Germany's Master in The Making

By ROBERT HUGHES

It seems from Anselm Kiefer's retrospective, which has just opened at the Art Institute of Chicago, that at 42 this German artist is the best painter of his generation on either side of the Atlantic. Given most of the talent we have, this may not sound like much of a compliment. Certainly Kiefer's limitations are inescapable: his drawing lacks fluency and clarity and his color is monotonous, though the former seems to reinforce the grinding earnestness of his style and the latter contributes to its lugubrious intensity. What counts, is that he is one of the few visual artists in the past decade to have shown an unmistakable greatness of vision.

His ambitions for painting range across myth and history, they cover an immense terrain of cultural reference and pictorial techniques, and on the whole they do it without the megalomaniac narcissism that fatally trivializes the work of other artists to whom Kiefer is sometimes compared -- Julian Schnabel, for instance. Kiefer bears, in full measure, the tragic sense and redemptive hope against which most of the art of our fin de siecle has insulated itself, and his stature can only grow with time. Which is not to say, of course, that all his work is of equal value.

The Chicago show was organized by the late A. James Speyer (from 1961 to 1986 the Art Institute's curator of 20th century painting) and Mark Rosenthal of the Philadelphia Museum, who wrote its catalog. It will travel through 1988 to Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York City. An hour at it can be a fairly exhausting experience, like a slog toward a receding horizon across the plowed clay fields that are Kiefer's favorite landscape. His canvases are huge in size and engulfing in scale; he is, one notes, one of the few artists around who really do understand the scale of images and do not paint big just to look important.

A list of his materials, apart from paint, would include paper, staples, canvas, rough foil formed by throwing a bucket of molten lead on the canvas and letting it cool there, sand, gold leaf, copper wire, woodcuts and lumps of busted ceramic. It is highly unlikely that more than a few will survive for 50 or even 25 years. Kiefer carries a disregard for the permanence of his materials to such an extreme that the lead will not stay in place and the straw on some canvases is already rotting, though this does not seem to discourage collectors.

The subjects of his art include Egyptian legends, alchemy, the Cabala, the Holocaust, the story of Exodus, Napoleon's occupation of Germany, Albert Speer's architecture, the mythic roots and Nazi uses of German romantic imagery -- dark woods, lonely travelers, ecstatic moral conversions in the face of nature -- and much more besides. Among Kiefer's spiritual heroes are Richard Wagner, Frederick II, Joseph Beuys, Painters Arnold Bocklin and Caspar David Friedrich and Novelist Robert Musil. Kiefer is not an artist of ordinary ambitions. But his ambitions are not bound up in the cult of celebrity that has riddled the art world in the '80s. He shuns publicity, permits virtually no photographs and spends most of his time behind the locked gates of his studio in the unremarkable German town of Buchen. "Live like a bourgeois, think like a god" -- if any painter has taken Gustave Flaubert's famous injunction to heart, it is Kiefer.

In this, of course, he is utterly different from his mentor, Joseph Beuys, who taught him at the Dusseldorf Academy in the early '70s. Lecturing, performing, always accessible to the young (and the press), Beuys was the Pied Piper of postwar German esthetic renewal. One does not need to accept his message that everyone is some sort of artist to recognize his achievement in giving back to Kiefer's generation the vast fund of German imagery, the sense of the primordial and the ritual that had been corrupted, made almost radioactive, by Nazism. Thanks to Beuys, younger German artists were able to connect with their own history and think about it without illusion, and Kiefer's work is the fruit of that process.

But Kiefer's work is, in a sense, much more traditional than Beuys'. He is the modern incarnation of the grand-scale history painter, producing didactic machines rather than the ephemeral and koan-like events (talking to a dead hare, sweeping a pavement) that were Beuys' specialty. Kiefer wants to involve his audience completely in the drama of the painting's construction; in this respect, he has learned a lot from the example of Jackson Pollock. As when deciphering the web of drips and mottlings in one of Pollock's "all-over" abstractions, the eye crawls its way across a Kiefer, mesmerized by detail: every square centimeter of those giant canvases is intended, somehow, to speak. What they were saying, particularly in the '70s and early '80s, was so literal that his German critics often got it quite wrong.

