be precise, an insight into his notion of using alchemy, in his work. In

this way, it may be possible to grasp the importance of the role alchemy plays in

developing an understanding of his work.

1 Qabbālāh is at present the preferred transliteration of the Hebrew word although earlier versions such as

Kabballah are still in current use. Some authors observe a convention of using Qabbalah to refer

specifically to purely Judaic practice whilst one of the spellings beginning with a ‘K’ is used to denote

Christian or other non-Judaic practice. For the purposes of this thesis, the form Qabbalah will be used

throughout to refer indiscriminately to all forms of the practice. [Authors note]

2



.

Figure1. Robert Fludd, illustration from, Utriusque Cosmi historia II, 1621

The conclusion will consider whether the results of these various researches, taken as a

whole, can provide any sort of insight into Kiefer’s alchemic modus operandi or any

measure of the efficacy of his recipe for turning lead into gold

3



Chapter One

After the Catastrophe

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, the last year of the Second World War, the year

National Socialism was defeated and the year when the German population came to be

acquainted with the idea of Kollektivschuld, Collective Guilt.

Figure2. Anselm Kiefer, The Secret Life of Plants, 2001

Allied propaganda teams were tasked with informing the greater German population of

their culpability, in no uncertain terms as the facsimile of an Allied propaganda leaflet

below illustrates,

4



Figure3. ‘These Atrocities: You Are Guilty’, Allied propaganda leaflet circa 1945

Kiefer and his contemporaries were born into a heavily guilt-laden atmosphere, one that

would, however, disperse fairly quickly. The U.S.A., with Britain playing second-

fiddle was obliged in the end to discontinue their operations in the face of non-

compliance by their European, allies. Naturally, the Soviet Government could not be

expected to disseminate U.S. propaganda when the socio-political ideologies of the two

powers were in such total opposition. The British and French, on their part, had no wish

to implement the U.S. ‘Morgenthau Plan’2 to return Germany to the state of a pre-

industrial nation because, devastated and bankrupted by the war, they couldn’t afford to

have such an impoverished neighbour. Kollektivschuld or not expediency demanded

that the German economy be revived. The U.S.A. was allowed to save face by claiming

the initiative to discontinue the propaganda war was their own. In any case, they had

been successful in their severe censorship of the Arts, impounding, it is said,

dangerously fascist landscapes and paintings of rural German life of an obviously anti-

Semitic nature and shipping them back stateside for safe-keeping.3 The Nazis had

2 Henry Morganthau, The Morgenthau Plan from the book "Germany is our Problem"

(Harper & Brothers - New York and London) 1945

3 ‘In the spring of 1947, 8,722 paintings and sculptures of German artists were transported to the United

States. Of these, only a small number have been returned to the Federal Republic of Germany.’

(Sunic,Tom, Art in the Third Reich: 1933-1945, Ecrits de Paris No. 645, July-August 2002,Translated by

the author, retrieved from, http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net)

5



promulgated an extremely conservative taste in the Arts. The Allies took an ambivalent

attitude to the vanquished Germans for on the one hand it was an absolute economic

necessity to move on from the war and rebuild Europe but at the same time and

considering the enormity of the full facts as they emerged it could never be appropriate

to excise the whole business from the historical ledger.

This, possibly unprecedented, position placed the ordinary German citizen in an

extremely difficult position morally. A minor example of this dysfunctional state of

affairs is that During Kiefer’s youth it was illegal in the German Republic even to draw

a Swastika4, despite the fact that is an early sun-symbol found in ancient rock paintings

in India and Pakistan and as such, is more properly associated with the early Indus

Valley civilization than with any modern fascist political ideals.[Fig.4] It was this

insupportable state of affairs that prompted Kiefer to act out his well-known series of

performances, preserved on polaroid snapshots and entitled ‘Occupations’ which were

exhibited at Galerie am Kaiserplatz, Karlsruhe, in 1969 to much public outrage. 5

Figure4. Faience button seal with swastika motif, floor of Room 202, Harappa, Pakistan 2001

Also, it was due to Kiefer’s early use of ‘performance art’, or to use the terminology of

the times ’happenings’ in this series, that he became associated in the public mind with

the larger than life figure of Joseph Beuys.

4 Strafgesetzbuch , section86a

5 Nicholas Wroe, A life in art: Anselm Kiefer , The Guardian, Saturday 19 March 2011

6



As an article published by the Glasogian Gallery puts it,

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany. After

studying law, he began his art education in Karlsruhe and then Düsseldorf,

where he studied informally under Joseph Beuys.6

Or, there again as the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History would have it,

After studies at the university in Freiburg and the academy in Karlsruhe, he

studied informally in the early 1970s with the artist Joseph Beuys on

occasional visits to Düsseldorf.7

However, Kiefer himself is inclined to play down the connection with Joseph Beuys,

considering Peter Dreher to have been his main and only real teacher. It was under

Dreher, then Professor of Painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste

Karlsruhe in Freiburg, that Kiefer studied when he abandoned his studies in Law and

Romance Languages in favour of Art. Professor Dreher’s own art work was heavily

influenced by the ‘New Objectivity’ movement and he is best known for his series, ‘Tag

um Tag guter Tag’ which roughly translates as ‘day by day is good day’, an aphorism

appropriated from Zen Buddhism. This series of over five thousand paintings, executed

in a highly realistic, almost photographic style, all depict the same subject, a tumbler of

water standing on a white tablecloth. Dreher is in the habit of painting a new one every

day as he has done for over forty years.8 It is possibly Dreher’s unfashionably realistic

style coupled with his apolitical and non-materialistic spiritual motivation that prompts

commentators to overlook his influence on Kiefer. It might also be noted that Although

Kiefer has said that Peter Dreher was his only real teacher the works of the two men

appear, at least superficially, to have very little in common.

The classification of Art into recognisable movements in post-war Germany has been

problematic. The National Socialists had, as is widely known, controlled the Arts with

an iron fist, artists whose work was considered to be entartete, that is to say degenerate,

were forbidden to work, if they were lucky. Some, such as Otto Dix, whose work

6Menu Artist: Anselm Kiefer, Gagosian Gallery, 2013, retrieved from: http://www.gagosian.com, 03-01-

2014 edition

7 Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, © 2000–2013 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

recovered from: http://www.metmuseum.org, 02-01-2014

8 Information retrieved from, http://www.artfund.org

7

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phdu/hd_phdu.htm

http://www.gagosian.com/


http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/phdu/hd_phdu.htm



would have been considered extremely degenerate, were allowed to continue working if

they were content to retire to the countryside to paint landscapes and rustic scenes.9

Figure5. Peter Dreher, Glass at Night , No. 2143, 2005

The Nazis particularly favoured rustic or pastoral scenes and paintings celebrating the

virtues of living a simple but honest life [Fig.5]. As a result of liberation from these

confinements after the war, it was quite natural that artists in Germany should once

again embrace the avant-garde. Artists such as Joseph Beuys thrived in this new

environment and the unusual materials that Anselm Kiefer works with are entirely in

keeping with contemporary artistic trends although in contrast to many of his

contemporaries, his work tends to be figurative. Kiefer is generally referred to as a

Neo-Expressionist along with artists such as Georg Baselitz and Martin Kippenburger.

Georg Baselitz, born in 1938 in Baselitz [from which town he takes his name, having

9 A walk through the exhibition proved that the principles of clarity, truth, and professionalism

determined the selection [....] the heroic element stands out. The worker, the farmer, the soldier are the

themes [....] Heroic subjects dominate over sentimental ones [....] The experiences of the Great War, the

German landscape, the German man at work, peasant life [....] The life of the State with its personalities

and developments. These are the new subjects [....] In accordance with the subject, the style of most of

the works is clear, strong, and full of character [....] there is a whiff of greatness everywhere. [….] Anew era of art has begun. (Dr. Wilhelm Späl, Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung 1937 , Kölnische

Volkszeitung, July 22nd, 1937, recovered from, http://thecensureofdemocracy.150m.com)

8







been christened Hans-Georg Kern] is sometimes said to have painted and hung a large

number of his works upside-down in response to the ‘topsy-turviness’ of life after the

War. It is worth bearing in mind, however that Baselitz grew up in the G.D.R. under

soviet rule where de-nazification was unknown, soviet-socialisation being the prime and

sole objective of political propaganda. The cultural environment in which he grew up,

then, was completely unlike that with which Kiefer was familiar. In a similar way,

Gerhard Richter lived in the G.D.R. until he escaped to the West and settled in

Düsseldorf in 1961. The great difference between Kiefer and these other German

painters is his insistence on ‘talking about the War’ for there can be no doubt that the

central theme running through all of Kiefer’s work is that of the horrors of the second

World War, all other material is subsidiary to the big theme of ‘The Catastrophe’.

