Artwork: Anselm Kiefer, Paul Celan: du rollst die Altäre zeiteinwärts, 2021
Before becoming an artist Anselm Kiefer wanted to be a poet. Later he spoke of his art saying: “I’m a storyteller with a broken story.” Not a poet, but a storyteller whose paintings vacillate between creation and destruction; memory and history and its constant reconstruction; storytelling as an alchemical and poetic process, grafting the material and spiritual in a tense, often doubt-ridden dialogue, where answers to the questions of our humanity, purpose and relationship with the universe can never truly be resolved.
Kiefer’s recent exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in Paris titled Hommage à un poète, is not so much a tribute to the poets who have influenced his art throughout his career, so much as speaking to an intricate connection that poetry has woven through his work: the words of poets shaping, materialising and inspiring the images Kiefer creates. One of his most devastating testaments to the Holocaust and Germany’s Nazi past is the painting Sulamith (1983, not featured in the exhibition), its title and subject inextricably tied to Paul Celan’s poem, Deathfugue (1945). The painting is of a cavernous tomb-like arched chamber (a stark and harrowing reference to the gas chambers), with a fire burning at an altar and the bricks smeared with ash bearing the name “Sulamith” scrawled in the top left corner. “Sulamith” refers to “Shulammite” which comes from the Hebrew “shulammit” meaning “woman of Jerusalem” (characterised as King Solomon’s beloved in the Bible’s Song of Solomon), and which figures in Celan’s poem, “Your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped”.
Poetry is powerfully entwined in Kiefer’s art and in this exhibition his work speaks to four poets: Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, Osip Mandelstam and August Graf von Platen. Recently Kiefer spoke about his relationship to these poets saying:
“For some time now, I’ve been doing exhibitions dedicated to poets. And I like doing that very much because I’m in constant contact with these poets, who are here now. I have a relationship with them. I call on them. I ask them for a critique when I’ve painted something. And so it’s not so much that I quote them, but rather I live with them. And talk to them. I believe that everything we see—you for example—what we see is illusion. It is not reality. The only thing that is real for me is poetry. A poem which is so condensed, which is written so precisely that it becomes reality. Normally I make a painting and at some point in the course of the process, of its completion, a verse from a poem suddenly comes into my head, which then belongs there. The theme here is language, language that is like a knife. Like a sword, that separates things, that highlights things. All three poets—Madelstam, Bachman, Celan, and others, of course—suffered under totalitarianism, under mass persecution. I think every poet who pushes to the very end comes to the unspeakable. Because the Real, the mystery, cannot be voiced. That’s why every poet comes to the point where it results in a blind spot, because he can no longer say what he really wants to say. Why is the world, why are people, built in such a way that they behave so impossibly, that they behave so terribly? The question is how one can now transfer what appears in Celan’s poems as a ‘blind spot’, what cannot be said, where he destroys the language: how one can transfer that into the image, that is then the question. And I do that through my own means, so that I believe or hope that the images are a parallel to the abstract poems.”