Some treat his reflections on Nazism not as a walk around the rim of the deepest spiritual crater in European history, but as a modish and sinister nostalgia for Hitler. What other motives, the argument goes, can you assign to a painter who at 24 was photographed Sieg heil-ing outside the Colosseum or on the edge of the sea, as though "occupying" these sites in the name of the dead Fuhrer? Plenty, as it turned out. The shot of Kiefer saluting the Mediterranean is an acrid parody, the Nazi as Canute trying to raise himself to the level of a natural force. But this eludes those who want to think that the demons raised in Nazi Germany can be buried by mere denial, beneath the concrete of the postwar economic miracle.

The ghosts come out anyway; and it is Kiefer's project to lay them by showing their relations to the real cultural history of Germany, bitterly polluted by Nazi appropriation. When Kiefer paints a Nazi monument, such as the Mosaic Room in Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer, he also evokes by implication the noble tradition of German neoclassicism that Speer froze and vulgarized. His charred, plowed landscapes, their heavy paint mixed with straw, are real agricultural terrain, but they are also frontier, no- man's land, graveyard and the biblical desert of Exodus.

What may be Kiefer's most humanly poignant cluster of images was provoked by Death Fugue, a poem written in a German concentration camp by Paul Celan, which runs in part:

death is a master from Germany

his eyes are blue

he strikes you with leaden bullets

his aim is true . . .

he plays with the serpents and

daydreams death is a master

from Germany

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamite

Margarete, the blond personification of ideal German womanhood, and Shulamite, the cremated Jewess who is also the archetypal Beloved of the Song of Solomon, interweave in Kiefer's work in a haunting and oblique way. Margarete's presence is signaled, like a motif in music, by long wisps of golden straw, while Shulamite's emblem is charred substance and black shadow. Hence Kiefer's tragic image of Shulamite, 1983: a Piranesian perspective of a squat, fire-blackened crypt, the paint laid thick in an effort to convey the ruggedness of the masonry, whose architectural source (as Mark Rosenthal points out in his astute introduction to the difficulties of Kiefer's work) was a Nazi "Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers" built in Berlin in 1939. At the end of this claustrophobic dungeon-temple is a small fire on a raised altar, the Holocaust itself.

Not all of Kiefer's allegories work with such clarity. When he felt the urge to be didactic ten or so years ago, he could be remarkably opaque. Ways of Worldly Wisdom, 1976-77, attempts to create a whole genealogy of German nationalism starting with Arminius, who in A.D. 9 wrecked Augustus Caesar's policy of German occupation by destroying three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest. As a primal hero of German history, Arminius was a great Nazi favorite, but here Kiefer conflates him with awkward portraits of all manner of later German "descendants" like Blucher, who fought against Napoleon; Schlieffen, whose strategy for the westward conquest of Europe was the basis of Hitler's blitzkrieg; writers from Klopstock to Rilke, and so on. Lines signifying affiliation, as in a family tree (a whole family forest, in fact, this Teutoburg), ramble slackly between some of the characters. Pictorially, the result is a shambles, and one needs an instruction manual to decipher it.

Where Kiefer rises to greatness is in his simpler and less conceptually turgid images like The Book, 1979-85, and Osiris and Isis, 1985-87. The former takes as its point of departure one of the canonical images of German Romanticism, Friedrich's Monk by the Sea, 1808 -- a tiny figure contemplating infinity, culture lost before the magnitude of nature. In Kiefer's painting this is almost reversed; the main motif is a lead book without writing, its silvery pages full of light and as big as a medieval hymnal, an object as imposing as the seascape behind it. Is this the Book of Creation? Of Revelation? The unnamable form of God?

Even more impressive is Osiris and Isis. According to Egyptian mythology, the god Osiris was murdered and dismembered by his brother Set. All the parts of his body except the penis were then reassembled for burial by his sister- wife Isis, so that he could have eternal life. An immense liturgy of transformation grew from this myth, and Kiefer uses it to connect primal fertility rites to the no less awful mysteries of nuclear technology. The painting is filled by a gigantic step-pyramid, the site of Osiris' burial but also, by implication, a nuclear reactor. Osiris' body parts are ceramic fragments scattered at the base, each wired by bright copper cable to his ka, or soul, at the summit of the mastaba, represented by a circuit board. Death and integration: fission and fusion. Through such metaphors, Kiefer sets forth images charged with warning and suffused with hope.

His work is a ringing and deeply engaged rebuke -- clumsy sometimes, and bathetic when it fails, but usually as pictorially brilliant as it is morally earnest -- to the ingrained limitations of its time. It sets its face against the sterile irony, the despair of saying anything authentic about history or memory in paint, and against the general sense of trivial pursuit that infests our culture. It is a victory for the moral imagination.