Figure6. Leopold Schmutzler, Working Maidens, 1940

The critic Andreas Huyssen has claimed in an article for October magazine 10 that whilst

Kiefer has been perceived in the U.S.A. as really the only German artist to try to deal

with ‘The Catastrophe’, within Germany it has been the main issue for German

intellectuals since the 1960s, writing that for German critics,

10 Andreas Huyssen , "Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth", ‘October 48’,

spring edition, 1989, pp25-45 9



…the issue was rather how Kiefer went about dealing with this past. To

them Kiefer’s deliberate strategy of opening a Pandora’s Box of fascist and

nationalistic imagery amounted to a kind of original sin of the post

Auschwitz era.

However that may be, it really doesn’t seem to have been the main preoccupation of

German visual artists. Martin Kippenberger’s, With the Best Will in the World I Can't

see a Swastika, 1984, perhaps comes close with it’s clear, if tongue-in-cheek, reference

to the F.R.G. Law; Strafgesetzbuch, section86a, which, as mentioned earlier, forbids the

public display of Nazi-related insignia. This would seem to present his point of view as

being in conformity with Kiefer’s view that, ‘Germans want to forget [the past] and start

a new thing all the time, but only by going into the past can you go into the future.’11

Alluding to the secrecy surrounding the War, however, is hardly the same thing as

penetrating the veil of secrecy and working with the material discovered thereby.

Figure7.Martin Kippenberger, With the Best Will in the World I Can See No Swastika, 1984

11 Alex Needham, Anselm Kiefer: 'Art is difficult, it's not entertainment' , The Guardian, Friday 9

December 2011

10



In view of the facts presented above it is not hard to see Kiefer's deliberate strategy of

‘opening a Pandora's box of fascist and nationalistic imagery’12 which as noted earlier

was perceived ‘...a kind of original sin of the post-Auschwitz era.’ by German

academics and art-critics, as the first and possibly the only serious attempt by a high

profile German artist to attempt honestly to address the horrors and the inhuman

insanity of ‘the Catastrophe’. Any attempt to place Anselm Kiefer in the context of

some sort of post-war, pan-Germanic art-movement, however, is ultimately futile for

not only has such a movement not been observed to exist but Kiefer has always played a

lone hand. From his studio in a disused school-house in the Black Forest to his

decommissioned brick-factory studio in Buchenwald, from the brick factory to the

former silk-farm in rural Provençe and on to his huge Paris studio taking up almost an

entire block in an old run-down industrial area, he has always isolated himself from

other artists, always following his own ideas as he no doubt will continue to do in his

newly acquired nuclear reactor.

Figure8. Anselm Kiefer, Resurrexit , 1973

12Andreas Huyssen , "Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth" (October 48, spring

edition, 1989) pp25-45

11



Chapter Two

The Mythology of Murder

It has been noted that Kiefer’s presence in the Art-world was greatly augmented by his

controversial works referring directly to the ‘Catastrophe’, firstly with the series

‘Occupations’ mentioned in the previous chapter and also by a number of works

ridiculing the Nazi high command and their meticulous although ultimately futile plans

for the invasion of the U.K. code-named, ‘Operation Sea-lion’.13 Probably the most

striking aspect of Kiefer’s work, however, is his overt use of metaphor and symbolism.

After he had exhausted his exploitation of ‘Nazism-as-object’ by means of the

‘Occupations’ and ‘Operation Sea-lion’ series, he turned to earlier Germanic history and

myth. Indeed, by turning to Arminius, the legendary leader of a German tribal coalition

force that defeated three legions of the Imperial Roman army at Teutoberg Forest in the

first century A.D.14, Kiefer draws attention to a vital and significant point at which

history and myth meet. The importance of this myth is that it defines a point at which

the area of present day Germany lying between the Rhine and the Elbe became

temporarily isolated from the rest of Europe which, was becoming racially diverse as a

result of the Roman occupation.15 As a result, it was in the splendid isolation of this

area known as the Rhineland that the myth of German racial purity grew and blossomed

in the dark forest.16

Other mythologies tackled by Kiefer include that known as the Ring Cycle, otherwise

known as The Ring of the Nibelung and best known as a series of four operas by the

nineteenth century German composer Richard Wagner. Wagner developed Der Ring

des Nibelungen from the thirteenth century Burgundian epic poem composed in High

German, known as das Nibelunglied, the Song of the Nibelung. He added drama to the

tale, however, by combining the chivalric Burgundian romance with material from early

13 Rafael López-Pedraza, Anselm Kiefer, ‘after the castrophe’ (Thames and Hudson Ltd. London, 1996)

pp20-23

14 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (Fontana Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 77-85,

Fullham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB, 1996) pp87-90

15 Andrew Marr, A History of the World , Part Two, The Case for War (Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Pan

Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR,)

16 It should perhaps be noted at this point that, as Simon Schama demonstrates in ‘Landscape andMemory’, subsequent to the Diaspora, Jewish immigrants settled in the area in substantial numbers,

establishing themselves as traders and lumberjacks.

12



Norse Mythology.17 In doing so, Wagner, wittingly or not, created and promoted a

new, syncretic mythology localised in the Rhineland where otherworldly Rhine-

maidens guarded the hidden Rhinegold whilst heroic Germanic warriors slew all before

them wielding magical weapons inherited from the old gods.18

Figure9. Anselm Kiefer, Ways of Worldly Wisdom: Arminius's Battle, 1978

López-Pedraza 19 argues persuasively that Kiefer has followed Jung’s ideas concerning

racial myths and archetypes closely and that he uses these myths in a specifically

Jungian and therapeutic way. In 1936, Jung published an essay in the Neue Schweizer

magazine entitled Wotan20 in which he suggested that the collective psyche of a race of

people could be understood by reference to the traditions and myths of that race.

Taking this approach further, he stated that the old Germanic weather and war god

Wotan equated to a fundamental and potentially dangerous part of the German psyche.

From 1933 Jung was obliged to work closely with Hermann Göring in order to preserve

the continuation of the Society for Psychotherapy in Germany, although it would be

never again be possible for Jews to gain membership. He formed an international

17 the Verse Edda, the Prose Edda, the Völsunga saga and the Thidreks saga, saga

18 Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner’s Ring, (Oxford University Press, London,

1979)

19 Rafael Lopez Pedraza, Anselm Kiefer: after the catastrophe (Thames and Hudson Ltd. London, 1996)

20 Carl Jung, Wotan, (first published in Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich). n.s., III March, 1936)

13

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thidrekssaga






Society located in Switzerland ‘based on our Berlin model’ as Jung put it21 which made

it possible for Jewish members to continue their work under the auspices of the

International Society.

Figure10. Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda poster circa 1935

Finally, in 1936 members of the German institute were forbidden by the German

Government from attending the Jungian Eranos Convention at Ascona in

Switzerland 22and in the same year, the Göring Institute was founded to replace the

German Society for Psychotherapy. By 1936, Jung, frustrated by the intransigence of

the National Socialists had also, on his not infrequent visits to Berlin become aware of a

growing unrest and a societal deterioration.23 It was in this context then, that Jung

published his essay on Wotan in the New Swiss Magazine. The essay is not an

21 Ann Casement, Key Figures in Counselling and Psychotherapy, Carl Gustav Jung (Sage Publications

Limited, 6 Bonhill Street, London EC2A 4PU, 2001) Pp104-106

22

ibid

23 ibid

14



academic treatise but written for a broader readership although many of his arguments

are quite subtle.

