Anselm Kiefer

let a thousand flowers bloom

Mark Lawrence Rosenthal

A. James Speyer

Offers a profile of the German artist, shows examples of his paintings and photographs, and discusses his approach to art.

Tess Lewis

Notebooks, Volume 1, 1998-99

"For a long time, it was not clear if I would become a writer or an artist," says Anselm Kiefer, whose paintings and sculptures have made him one of the most significant and influential artists of our time. Since he was awarded the Peace Prize by the German Book Trade in 2008, his essays, speeches, and lectures have gradually received more attention, but until now his diary accounts have been almost completely unknown. The power in Kiefer's images, however, is rivaled by his writings on nature and history, literature and antiquity, and mysticism and mythology. The first volume of Notebooks spans the years 1998-1999 and traces the origins and creative process of Kiefer's visual works during this period. In this volume, Kiefer returns constantly to his touchstones: sixteenth-century alchemist Robert Fludd, German romantic poet Novalis, Martin Heidegger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Robert Musil, and many other writers and thinkers. The entries reveal the process by which his artworks are informed by his reading--and vice versa--and track the development of the works he created in the late 1990s. Translated into English for the first time by Tess Lewis, the diaries reveal Kiefer's strong affinity for language and let readers witness the process of thoughts, experiences, and adventures slowly transcending the limits of art, achieving meaning in and beyond their medium. Praise for Kiefer "His works recall, in this sense, the grand tradition of history painting, with its notion about the elevated role of art in society, except that they do not presume moral certainty. What makes Kiefer's work so convincing . . . is precisely its ambiguity and self-doubt, its rejection of easy solutions, historical amnesia, and transcendence."--New York Times "Wordiness for Kiefer is painterliness. The library and the gallery, the book and the frame inseparable, even interchangeable, in his monumental archive of human memory. Not since Picasso's Guernica have pictures demanded so urgently that we studiously reflect and recollect in their presence."--Simon Schama

Notebooks

Bernard Comment

Galerie Yvon Lambert

An allusive art, anglais

"The power in Anselm Kiefer's images is rivalled by his writings on nature and history, literature and antiquity, and mysticism and mythology. This first volume of his Notebooks spans the years 1998-1999 and traces the origins and creative process of Kiefer's visual works during this period. Kiefer here returns constantly to his touchstones: sixteenth-century alchemist Robert Fludd, German romantic poet Novalis, Martin Heidegger, Ingeborg Bachmann and Robert Musil, among others. The entries unmask the process by which his artworks are informed by his reading and vice versa and track the development of the works he created in the late 1990s. The diaries reveal Kiefer's strong affinity for language and let readers witness the process of ideas, experiences and adventures slowly transcending the limits of art, achieving meaning in and beyond their medium"--Publisher's description.

This is a series of delicately executed watercolors - landscapes and a surprising sequence of female nudes. In 1974 Kiefer traveled to the coast of Norway; three years later, using photographs he had taken during his trip as an aide-memoire, he painted Erotik im Fernen, a work that incorporates his deepest aesthetic and philosophical concerns. In these seascapes and landscapes there are icebergs and frigid skies of Norwegian winters. The sequence gives way to female nudes. There is a virtual explosion of color and form that evokes seasonal changes. The spontaneity and simplicity of these images are expressions of Kiefer's warning against intellectual, as opposed to visceral, understanding. -- Dust Jacket.

Erotik Im Fernen Osten Oder Transition From Cool To Warm

The catalogue accompanies an exhibition that brings together many of the interests that have characterised Kiefer's work for decades, including mythology, astronomy and history. Located across the entire Bermondsey space, it features a large-scale installation and paintings that draw on the scientific concept known as string theory. 00String theory is a mathematical model that attempts to articulate the known fundamental interactions of the universe and forms of matter. In this new body of work, Kiefer has 'tried to bring together theories of seemingly extraneous principles from different cultures and histories', so that complex scientific theory is connected with subject matter from ancient mythology. In so doing, Kiefer makes visual the idea that, "Everything is connected: the missing letters, string theory, the Norns, the Gordian knot."00Exhibition: White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK (15.11.2019 - 26.01.2020).

Superstrings, Runes, the Norns, Gordian Knot

Klaus Dermutz

Anselm Kiefer ist einer der bedeutendsten Künstler unserer Zeit, dessen Werk tief mit geistigen Traditionen Deutschlands verbunden ist. Die Gespräche mit Anselm Kiefer in diesem Band erschliessen die philosophischen und theologischen Grundlagen seiner Kunst, die von der Mystik und Kosmogonie Isaak Lurias sowie von den Gedichten von Ingeborg Bachmann und Paul Celan inspiriert ist. Die Gespräche mit Klaus Dermutz kreisen um die Elemente Feuer, Wasser, Erde Luft, um Erzählungen aus dem Alten und Neuen Testament sowie um die Leere, die im buddhistischen Denken eine zentrale Rolle spielt. Der Band erörtert Fragen der deutschen Geschichte, ihre Mythologien und Ideologien, und thematisiert Kiefers intensive Beschäftigung mit der Shoah.

Anselm Kiefer im Gespräch mit Klaus Dermutz

Die Kunst geht knapp nicht unter

Michael Auping

A retrospective volume of Anselm Kiefer's work, this book addresses the artist's entire career through the lens of one compelling theme. From his earliest sculptures to his recent highly textured paintings, Anselm Kiefer has woven themes of heaven and earth into his work, exploring the polarities of these ideas while struggling to define the transcendent quality that places art squarely in between. Destruction and rebirth, glory and shame, sin and redemption all figure largely in Kiefer's often controversial depictions of Germany's physical and cultural landscape. This book of more than fifty reproductions includes Kiefer's first work, The Heavens, as well as numerous other rare early works and recent works being presented for the first time. It features an interview with the artist, which is accompanied by rich black-and-white photographs of his ongoing monumental installations on his property in Barjac, France.

Heaven and Earth

Daniel Arasse

Since that time, through such diverse mediums as painting, gouache and watercolor, photography, artist's books, engravings, installations, and sculpture, Kiefer has created a body of work that is protean, theatrical, monumental, or intimate, depending on the period. He has interpreted the great political and cultural issues at the heart of the modern European sensibility: the connections among memory, history, and mythology; war; the Holocaust; and ethnic and national identity."--BOOK JACKET.

Catherine Strasser

Bris des vases

"I think in pictures. Poems help me with this. They are like buoys in the sea. I swim to them, from one to the other. In between, without them, I am lost. They are the handholds where something masses together in the infinite expanse."--Anselm Kiefer The only visual artist to have won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Anselm Kiefer is a profoundly literary painter. In the ten conversations with the writer and theologian Klaus Dermutz collected here, Kiefer returns to the essential elements of his art, his aesthetics, and his creative processes. Kiefer describes how the central materials of his art--lead, sand, water, fire, ashes, plants, clothing, oil paint, watercolor, and ink--influence the act of creation. No less decisive are his intellectual and artistic touchstones: the sixteenth-century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria, the German Romantic poet Novalis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Marcel Proust, Adalbert Stifter, the operas of Richard Wagner, the Catholic liturgy, and the innovative theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor. Kiefer and Dermutz discuss all of these influential thinkers, as well as Kiefer's own status as a controversial figure. His relentless examination of German history, the themes of guilt, suffering, communal memory, and the seductions of destruction have earned him equal amounts of criticism and praise. The conversations in Art Just Barely Survives offer a rare insight into the mind of a gifted creator, appealing to artists, critics, art historians, cultural journalists, and anyone interested in the visual arts and the literature and history of the twentieth century.

Anselm Kiefer

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