Scars of the world

In 1949, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno suggested that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is… impossible”. His idea was that the horrors of the Holocaust had rendered art redundant. Two men whose careers might be seen as attempts to grapple with Adorno’s proposition are the artist Anselm Kiefer and the poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). The latter inspired the former’s 2012 painting, Für Paul Celan: Kenotaph, offered in Bonhams’ Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in London in March.

Kiefer was born in 1945, during the final months of the Second World War, in a small town in southern Germany. As a baby, his mother and father (an art teacher) used to stuff wax in his ears and flee with him into the forest when Allied bombers raided. He says he spent his childhood “growing up in ruins”, and an artistic urge first manifested itself in tiny houses that he created out of the rubble.

Studies took him to Freiburg, Karlsruhe and finally Düsseldorf, where he became a protégé to Joseph Beuys at the Fine Arts Academy. Though his official title was Professor of Sculpture, Beuys was first and foremost a provocateur – and he heaped praise on Kiefer’s controversial breakthrough series ‘Occupations’ (1969).

This consisted of photographs that Kiefer had had taken of himself, dressed in a Wehrmacht uniform, doing the infamous Sieg Heil salute at European monuments. ‘Occupations’ marked Kiefer’s refusal to accept what the author W.G. Sebald called a “tacit agreement” in German post-war society not to address the Nazi past.

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That tortured past infuses Kiefer’s work. However, as he and his art matured, particularly from the 1980s, he exponentially broadened his range of references. He started creating work that reflected his omnivorous interests and travels: from the mysticism of the Kabbalah and Norse mythology to alchemy, Mesopotamian architecture and the crackpot Futurist poetry of Russia’s Velimir Khlebnikov. “Art cannot live on itself,” Kiefer once said. “It has to draw on a broader knowledge. It needs to bear the scars of the world.”

Kiefer is a painter who tends to work on very large canvases and applies his paint in impasto, churning it into peaks and troughs, working and reworking his surfaces seemingly ad infinitum. He deploys a host of other materials too – sand, rust, dirt, ash and glass. Sometimes dried flowers or barbed wire stick out at us from the canvas. His paintings might well be considered sculptures.

Richly allusive, highly symbolic connections emerge – connections that have catapulted the 79-year-old German to art superstardom. In 2022, he was invited to stage an exhibition at the Doge’s Palace in Venice; in 2023, he was the subject of a swooning 3D documentary film, Anselm, by Wim Wenders; and this spring he opens a major show at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.

Such is his renown that his long-time studio complex, La Ribaute – occupying a 100-acre site near Nîmes in the south of France – now opens in summer for public visits.

Kiefer is well known for his landscapes, and Für Paul Celan: Kenotaph is a classic example. Created on a trio of conjoined canvases, it measures six metres across. There are sprinkles of colour – gorgeous hints of blue, pink and yellow – but overall the palette is low-key. It is a field of (real) flowers, which show limited signs of life as they have been dried out and covered by Kiefer in layers of oil, acrylic and shellac.

The landscape manages to look ancient and modern at the same time. The broadly black-white-and-grey palette gives a sense of the old, yet the stunning sight of an aeroplane wing jutting out of the canvas suggests a scene from the past century.

Are we meant to imagine the crash of one of the Allied bombers whose flights greeted the artist’s first weeks on Earth? Or a downed Messerschmitt as a metaphor for Germany’s defeat in 1945? Neither interpretation is wrong, but it never pays to read Kiefer paintings in simplistic or autobiographical terms. Their many threads of meaning are difficult to unpick.

Nonetheless, the name of the work is instructive, as is the small inscription that Kiefer has added in chalk above the wing. The title pays homage to Celan’s 1954 poem ‘Kenotaph’, a pair of lines from which provide the inscription: Der hier liegen sollte, er liegt/nirgends. Doch liegt die Welt neben ihm (‘He who was supposed to lie here lies/nowhere. Yet the world lies beside him’).

A little background on the poet – one of Kiefer’s keenest inspirations – is necessary at this point. Celan was born into a German-speaking, Jewish family in 1920 in the city of Czernowitz: today the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi, it was an eastern outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, before becoming part of Romania in 1918.

Both Celan’s parents died in concentration camps during the Second World War, and he was forced to work in a labour camp. Those experiences were a key theme of his poetry, all of it written in German. It’s worth stressing, though, that Celan’s version of German has been rendered increasingly abstract, as if the language needed cleansing from the toxic populism of Nazi hate speech.

Kiefer first encountered Celan’s verse as a teenager and is such a devotee that he is able to recite numerous poems by heart. “Paul Celan [didn’t] just look at the void, he experienced it, he penetrated it”, the artist said recently. “His language comes from so far away… we only really understand a fraction here and there.”

The poem ‘Kenotaph’ takes its title – and theme – from the Greek for ‘empty tomb’. This is picked up by the painting’s inscription: ‘He who was supposed to lie here lies/nowhere’. The reference is to Holocaust victims, who weren’t afforded the dignity of a grave.

Celan has been an artistic inspiration for Kiefer since 1980, and in the winter of 2021-22 the latter put on a whole exhibition of works dedicated to the poet at Paris’s Grand Palais Éphémère. “Paul Celan… never leaves me,” the artist said shortly before that show’s opening.

‘Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels’ is at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, from 22 March to 21 July; palazzostrozzi.org

Alastair Smart writes for The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Mail on Sunday. He is currently writing a book on Raphael.