His main contention is that deities can be understood to be personifications of psychic

forces, that is to say, of elements of the unconscious mind, which may influence how

people respond to events in the exterior world. These psychic forces are perceived to be

so fundamental as to function on a biological level with the imputation that they are

inherited, in part at least, genetically. Therefore, some of these psychological traits may

be possessed by an entire nation or even a whole race of people. He perceives the

German people as possessing a complex of psychic elements which he equates with the

old Germanic god Wotan, ‘a god,’ as Jung says

of rage and frenzy, who embodies the instinctual and emotional aspect of

the unconscious. It’s intuitive and inspiring side also […] for he

understands the runes and can interpret fate.

He sees this psychic force, however, as existing under normal circumstances only as a

potential, lying dormant until such time as it is possessed by a potent and corresponding

force from without. That time appears to Jung to have arrived, ‘the Germans are in a

state of fury’ he says, going on say:

Wotan is an Ergreifer [one who takes possession of in the occult or

demonic sense] of men, and unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which has

indeed actually happened – he is the only explanation.

He presents Hitler as a man who has become possessed by the fury of Wotan and in turn

has induced the entire German population to become possessed also and to enter a sort

of divine frenzy. ‘A god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled

with a “mighty rushing wind.”’ observes Jung, concluding however, ‘We who stand

outside judge the Germans far too much, as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps

it would be nearer the truth to regard them, also, as victims.’

Wotan is a Germanic name for the Norse god Odin24and López-Pedraza interprets the

journey that Kiefer made to North Cape in Norway in 1974, not only as a form of the

alchemical ‘peregrinatio’ to the abode of Deus Abscondus25 mentioned by Jung in

24 The German form of [Odin’s] name is Woden, or Wotan; the name Wednesday is derived from

Woden's day.( www.missgien.net/vikings/myth.html)

25 C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol.12)

15



Psychology and Alchemy,26 but also as a way to get to the geographical place of origin

of his inherited Germanic mythology.27 A small watercolour that Kiefer made on the

trip depicting a sword stuck into a rock is inscribed, ‘my father promised me a sword’

and appears to refer to a painting he painted the year before entitled Nothung. The

painting Nothung depicts the attic of the disused schoolhouse in Hornbach that served as

Kiefer’s studio for many years,28 it appears in a number of his works from this period.

In this rendering, a sword is stuck into the floorboards referring to the Norse myth of

Odin and his son Sigmund or in Wagners Rhenish version, Wotan and his son

Siegmund.

Wotan promises and subsequently gives Siegmund an invincible sword which

Siegmund names Nothung, however, at a later stage in the story Wotan is tricked into

shattering Nothung on the battlefield, an action which results in the death of Siegmund.

Siegmund’s son Siegfried inherits the shards of shattered sword and by virtue of being

born of a heroic and semi-divine blood-line is able to re-forge the sword, testing the

weapon’s virtue by using it to chop into two the anvil that he had used to make it.

Blood on the blade of the sword in Kiefer’s painting suggests both a blood inheritance

and a bloody one. Being the heroic possessor of an invincible weapon does not

necessarily lead to a blessed life. Greed motivates Siegfried to use his powers to gain

possession of the Nibelung’s ring despite the warnings of the Rhine-maidens, before

going on to free the Valkyrie Brünnhilde from the spell that keeps her asleep

surrounded by a ring of fire and claiming her as his betrothed. Little time passes,

however, before he is tricked into leaving Brünnhilde and travelling to the court of King

Günther where he becomes the victim of a plot to steal Alberich’s 29 ring from him. A

magic potion administered to him by stealth makes him forget Brünnhilde and fall in

love with Günther’s sister Gutrune setting in motion a sequence of disastrous events

which culminate in the deaths of both Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Siegfred is at least

freed from the effects of the potion in his death agonies and Brünnhilde, realising that

he has been tricked rather than unfaithful throws herself onto his funeral pyre.

26 Rafael López-Pedraza, Anselm Kiefer, ‘after the castrophe’ ,p.32

27 Ibid p.31

28 Ibid p36

29 Alberich the Nibelung, the original owner of the ring

16



López-Pedraza interprets Brünnhilde, serenely sleeping within the ring of fire, as

Siegfred’s anima or feminine side or to put it another way, his inner spiritual life so that

his forgetting of her is seen as a metaphor for neglect of the spiritual side of life as a

result of the obsessive pursuit of material wealth. It is for this reason that Kiefer’s

painting Siegfred forgets Brunhilde, 1975, depicts the desolation of a ploughed field

frozen in the depths of winter, symbolic of the spiritual winter of the German people. 30

Figure11. Anselm Kiefer, Siegfred forgets Brunhilde, 1975

In the early 1980s, Kiefer became very interested in the works of the Romanian poet,Paul Celan and in particular with his poem, ‘Todesfugue’,31 Death-fugue in English.

The poem innovatively mimics the ‘imitation’ so distinctive of the Fugue as a musical

form and the dark imagery employed returning again and again in barely varied

repetition, produces a very powerful expression of the horrors of the concentration and

death camps.

30 Rafael López-Pedraza, Anselm Kiefer, ‘after the castrophe’p.43

31 Paul Celan, Death-fugue;Selected Poems, Trans. Michael Hamburger, Christopher Middleton (Penguin

Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1972)

17



Below is a translation of the first verse,

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown

we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink it

we dig a grave in the breezes there one lies unconfined

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

he writes when dusk falls to Germany your golden hair Margaretehe

writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are flashing he whistles his

pack out

he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave

he commands us strike up for the dance

Celan had been unfortunate enough to be imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and

it was this experience together with stories gleaned from compatriots and other Jews

who like him had been liberated from the Polish camps in by Soviet troops in 1944 that

inspired him to write Death-Fugue. The poem revolves around three main Characters; a

German man, presumably the Camp Kommandant, Margarete or a personification of the

German war machine and variously Margarethe or Margarete and Sulamith otherwise

called Shulamite. The German man, described by variations of the following lines,

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents […]

death is a master from Germany his eyes are blue

he strikes you with leaden bullets …32

could be a metaphor for the military machine or he could be an actual man in the way

that ‘digging a grave in the breezes’ seems a bizarre image until the realisation comes

that it is quite literal, it is burial by cremation. Margarete and Sulamite stand for the

characters or spirits of their respective races, the German Margarethe with golden locks,

the Jewish Shulamith with ashen hair.33 Semitic people are, of course, known for their

32 Paul Celan, Death-fugue;Selected Poems, Trans. Michael Hamburger, Christopher Middleton (Penguin

Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England 1972)

33 ibid

18



dark hair so that there is a particular chill in the line, often repeated, ‘thy ashen hair

Shulamith’. A chill reinforced rather than mitigated by the knowledge that in fact the

victims of the gas-chambers had been shorn of hair long before their bodies were

cremated.

Figure12. Anselm Kiefer, Shulamith, 1983

With the ‘Occupations’ and ‘Operation Sea-Lion’ series’, Kiefer has begun to confront

the ‘Catastrophe’ in terms of the massive loss of life and property that the Nazis visited

on Europe. In his works dealing with German mythology he appears to be trying to

understand the cultural and racial traits that may have contributed to make such an

unthinkable disaster to arise. Now, however, he is coming to terms with the darkest,

most repulsive and evil heart of the whole matter, ‘The Final Solution’. He has

successfully ridiculed the occupation of Europe and Operation Sea-Lion, neither of

which are really amusing subjects and certainly not for those who suffered, but the time

for comedy has now passed. The orchestrated and mechanised mass-genocide that we

know as the Holocaust and Jews as the Shoah, could never be a subject for humour

however ironic the presentation. From this point on in his artistic career, his work

seems always to be invested with the knowledge of the extermination camps.

19



Kiefer’s work is always heavily laden with reference to myth and frequently is inscribed

with arcane symbols. His later works in particular make frequent allusions to mediaeval

Alchemy. His works also quite specifically refer to the Jewish Qabbalah and it is

perhaps not co-incidental that Qabbalah was subsequently absorbed into the theories of

Alchemy throughout Europe. The seventeenth century English alchemist Robert Fludd

is a good example of a Christian qabbalist as he demonstrates in his Theosophical

Cabalistic and Physiological Discourses of 1621.34 In Christian Spain such practices

fell under the scrutiny of the Spanish Inquisition of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries

but Qabbālāh was to remain embedded in European Christian Alchemy, passing

eventually into the Rosicrucian movement and a variety of later Arcane Societies from

the Freemasons to the famous Order of the Golden Dawn and even the Ordo Templi

Orientis of the infamous occultist, Aleister Crowley.

