Lot Essay
Few artists have been so unjustly slandered as Kiefer was by the critics during a retrospective of his work held in the German Pavilion of the 1980 Venice Biennale. They described his preoccupation with the legacy of Hitler's Reich as "flirting with the ghosts of the Fatherland." There were even those who denounced him personally as a Neo-Nazi. Yet had they had a chance of viewing a picture such as Die Königin von Saba, the very contrary standpoint would have been maintained.
Kiefer may have taken as his prefered subject matter the Fascist regime and its perverted brain-child, the Final Solution. But he is eternally on the side of the Jews. Through his imagery he forces his German peers to come to terms with their guilt in public; a necessary action, he believes, if Germany is to ever be spiritually and physically resuscitated.
It is this theme of oppressive guilt and the hope of redemption which provides a key to the cryptic mythology of Die Königin von Saba. As a setting for his story, Kiefer chooses to paint a seascape. Reading the text which is scrawled along the horizon line, we learn that this is the Shore of Juda, a mysterious-sounding place which in fact does not appear on the modern map. Rather it is meant to signify an eternal seashore, where events of biblical enormity might occur. Mark Rosenthal writes, "Water, in the form of the Red Sea, is a place of renewal for the Jews; it is a source of life for many religions; and it is an infinite formless, homogeneous mass for Kiefer himself. The sea replaces the land and architecture, providing an appropriate context for a momentous series of events." (Mark Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, Chicago and Philadelphia, 1987, p. 133).
Influenced by the cold grey seascapes of Courbet, Kiefer had first attempted to paint the sea in Midgard, 1980-85, in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Die Königin von Saba shares the latter's high horizon line, but the sheer range of surface effects he now achieves, proclaim him to be as much a brilliant technician as a profound conceptualist. Heavily impastoed waves pound relentlessly onto an eroded and sun-blistered crust of earth, whose textures have been perfected over a period of years. Lead "meteorites" meanwhile fall from the heavens and are suspended on copper wires.
"Kiefer's art reached maturity in the early 1980s," writes Rosenthal. "Whereas earlier, content had dominated the viewer's perception of it, now the physical materiality and visual complexity of its surfaces became major sources of interest. Kiefer began to employ an almost bewlidering variety of materials... The vast scale and complexity of the paintings gave them a forceful presence... Kiefer had, in effect, integrated his on-going thematic concerns with the outsize proportions of Abstract Expressionism and the modernist insistence on the literal qualities of the object." (Rosenthal, p.76).
Kiefer places the schematically drawn figure of the Queen of Sheba like a beached seal in the centre foreground of the seascape. Although there is no specific mention of this scene in the bible, her supine position can be read as symbolic of her deference to Solomon, King of the Jews. According to legend, the foreign Queen was so impressed by the Jewish kingdom that she bestowed on it great riches. Perhaps Kiefer wishes the Queen to stand for the German people, who likewise need to supplicate themselves at the feet of the Jews before atonement and national rebirth can be achieved.
Kiefer may have taken as his prefered subject matter the Fascist regime and its perverted brain-child, the Final Solution. But he is eternally on the side of the Jews. Through his imagery he forces his German peers to come to terms with their guilt in public; a necessary action, he believes, if Germany is to ever be spiritually and physically resuscitated.
It is this theme of oppressive guilt and the hope of redemption which provides a key to the cryptic mythology of Die Königin von Saba. As a setting for his story, Kiefer chooses to paint a seascape. Reading the text which is scrawled along the horizon line, we learn that this is the Shore of Juda, a mysterious-sounding place which in fact does not appear on the modern map. Rather it is meant to signify an eternal seashore, where events of biblical enormity might occur. Mark Rosenthal writes, "Water, in the form of the Red Sea, is a place of renewal for the Jews; it is a source of life for many religions; and it is an infinite formless, homogeneous mass for Kiefer himself. The sea replaces the land and architecture, providing an appropriate context for a momentous series of events." (Mark Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, Chicago and Philadelphia, 1987, p. 133).
Influenced by the cold grey seascapes of Courbet, Kiefer had first attempted to paint the sea in Midgard, 1980-85, in the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Die Königin von Saba shares the latter's high horizon line, but the sheer range of surface effects he now achieves, proclaim him to be as much a brilliant technician as a profound conceptualist. Heavily impastoed waves pound relentlessly onto an eroded and sun-blistered crust of earth, whose textures have been perfected over a period of years. Lead "meteorites" meanwhile fall from the heavens and are suspended on copper wires.
"Kiefer's art reached maturity in the early 1980s," writes Rosenthal. "Whereas earlier, content had dominated the viewer's perception of it, now the physical materiality and visual complexity of its surfaces became major sources of interest. Kiefer began to employ an almost bewlidering variety of materials... The vast scale and complexity of the paintings gave them a forceful presence... Kiefer had, in effect, integrated his on-going thematic concerns with the outsize proportions of Abstract Expressionism and the modernist insistence on the literal qualities of the object." (Rosenthal, p.76).
Kiefer places the schematically drawn figure of the Queen of Sheba like a beached seal in the centre foreground of the seascape. Although there is no specific mention of this scene in the bible, her supine position can be read as symbolic of her deference to Solomon, King of the Jews. According to legend, the foreign Queen was so impressed by the Jewish kingdom that she bestowed on it great riches. Perhaps Kiefer wishes the Queen to stand for the German people, who likewise need to supplicate themselves at the feet of the Jews before atonement and national rebirth can be achieved.