Anselm Kiefer at MOMA - Museum of Modern Art, New York

National Review, March 10, 1989 by James Gardner

GIVEN THE aggressive and unabashed Germanness of the Anselm Kiefer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, it was fitting that, as I passed through its lugubrious halls, I found myself thinking of those famous words of Luther before the Diet of Worms: "I cannot and I will not retract, for it is neither safe nor advisable to act at variance with one's own conscience. "

The truth is that we critics have to put up with a great deal of browbeating and intimidation. That this coercion is as subtle as it is constant in no way minimizes its power, causing even the most stalwart critics to wonder if their first and best instincts might just be wrong-causing them, after they have correctly rejected twenty daubers in a row, tentatively to embrace the 21 st, for fear that they have become too intolerant and set in their ways. Now, if our compliance helped to erect as stately a structure as St. Peter's in Rome (for it was efforts to fund that project that turned Luther against the Pope), then we would gladly comply. But when the best we can hope for is some paltry mud-hut compounded of straw, dung, and acrylics, like the one Anselm Kiefer recently set up at MOMA, is it not our obligation to revolt?

Yet while the 44-year-old Kiefer scowls across the pages of art publications throughout the world, while he remains belligerently monosyllabic in interviews, the corps of bowing and scraping critics continue to give him whatever he wants. Even critics who should know better, critics who have meted out to the likes of Schnabel and Salle, Mapplethorpe and Longo, exactly what those artists deserved, have hedged their bets when it came to the truculent mediocrities of Anselm Kiefer. They say that, notwithstanding Kiefer's formal mediocrity, he is a noble, incorruptible spirit; or they claim to despise everything he stands for, but to find themselves unable, in good conscience, to deny his formal competence. What is needed now is for someone to explain that Kiefer a) has nothing to say, and b) says it badly. Well, hier stehe ich.

Let us attend first to what Kiefer appears to be saying. "His art reaches something deeply felt in the collective imagination," we learn in the flyer that was offered to viewers of the exhibition, and he does this by "directly confronting recent German history -the War, the Holocaust, the Occupation . . . " He has gained a reputation for being a painter more literate than most, mainly by scribbling across his canvasses sundry spasms of German grammar, impressive only to those who are wholly ignorant of the language. Also imposing are his constant and, to some, obscure allusions to Arminius, Gilgamesh, Yggdrasill, and the Iconoclastic Controversy. In thus attempting to sum up German history, Kiefer has filled his canvasses with expanding vistas of fascist architecture, war-torn cities, Wagnerian stage-sets, and wild fields reminiscent of concentration camps, all merging into one urgent message unto the nations: War is unpleasant, and so am I.

Formally, what is most obvious about these paintings is their heroic bigness. Inspired by Joseph Reuys, Kiefer seems rather to enjoy the charred, scarified, and generally war-torn look, which he successfully imparts to his pain tings, drawings, sculpt u re, and touched-up photographs through a variety of techniques. Over the past twenty years Kiefer has proved to be one of the most protean, or, if you win, one of the most inconstant of artists. His earliest paintings, like Man in the Forest, are awash with the same symbolism that characterizes his more recent work; but their togated figures and primeval forests in brown and pale pink are closer to the queasy Art Nouveau dreaminess of Ferdinand Knopff.

These thin applications of oil to muslin do not continue for very long, however, and by 1974 Kiefer begins to evolve the "ranting" style that will typify most of his subsequent paintings. Though these works are rarely entirely abstract, you often have to seek long and hard to find external references in his seemingly gratuitous clumps of dirt, strips of metal and wood, swathes of straw, and isolated lilies of the valley. Cockchafer Fly depicts a furrowed field whose dark, rich soil is represented by the thick application of black paint to burlap. At the very top there is a suggestion of trees and mist, and because we know whom we are dealing with, we immediately imagine that we see an abandoned concentration camp littered with corpses. At the same time, Kiefer has enjoyed making sharp and dramatic perspectives, whether of the medieval mythological type, resembling a set from Wagner's Siefried, or adorned with hulking colonnades, reminiscent of Albert Speer, that seem to crumble and peel away under the unbearable weight of their own internal rottenness. In addition, Kiefer is the author o "books," all of whose pages are coated in black or amber mud, as well as of doctored photographs of the sea, and of a myriad other distractions to describe which would be onerous to