Figure13. Aleister Crowley, imsignia of Ordo Templi Orientis

It may be of some advantage then, in attempting to comprehend the work of Anselm

Kiefer, to undertake some sort of investigation into the symbolism that he makes use of.

In the next chapter, therefore, an attempt will be made to research the origins and

practice of Alchemy and Qabbālāh.

34 Robert Fludd , Utriusque Cosmi historia II, 2: Tomi Secundi Tractatus Secundus, Sectio proma: De

Theosophico, Cabalistico et Physiologico utriusque mundi discursu ( Frankfurt 1621)

20



Chapter Three

Alchemy and Qabbālāh

One of the main problems encountered in trying to investigate the subject of Alchemy is

not so much a paucity of documentation so much as the uncertain provenance of a great

deal of the available material. For not only has alchemical material been appropriated

into any number of ‘New Age’ cults but it is also to be found embedded in Video-game

mythology.

Figure14. Robert Fludd, Divinorum Neglectus, from Utriusque Cosmi historia II

Alchemy is known to have been practiced with a great deal of secrecy by some of the

most educated men in Europe during the period known as the Middle Ages as well as

throughout the Renaissance, becoming absorbed into the Rosicrucian and other similar

movements during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.35 Later scholars were keen

to distance themselves from the practice which they saw as fantasy relying on myth

rather than on any empirical scientific facts. Any association with alchemical practice

had the potential to sully the reputation of scientific methods so that it became

35 ‘Rosicrucian discourse was incredibly eclectic, drawing from alchemy, astrology, Paracelsianism,

Christian mysticism, millenarianism, the lore of chivalric orders and the Kabballah.’ [ William E. Burns,The Scientific Revolution: an Encyclopaedia, 1959 (ABC-CLIO, Inc, 130 Cremona Drive, Santa Barbara,

California, USA)p.275]

21



customary, in view of the rapid developments in the sciences over the last two centuries

to consider Alchemy as unrelated to chemistry, an aberration on the part of the scholars

of yore, who are presumed to have been lured into this dubious practice by a mistaken

belief in the supposed possibilities of obtaining great riches by means of the

transmutation of base metals, usually lead, into gold or of securing for themselves

immortality by discovering the ‘elixir’, a mythical formula with the property of

extending life indefinitely.

Ironically, discoveries in the area of molecular and atomic theory reveal that not only is

it possible for an element to transmute into a different element but that deep

underground and also in the upper atmosphere unstable or destabilised atoms are

constantly in the process of transmutation.36 By manipulating the transmutation of

unstable matter harvested from radio-active mineral deposits, Nuclear processing plants

and power-stations create energy, which at this point in human evolution is at least as

valuable as gold. It is only fair to add, however that both lead and gold are extremely

stable elements and the transmutation of one into the other has never been observed to

occur.

Only in recent years and due largely to discoveries made by investigative historians has

it reluctantly been accepted that alchemy formed the foundation upon which modernscience has been built.37 Naturally, it has been apparent for some time that the modern

term chemistry must certainly have derived from the word alchemy but any other link

between the two practices has been considered at best tenuous. More recently however

evidence that the alchemists discovered at a very early time a number of substances

known and used to this day by chemists such as, hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, nitric

acid, sodium, potassium and distilled alcohol, has led to a reassessment of the value of

alchemy. Additionally there can be no doubt that the early alchemists made great

advances in the science of metallurgy.

36 As the unstable nucleus emits radiation (disintegrates), the radionuclide transforms to different

nuclides. The process is called radioactive decay. It will continue until the forces in the nucleus are

balanced. For example, as a radionuclide decays, it will become a different isotope of the same element if

the number of neutrons changes and a different element altogether if the number of protons changes.

(retrieved from http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/radiation.html)

37 Many of the techniques used in chemistry began with the alchemists. From the early belief in earth,

fire, air and water as the four constituents of matter they gradually managed to isolate more and more

compounds and elements perhaps not realizing they were actually unravelling the mysteries of their world(Henry Mulder, Alchemy and Modern Chemistry: Perhaps they found gold after all, recovered from

http://www.scienceandyou.org)

22

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/glossary/termnop.html%23nuclide

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/glossary/termghi.html%23isotope

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/glossary/termghi.html%23isotope

http://www.epa.gov/radiation/glossary/termnop.html%23nuclide



Incidentally, from the artists’ point of view also there is a great debt owed to alchemy in

as much as a surprising amount of the various media available to artists were discovered

by alchemists. Distilled Turpentine, for instance or Flake white, a mainstay of artists,

which has for centuries has been traditionally produced by hanging strips of lead in a

sealed ceramic vessel containing a quantity of acetic acid distilled from vinegar.38

Figure15, Robert Fludd, Integra Naturae Speculum Artisqu e imago, 1621

But the esoteric nature of alchemy with its insistence upon secrecy and the great

suspicion with which the practice has been regarded by orthodox religions suggests the

possibility of the existence of other aspects of the practice of a more spiritual, mystical

or arguably magical or occult nature. Notably one of the great pioneers of

psychoanalysis, Carl Jung was convinced that there was a spiritual narrative hidden

within the apparently practical nature of the practice which he felt corresponded very

strongly with his own insights into the human psyche, a theory which he developed at

some length in the book, 'Psychology and Alchemy’39. Jung’s central principle was

based on the idea that the extreme complexity of the thought processes of civilised

38 Doerner, Max, The Materials of the Artist and their use in painting,Harcourt, Brace and Company, inc.,

1934, p.51

39Carl .G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 12, trans. Gerhard Adler,

R.F.C. Hull, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., New Fetter Lane, London, 1957

23



humans had caused them to lose touch with their inner, spiritual life. He saw modern

people therefore as being fragmented, their focus was on the rapidly developing

material world and they were no longer aware of their own inner self. The aim of his

therapy was to affect a psychic reintegration and it was his opinion that the esoteric

practices of the early alchemists were aimed at producing the same result.40

Figure16. Robert Fludd, World of the Mind 1621

The precise origins of alchemy remain obscure. The term alchemy can easily be shown

by etymologists to derive from Arabic, Al is the definite article in Arabic and the

practice was known to Arabian scholars as Al-kimiya. However, kimiya is not an

Arabic word and is not known in that form from any other language so that its origin is

a matter of dispute amongst philologists. Dr.Gabriele Ferrario, in his article ‘ Al-Kimya:

Notes on Arabic Alchemy’41 , is inclined to the view that alchemy was already an

established science by the time it was encountered by Arab scholars subsequent to the

Arabian invasion of Egypt in the seventh century A.D. It is implied then that ‘Kimia’

40 Ibid

41 Al-Kimya: Notes on Arabic Alchemy by Gabriele Ferrario Ph.D., Chemical Heritage Magazine, Fall2007 edition

24



was the nearest phonetic equivalent that Arabic scholars could find to the name by

which the science was known in Hellenic Egypt. The theory and practice of Kimia

appear to have been the result of a synthesis of elements derived from the main early

Civilisations notably Mesopotamia, Babylon and the Indus Valley civilization.42

References to a practice similar to alchemy, with stated aims being the transmutation of

base metal into gold and the prolongation of life are to be found in Indian Vedic texts.43

Early Chinese manuscripts from the first century B.C. also mention the practice,

associating it with Taoism so that there can be no way of knowing definitely, when and

where these concepts arose.44

From a European point of view, however, alchemy began with the Arab invasion of

Egypt. Egypt was, at the time of the Arab invasion of the seventh century A.D., part of

the Roman Empire, an Empire that had relocated from Rome to Constantinople and

learned to speak Greek in favour of Latin. In fact the Empire, in Egypt, was largely

theoretical and the Christianity practised was not that of the capital. The country was

home to a number of Gnostic and other independent Christian cults who had fled from

persecution to practice their apostasies in the desert whilst the majority of ordinary

congregations now preferred their liturgy and scriptures in the ancient Egyptian

language Coptic which was undergoing a popular revival in favour of Latin or Greek, infact, as Hans Heimann suggests in his text on Egypt under Byzantine rule 45, Egyptians

of this period felt a strong connection between adopting the Coptic Christian religion

and a rejection of Hellenistic culture in favour of a revival of traditional Egyptian

customs and culture. Since the invading Arabs were no threat to Egyptian religious

beliefs the invasion was entirely secular and although bloody was not prolonged.

The early Arab scholars who arrived in the wake of the military conquests were

evidently very keen to acquire any new knowledge that they might discover in Egypt

and Alexandria and in particular in the body of knowledge known as Kimiya. But on

the other hand it is not at all clear, due to the secrecy surrounding the subject, what the

42 Dr.Gabriele Ferrario, Al-Kimya: Notes on Arabic Alchemy, (Chemical Heritage Magazine, Fall Edition

2007, retrieved from http://www.chemheritage.org )

43 ibid

44 ibid

45 Heinz Heinen, 'Roman and Byzantine Rule In Egypt' , The Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia, volume 2,

Claremont Graduate University, School of Religion. - http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/col/cce

25



scope of the knowledge embodied in Kimiya was. Scholars were, naturally enough

given the violence and religious upheaval of the time, fearful if of being perceived as

heretics or sorcerers and from this it appears at least probable that the new science had

aspects which were not theologically orthodox.46 This in turn would tend to support

Carl Jung’s assertion that alchemy was essentially spiritual in nature and that the true

transformation that practitioners sought was of an internal nature, an improvement in

the condition of the soul or in modern terminology a sort of psychological healing.47

However that may be, men of learning so as to avoid unnecessary danger, developed or

possibly adapted a symbolism by which anything they committed to writing was

encrypted. As an additional precaution, since the Prophet himself had been well

disposed towards Jews and Christians and since Arabs and Jews shared the same origins

in the Arabic Peninsula, the Muslim scholars attributed the discovery of al-Kimia to the

Jews and a number of fairly dubious etymologies were devised for ’Kimia’ that

reinforced the idea of Judaic origins.48

As has been already mentioned the Muslim expansionists were keen to spread the word

of the Prophet but tended, unlike modern Islamists, to exercise tolerance towards

unbelievers, particularly Christians and Jews. After all the Prophet Mohammed

himself, uttered the following hadith, When any human being is born Satan touches him at both sides of

the Body with his two fingers, except Jesus, the son of Mary, whom

Satan

Tried to touch but failed, for he touched the placenta-cover

instead."49

Mohammad was from a mercantile family who adhered to a tribal monotheistic faith,

idolatrous polytheism was his great enemy, received monotheistic religions were not

and so right from the start of his campaigns, Mohammad invited Jews, Christians and

46 Dr.Gabriele Ferrario, Al-Kimya: Notes on Arabic Alchemy, (Chemical Heritage Magazine, Fall Edition

2007, retrieved from http://www.chemheritage.org )

47 Carl .G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 12, trans. Gerhard Adler,

R.F.C. Hull, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., New Fetter Lane, London, 1957

48 Dr.Gabriele Ferrario, Al-Kimya: Notes on Arabic Alchemy

49

Mohammed, ‘hadith number-506' from 'sahih-bukhari-volume-4-book54-, narrated by Abu Huraira’ , trans. Muhammad Muhsin Khan from ‘Fath Al-Bari’ published by the Egyptian Press of

Mustafa Al-Babi Al-Halabi, 1959.

26

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Muhsin_Khan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt





Zoroastrians, who he termed ‘People of the Book’ to join Islam but made it explicitly

clear that he did not consider them under any obligation to do so.50 This is interesting in

as much as the Book of the Zoroastrians is not connected in any way with the Book of

Islam and although Mohammed may have had ulterior and quite possibly pressing

strategic motives for keeping these Persians on-side, nevertheless the Book argument

seems to have been accepted by his followers.

It may be of interest, in this context to note that books made out of lead are a recurring

feature in Kiefer works of art although his earliest books are of paper. His lead books

range from the relatively small books in the sculpture Twenty Years of Solitude to very

large books such as The Secret Life of Plants which stands at over 6 feet tall. He has

also produced whole libraries of books such as Zweistömland, two bookcases of steel

laden with lead books. Books are repositories of knowledge so the earliest of them,

painstakingly produced, contained important information that would previously have

been preserved orally by priest or bard trained in the arts of mnemonics and recital. The

main subject would naturally be the history of the tribe, the genealogy of the most

influential families, creation myths and revealed scripture as in the case of the Torah,

Gospels and Qu’ran. By the sixth century A.D., then, a book conferred authority upon

the words inscribed in it. Scriptures, naturally contain the rules, divinely ordained, bywhich the people abide and interpretations of those rules by judges have been

traditionally encoded in books of Law. Books of arcane knowledge might contain the

rules of the universe by which men may learn to bring nature to perfection. Certainly it

could be said that the alchemists studied the world in an attempt to discover such rules

and that they committed their findings to writing whenever they could do so with any

reasonable safety.

Co-operation, during the early years of the Arab Empire, between adherents of the three

Abrahamic religions was greatly facilitated initially by the fact that they share a

scripture known as the Torah by Jews, the Taurat by Muslims and the Pentateuch by

Christians, creating a common religious landscape favourable to communication of a

spiritual nature. By the time that the Ummayad Caliphate of Córdoba, controlling the

territory of Al-Andalus which comprised most of the Iberian peninsula and a

considerable area of southern France, had seceded from the larger Abbasid Empire, the

50 Andrew Marr, A History of the World , Macmillan, Pan Macmillan, 20, New Wharf Road, London N1

9RR

27



actual geographical landscape in which adherents of the three faiths communicated was

the Islamic state of Al-Andalus. The Abbasid Caliphs at Baghdad made no attempt to

re-conquer Al-Andalus and the Empire remained divided. Instead of war there ensued a

cultural competition between Córdoba and Baghdad each vying with the other for

supremacy in the fields of philosophy, scientific progress, refinement of taste, the

exercise of leniency and tolerance and general enlightenment.

Figure17. Anselm Kiefer, Seven eavenly P alaces, Hangar Bicocca, Milan

Over the Pyrenees from Córdoba in Eastern Al-Andalus, some of the more mystical

Jews of Provençe were evolving Qabbālāh. By the thirteenth century, Provençal

Qabbālāh was very much dominated by Rabbi Yitzhak Saggi Nehor, more commonly

known as Isaac the Blind. According to ‘The Jewish Encyclopaedia’, Qabbālist science

was handed down from Mount Sinai from person to person until it reached Isaac the

Blind [1160–1235].51 In other words, the tradition had been preserved orally until Isaac

published a commentary on the Sefer Yeẓirah52 in the thirteenth century. He may have

published other tracts but it was his correspondence with Azriel Ezra ben Menahem of

51 Isaac-the-Blind retrieved from, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8161-isaac-the-blind

52 Rabbi Yitzhak Saggi Nehor [Isaac the Blind] Commentary on the ‘Sefer Ye ẓ irah’, [an early text

considered to be a codification of a proto-q abbālāh] (Neubauer, "Cat. Bodl. Hebr. MSS." No. 2456, 12).

28







Gerona [Girona in modern Catalunya] that led to the compiling and publishing of a

number of Qabbālist treatises in Al-Andalus.

The relaxed atmosphere of religious tolerance in Córdoba provided the ideal

environment for Rabbis and Immams as well as Christian scholars and Clerics to confer

and to share their knowledge freely under the Caliph’s protection. An example of the

level of cultural integration in Al-Andalus is that many Christians took Arabic names,

Bishop Johannes of Toledo, for example, took on the name Ubayd-Allah ibn Qasim

whilst Bishop Recesmund preferred the Rabinic title, Rabi ibn Said. 53 As a result of

this unusual freedom of speech and thought Cordoba became the centre of Christian

Alchemy as well as Islamic whilst Girona became an important centre for Qabbālāh.

All manner of knowledge was drawn to Cordoba and all manner of knowledge was

subsequently disseminated throughout Europe.

Figure18. Robert Fludd, Union of Spirit and Matter, 1617

53 Richard Hitchcock, Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Identities and Influences,

Aldershot, Hampshire 2008

29



Chapter Four

The Alchemical Oeuvre of Anselm Kiefer

Kiefer’s early work such as ‘Occupations’ and ‘Operation Sea-Lion’ were frequently

misunderstood and so failed to establish his attitude to Nazism as contemptuous despite

his ridicule of the Nazi ideal of worldwide German domination and his exposure of the

childishness of the German Admiralty and their strategic incompetence. His later works

inspired by ‘Todesfugue’, a poem by the Romanian poet Paul Celan, must, however,

have gone a long way towards making his position clear. Celan, in Todesfugue,

characterises the German and Jewish races as two women, Margarethe and Sulamith a

beautiful woman in ‘The Song of Songs’, names that Kiefer would use as titles for some

of his best known works.

Figure19. Anselm Kiefer, Margarete, 1981

Margarethe is light and optimistic, an arrangement of burning tapers which on closer

inspection are made of straw, alluding to ‘thy golden locks’ but also suggesting a

connection to barley and the old fertility cults and to the soil, the German soil in which

it grows. Straw however can be highly inflammable, so there might be a suggestion of

an inherent danger in the character of this beautiful maiden.

30



Figure20. Anselm Kiefer, Sulamith, 1983

Sulamith appears to depict a large crypt. López-Pedraza54 in ‘After the Catastrophe,’

sees it as a dark, claustrophobic, military castle whilst others have seen it as a reference

to the crematoria of the ‘death camps’. In fact, it has been positively identified as the

Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldier in the Hall of Soldiers, Berlin, designed by

Wilhelm Kreis, c. 1939.55 An ironic association to make and yet the image itself is

suggestive of somewhere dark and mysterious yet also holy, the burning tapers,

particularly those placed on what appears to be an altar at the far end of the hall lending

an atmosphere of sanctity despite the gloom. Unlike the tapers of Margarethe, these

pose no incendiary threat.

Having established that Germany’s role in the second World War, the stupidity as he

sees it of Nazi ideals and objectives and in particular the utterly inhuman atrocities of

the concentration and death camps that resulted from them, is the central and recurring

motif throughout Kiefer’s oeuvre it now becomes necessary to discover whether this

relates to his ubiquitous use of and reference to Alchemical and other arcane symbols

54Rafael Lopez Pedraza, Anselm Kiefer, ‘after the castrophe’, pp.61-62

55 Rebecca Taylor, Anselm Kiefer's Shulamite [Sulamith], Smarthistory, retrieved from:

http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org

31



and if so, in what way it so relates. Certainly it is possible to perceive the secrecy

surrounding Alchemy as a reference to the veil of silence that fell around the

unthinkable deeds of the Third Reich subsequent to the Armistice but as the

contemporary German must invest time and effort to part the veil in order to glimpse the

true nature and extent of ’the Catastrophe’ so must the viewer search for the full

implications of the symbolism in Kiefer’s works. The use of unusual of materials will

be touched upon later in this chapter but first it may be instructive to examine the

various occult or metaphysical references to be found in the work.

Figure21. Anselm Kiefer, Nigredo, 1984

One of the few of Kiefer’s works to refer specifically to Alchemy is his painting

Nigredo 1984 which refers to the most basic and essential alchemical operation, the

very necessary first stage in the process known to alchemists as ‘The Great Work’. The

word is clearly derived from the Latin stem ‘nigr’ and in fact is one of several Latin

forms meaning ‘blackness’. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘Black Sun’. In the

context of alchemical practice, it refers to burning, blackening and in particular

putrefaction. It is in some way equivalent to a sort disintegration of the material as a

necessary preliminary to subjecting it to the process of Albedo by which the matter will

be cleaned and purged of impurities. The material may be repeatedly subjected to these

two processes before it is pure enough to progress to the next stage. The, very large,

painting [10 feet 10 inches x 18 feet 2 inches], often likened to a battlefield, depictswhat appears to be a burned stubble field, burning off the stubble left after grain has

32



been harvested is a common agricultural practice which helps to free the land of weeds

and pests.56 As Kiefer himself remarks, ‘Plowing (sic) and burning, like slash and-burn

agriculture, is a process of regeneration [….] Burning is absolutely elemental.’ 57

From this perspective, Nigredo must be seen as the lowest possible state in the growth

cycle but also the state that offers the greatest possibility of transmutation. In this way,

it resembles the lead that the alchemist hopes to refine into gold. Given that the

resemblance of the charred field to a battlefield is probably not accidental, one might

conjecture that the Second World War is presented as having been a necessary stage in

world development. So it is perhaps not entirely surprising that Kiefer has in the past

been accused of being a Neo-Nazi.58 Certainly that cannot be the case, however, for as

Kiefer says himself,

I cannot imagine German Culture without Judaism. Everything that makes

German philosophy and poetry interesting to the world is a combination of

Germany and Judaism. One thing is that Germans committed the

immense crime of killing Jews. The other is that they amputated

themselves. They took half of German culture and killed it.59

Since there can be no doubt that ’Nigredo’ is a direct reference to alchemical practice a

previous work, ‘Quaternity’, 1983, may in retrospect appear to have alchemical

significance also. Obviously it refers to the Holy Trinity of Christianity but by turning

the trinity into a quaternity Kiefer appears to be alluding to the four elements of western

alchemy and possibly also the ‘Crusis’ of the Rosicrucians. The fourth member of the

Quaternity is labelled ‘Satan’ and points to the contradiction between belief in an

entirely beneficent God and the direct experience of the real world. As Jacqueline

West and Nancy Douherty have written of the painting,

56 E. Starch and L. D. Kurtz, Stubble Burning, (Montana State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts

and United States. Department of Agri'culture Cooperating, retrieved from http://arc.lib.montana.edu)

57 Michael Auping, Heaven is an Idea, An Interview with Anselm Kiefer , 2004, published in

AnselmKiefer: Heaven and Earth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in association with Prestel, 2006

58 Kiefer's art was often more appreciated outside of Germany. When his work was featured by West

Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale it caused a great deal of controversy at home for his resurrection of

the ghosts of German nationalism, particularly Hitler's Third Reich. However, a neo-Nazi interpretation

of Kiefer's art was dismissed by many as a superficial reading of his work. (recovered from

http://www.answers.com/kiefer)

59 Michael Auping, Anselm Kiefer, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, Modern Art Museum of Fort

Worth in association with Prestel, 2006, Introduction, p.45-46

33

http://arc.lib.montana.edu/

http://arc.lib.montana.edu/



In this image of the mythic conundrum of the Trinity, Kiefer introduces

the fourth element, a snake, representing Satan. He is quite clearly

wrestling with the moral conflict inherent in a Trinitarian deity that

tolerates the existence of evil. In this painting, Kiefer presents Satan, or

evil, as an insistent presence in the spiritual matrix.60

Unsurprisingly ideas of the careful balancing of opposite forces were also fundamental

to Alchemical theory, and the quest of achieving and maintaining a natural equilibrium

between the four elements is essential to alchemical practice. The snake must,

presumably, also be a reference also to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. For alchemy

shares that same religious landscape that Jews, Christians and Muslims all share.

If this discussion appears to be abandoning alchemical territory in favour of religion and

revealed scripture that is because Alchemy has been nothing if not catholic in approach

to appropriating material from many and varied traditions. Of these the Jewish

Qabbālāh has had, undoubtedly the most profound influence on Western, Christian

Alchemy and it has also brought with it older Judaic mysteries such as those of the

Sepher Yetzirah and Sepher Hechaloth, Hebrew books of considerable antiquity which

describe the ‘Merkaba’, the divine chariot by means of which the aspirant will in due

course be enabled to visit the Seven Heavenly Palaces.

But above all, it should be remembered that these Western Alchemists were

fundamentally Christian and as such accepted the Old Testament which is entirely

Judaic in origin and content. Indeed Pope John XXII (1249–1334), famed mainly for

his support for the King of France in his strategy of arresting, executing and

dispossessing the Order of Knights Templar 61 to bolster the Royal and Papal coffers,

issued a decree in 1313 against alchemists who sold gold that they had ‘made’. 62

The debasement of gold, an increasingly common way of making it go further at the

60 Jacqueline J West, PhD & Nancy Douherty, The Palette of Anselm Kiefer: Witnessing our Imperilled

World , ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype, Issue 4, 2010

61 Philip, who had obstructed the operations of commerce by debasing the coin of the realm to meet the

exigencies of the state, was always in want of money. His cupidity was excited by the wealth of the order

of Knights Templars, […] Every house of the Templars in the dominions of the King of France was

suddenly surrounded by a strong force, and all the Knights and members of the order were simultaneously

taken prisoners [...] proceeding against them as relapsed heretics, they were condemned to be burned

alive. [...] the last grand master of the Temple and his faithful comrades were burned to death at a slow

fire. (F.C.Woodhouse, H.H. Milman, Extinction of the Order of Knights Templars and the Burning of

Grand Master Molay, A.D. 1314, recovered from, http://www.gutenberg.org)

62 Terry Jones, Mediaeval Lives,2004, (BBC Books, Worldwide Ltd, Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane, London

W12 OTT) p.123

34



time was proving to be a problem in every part of Europe.63 But he issued no decree

against Alchemy per se. In fact, he is popularly thought to have engaged in the practice

himself and an alchemical treatise entitled L'Elixir des philosophers, autrement L'art

transmutatoire, published at Lyons in 1557 is commonly attributed to him. So it should

be understood that in speaking of Alchemy this text refers to Western Christian

Alchemy in the broadest possible sense thus allowing reference not only to works by

Kiefer with obvious alchemical associations such as; For Robert Fludd , 2002 dedicated

to the influential English alchemist but also to works like Lilith.

Lilith is an apocryphal figure appearing mainly in Jewish folklore but who also passed

into alchemical mythology. She is said to have been the first wife of Adam, a belief

currently thought to arise from an inconsistency in the Book of Genesis. Below is an

exerpt from the Book of Genesis, chapter one,

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let

them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,

and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing

that creepeth upon the earth. 27 So God created man in his own image, in

the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. 64

In this description of the Creation God created man and woman simultaneously and

apparently as equals but this assertion is contradicted almost immediately in chapter

two,

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every

beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him.

21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept:

and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; 22 and

the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and

brought her unto the man. 23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my

bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she wastaken out of Man. 24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother,

and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. 25 And they

were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.65 This contradiction gave rise to the belief that the woman created in Genesis 1:7 was in

63 Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange and the

Emergence of Scientific Thought, 1998, (Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building,

Cambridge, CB2 2RU, U,K,) pp.19-21

64The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version, Genesis 1:26-27

65 Ibid. Genesis, 2:18-24

35



fact Adam’s first wife who deserted him after a disagreement over gender roles and

subsequently mated with the Archangel Samael producing a race of demons. In some

versions she is said to have demanded to be on top during the act of sex. At this point in

her tale, her identity seems likely to have become conflated with that of a mythical

Mesopotamian demon with a similar name. She was thought to be of particular danger

to infants and pregnant women. In a 1991 interview with Patrick Boehner for Arena,

Kiefer says of Lilith that she is said to live amongst ruins and for that reason he is

attracted to her. The painting of that name [1987-89] was inspired by a visit to Sao

Paulo in Brazil.

One can only speculate that Lilith’s Daughter , 1990 may be the offspring of one of

Lilith’s unclean matings.

Figure22. Anselm Kiefer, Merkaba, 2011

Kiefer’s 2002 exhibition was entitled Merkaba, he had used the alternative spelling

Merkava in 1996 as the title of a painting. The Merkaba is an idea developed from

Ezekiel’s vision of a mystical flight to Heaven. Using the chariot called Mekaba, the

pre-Kabballist mystics claimed to be able to travel inwardly, passing through the Seven

Heavenly Palaces known as Hechaloth in a ritual visualisation. 66

66 Michael Auping, Heaven is an Idea: An Interview with Anselm Kiefer , 2004, published in

AnselmKiefer: Heaven and Earth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in association with Prestel, 2006,

pp175-176

36

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archangel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samael

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samael

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archangel



1996, the Breaking of the Vessels 1990 and The Shattering of the Vessels, 2007 refer to

an alternative creation myth that many qabbalists believe conceal details of esoteric

operations.

But for a more comprehensive insight into the alchemy of Anselm Kiefer, it is necessary

to look beyond the references and at the physical properties of the works. The use of

lead, after all, is probably the most dominating aspect of his work. Lead can, on the one

hand refer to bullets, warfare, death and destruction but on the other it represents the

base metal from which gold can be produced, in esoteric terms the unrefined person,

born into and shaped by the world, fresh from the mould but with a divine spark within

and in a good position, by exercise of will, to refine their nature and aspire to spiritual

perfection. By implication our society, our culture or cultures, by extension our world,

can be viewed as being in a fairly raw and chaotic state, ready to refine itself. So it

should come as no surprise that his paintings are composed not only of lead but also of

razor-wire, of straw and hair, mud and plaster, clay and copper wire, ash and dead

flowers. These, after all, are the materials of which the real world is made. To

transmute these commonplace materials into a work of art could be said to constitute an

alchemical operation.

Figure23. Anselm Kiefer, The High Priestess/Zweistromland , lead and steel, 1989

37



Kiefer has said of lead,

I feel closest to lead because it’s like us. It is in flux. It’s changeable and

has potential to achieve a higher state of gold. You can see this when it is

heated. It sweats white and gold. But it is only a potential. The secrets are

lost, as the secrets of our ability to achieve higher states seem lost or

obscured.

In mediaeval alchemical practice, it was frequently thought necessary to perform

Nigredo and Albedo, a cleansing process, a number of times in succession before

proceeding to the next stage. A cyclic process appears to be suggested by references to

Mesopotamia [Zweistromland] and Egypt [Isis and Osiris], civilizations that rose and

fell. The myth of Isis and refers to the cyclic, annual, flooding of the Nile delta which

not only keeps the desert at bay but also fertilises the earth for agriculture. Of course,

this also puts recent events into a larger historical perspective so that perhaps, from an

alchemical point of view the situation can be viewed with optimism

Then there are the Sunflowers, the sun as has been noted had a special importance for

the alchemists, featuring frequently in their diagrams. In addition to the black, White

and Red Suns associated with ‘The Great Work’ the physical, stellar Sun was the most

powerful and the purest of the planetary influences, radiating the most potent rays. The

Sun was gold just as the Moon was silver, just as Saturn was lead. The Sun symbolises

the light of knowledge and of awakening consciousness. In religious paintings such as

the Adoration of the Lamb by the Van Eyck brothers the Sun radiates golden rays [finely

executed in gold leaf] which seem to fill the picture with a holy light whilst in the centre

of the Sun a white dove, the conventional mediaeval symbol of the Holy Spirit, appears

to be on the point of Descending from on High. Clearly the Sun is, above all, to be

associated with the Holy Spirit.

Figure24. Jan and Hubert van Eyck, the Adoration of the Lamb, 1432

38



The sunflowers appear dead and brittle, of course, in contrast to the immovable

and solid gravitas of the lead but if the burnt earth contains the potential to be

fertile the Sunflowers contain even the very seed from which new growth will burst.

39



Conclusion

It now remains to consider whether it is possible to draw any conclusions from these

investigations. How can one even approach these works, they are not like books to be

read and taken literally, even those that are actually books. The pages of the great

leaden books of Kiefer’s have no text. Texture yes, the marks of time, of handling and

corrosion, which is not only a record of time passed but is also in reality a form of

transmutation, if not of the kind that the alchemists sought. There may be vegetable

matter or other artifacts such as women’s hair. [Shulamith, Figure24.]

In chapter three it was shown how books took over from the oral tradition assuming as

they did so some of the authority traditionally held by the wise-men and tribal bards.

The primary use of these early and precious books was to preserve tradition, religion,

acquired knowledge, ultimately culture. Certainly books such as the Holy Bible and the

Qu’ran have been from time to time used as weapons of repression and oppression and

they may appear to conceal as much as they reveal but they do contain a lot of

information about our past if it can be deciphered and as Kiefer says ‘only by going into

the past can you go into the future.’67

It may be suggestive that Kiefer began his artistic career by studying Law. He explains,

I began by studying law. I didn’t study law to be a lawyer, but for the

philosophical aspects of law, constitutional law. I was interested in how

people live together without destroying each other.68

The question of how people can live together without destroying each other could be

viewed as one of the big themes underpinning his oeuvre although it often manifests in

allusions to peoples failures in this respect. It is certainly a question that the world has

yet to solve. So a book may also symbolise the rules by which people are able to live

together without destroying each other. Let us, however, leave the final word to the

artist himself.

67 Alex Needham, Anselm Kiefer: 'Art is difficult, it's not entertainment' , The Guardian, Friday 9

December 2011

68 Auping p.167

40



The book, the idea of a book or the image of a book, is a symbol of

learning, of transmitting knowledge. The story of our beginnings always

begins in the oral tradition, but eventually finds it’s way into the form of a

book. This has it’s double side. It preserves memory, but it always makes

the story more rigid. Everyone tells a story differently but when it is written

down it can become frozen.69

It would seem by this reasoning that the book is a symbol of preservation, of learning

and culture but also of lifeless inflexibility. But as a symbol of humanity’s accumulated

knowledge and the recorded history of our species, it is perhaps all we have to guide us.

Figure25. Anselm Kiefer, Shulamith, 1990, soldered lead, with female hair and ashes,

Humanity’s Book may be frozen and rigid, a dead weight perhaps but there might also

be a suggestion that a great weight of base matter has the potential to transmute into a

large amount of gold.

Kiefer likes to use lead but he also likes to use other materials not normally associated

with painting or sculpture, such as the woman’s hair in Shulamith [figure24.]. This is,

of course, in keeping with the German post-War artists’ reaction to being freed from the

constraints imposed by the Third Reich although even by liberated standards his choice

of media is unusual. His paintings which are frequently made of lead but more

commonly burlap, are painted with a surprising variety of materials such as straw,

potters clay, resin, razor-wire, mud, gum, sand, pitch, ashes and many more. Kiefer’s

practice, then, clearly rejects traditional art and his use of ‘found objects’ and

unconventional materials is entirely in keeping with the reaction of post-War artists to

the emancipation of art from state control and repression. On the other hand, these

69 Ibid 174

41



materials may also be symbolic even if the symbolism is not generally understood.

Either way Kiefer’s choice of these particular if commonplace materials in favour of the

specialised tools and materials belonging traditionally to the painters’ trade, might also

be conceived of as a post-industrial alchemy, effecting the transmutation of these

everyday materials into works of art.

These paintings cannot be understood literally but they are allusive, drawing the

attention to a variety of matter, the bloody and doomed myths of Wagner’s Ring for

example or the selective and adulterated nationalist history taught at school epitomised

by stories such as that of Arminius. Fables that formed the tragic mythology that led

Germany to the excesses of the Third Reich by facilitating the mental state that allowed

the German people, in Carl Jung’s terms, to become possessed by Wotan.

Reference is made to dead civilizations such as Mesopotamia [Zweiströmland], the

great early civilisation which engendered fabled Babylon. Zweiströmland rose and

thrived and expanded but ultimately failed due to salinization of the soil caused by the

very irrigation system of gigantic proportions that allowed the great horticultural

civilisation to expand and thrive in the first place. 70 Isis and Osiris may refer to the

ancient Egyptian fertility myth centring round the annual flooding of the Nile, an

allusion possibly to natural cycles of death and rebirth and perhaps the rise and fall ofcivilisations also.

There are literary allusions as well such as Margarethe derived from the doomed

heroine of Goethe’s Faust, sometimes called Gretchen and Sulamith, ‘the Shulamite’ of

the Song of Songs71taken, however, not from their original contexts but from Paul

Celan’s poem Death Fugue. Celan used the two characters to personify the German and

the Jewish psyches and Kiefer attempts to describe the two archetypes pictorially,

always there is the Final Solution to remember. Jungian Psychotherapy involves re-

integration of the outer and inner person and Lopéz-Pedraza has suggested a connection

here, with Margarethe and Sulamith representing opposites that can possibly be

integrated.72

70 T Jacobsen, RM Adams, Salt and silt in ancient Mesopotamian agriculture, Science, 1958, retrieved

from www.faculty.bennington.edu

71

Song of Solomon 6: 13 - 6: 15, Holy Bible, Authorised, King James Version.

72 Lopéz-Pedraza p.73

42

http://faculty.bennington.edu/~kwoods/classes/enviro-hist/salt%20and%20silt%20in%20mesopotamia.pdf





As Kiefer has said:

I cannot imagine German Culture without Judaism. Everything that makes

German philosophy and poetry interesting to the world is a combination of Germany

and Judaism. One thing is that Germans committed the immense crime of killing

Jews. The other is that they amputated themselves. They took half of Germanculture and killed it.73

Another allusion is to the apocryphal figure of Lilith. In a 1991 interview with Patrick

Boehner Kiefer says of Lilith that she is said to live amongst ruins and it is for that

reason that he is attracted to her.74 The painting of that name [1987-89] was inspired by

a visit to Sao Paulo in Brazil, a sprawling mess of a city whose inhabitants range from

the very rich to the incredibly poor. Kiefer grew up amongst the ruins of Germany but

his towers, such as the Seven Heavenly Palaces [Fig.16], resemble nothing so much as

newly fabricated ruins.

Figure26. Kiefer’s complex of tower like structures at Barjac, France, photo Sophie Fiennes, 2010

Can any sort of conclusion be drawn then from Kiefer’s huge body of work? Allusions

are made to every sort of human endeavour, failure and success alike, perhaps there is a

preponderance of references to Alchemy, Merkaba, and Qabbālāh. In turn this may be a

suggestion that modern humans have lost sight of the spiritual side of their nature. Or

perhaps the suggestion is that for all our scientific advancement, NASA star-charts

inscribed on some later works, for example, we are really probing in the dark like our

alchemical forbears. Or maybe, like our predecessors we also may make astounding

discoveries by following flawed theories.

73 Michael Auping, Anselm Kiefer, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, Modern Art Museum of Fort

Worth in association with Prestel, 2006, Introduction, p.45-46

74 Patrick Boehner, Operation Sea Lion: Interview with Anselm Kiefer , Arena, 1991

43



In 2010 Sophie Fiennes showed her film documentary about Kiefer’s work at his studio

in Provençe, entitled Over Your Cities the Grass Will Grow, at the Cannes Film

Festival. During the trailer the artist is captured gazing over his enormous complex of

‘new ruins’ built of reinforced concrete and subterranean passages excavated by

industrial machinery and lined with concrete or massive steel tubes. 'I've long been

fascinated by Lilith’ he remarks,

A woman who lives in ruins. That is a wonderful idea, the woman who

lives in abandoned ruins, who operates from there. The Bible constantly

states that everything will be destroyed ... and grass will grow over your

cities, I think that's fantastic.

Fantastic possibly but also cryptic. Art, however, never has been easy to comprehend, as

Kiefer would be the first to admit.

Art is difficult, it's not entertainment. There are only a few people who can

say something about art – it's very restricted.75

Sophie Fiennes and her camera team spent some considerable time with the reclusive

artist in Barjac making Over Your Cities the Grass Will Grow, perhaps she could shed

some light on Kiefer’s intentions. '...when he does use words he even undermines the

potential meaning of the words that he uses…’ She says in the ‘featurette’ promoting

the documentary,

..he'll take the title of this film and he'll reuse the title on many different

pieces, so he pulls away meaning and he throws it open in ways that are

quite ambiguous.[...] and he has been in art-historical papers and peoplehave written about the undecideability of how to read what his intention

is.76

Certainly Kiefer gives very little away whilst showering his audience tantalisingly with

references and allusions. In the final analysis possibly all that can be said for certain is

that he gives us plenty to think about, that he provokes and cultivates thought.

75 Alex Needham, The Guardian, 2011

76 Sophie Fiennes: Over Your Cities the Grass Will Grow [Documentary], 2010, Alive

Mind presents an Amoeba Film/Sciapode Production

44



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anselm kiefer and the alchemy of art

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