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Lot Essay
A rough meandering dirt-track road or path that winds its way across a wild empty landscape like some ancient river or mythological snake finally to disappear on a high horizon is a common theme in much of Kiefer's art of the 1970s and 80s. For Kiefer, the landscape is a metaphor for both life and art. The road that winds through it is the path that one takes on a mythical journey - a journey that ultimately has no beginning or end. From the artist's scorched-earth landscapes such as March Heath or Nigredo to the roads and railways that punctuate his books such as Siegfried's Difficult Way to Brunhilde, the landscape is used in Kiefer's art as painterly expression of history, of the past, of our collective heritage and as the arena for heroic and self-determining action.
The close relationship that exists between the personal and heroic journey one must make across and within this landscape is often directly equated in Kiefer's art with the role and path of an artist. This is sometimes indicated by the immersing of his own personal symbol of identity - the painter's palette - above or within the scorched earth of the fields of his native land. These paintings, such as Malen and Malerei der verbrannten Ende for example, make plain the notion of the land as a metaphysical space within which a personal evolution or process of individuation is possible. Kiefer's vision of the landscape is part of the legacy of 19th Century German Romanticism and one that clearly sees the world beyond the purely spatial and the temporal and more as a metaphor of the infinite, the timeless and the mystic. In a typically Nietzschean way, but also one that probably reflects the influence of his teacher Joseph Beuys, Kiefer saw the role of the artist within society, particularly post-Nazi German society, as being fundamentally a shamanic one that enables a healing of the scars of the past.
Painted in 1983, The Ridge Way is one of the finest of Kiefer's large landscape paintings. A rare English-titled work, it depicts the Ridgeway - the oldest road in Europe, a road that is itself embedded in myth and mystery, a road seemingly without beginning or end that links many of the most ancient and sacred sites in Britain.
Dating from at least the Neolithic period five to six thousand years ago, the Ridgeway is a section of road, still surviving, that runs from the stone circle at Avebury for around thirty miles across central southern England. In their book devoted to the history and survival of this ancient thoroughfare, The Oldest Road: The Ridgeway", J R L Anderson and Fay Godwin ask, "How has it escaped the plough over thousands of years of close-fisted land-owning and jealous property rights? Here, where the ancient road served the heart of the lost civilization that produced the Great Stone Culture, something has protected it, something more powerful than laws or charters, an atavistic fear perhaps... It is as if over thousands and thousands of years ordinary greedy men were brought up short by - what? A line of footsteps in the muddy chalk? A feeling that a road trodden by countless generations has established property rights of its own? A simpler sense, felt in the bowels rather than the mind, that to plough the Ridgeway would exact retribution from the ghosts of all these years?...The fact is that the Ridgeway on these Downs has remained unploughed, a right of way established for the human race by laws older than any writ of man." (The Oldest Road: The Ridgeway , J R L Anderson and Fay Godwin, London, 1975. )
The sense of the Ridgeway being an immutable presence in the landscape that both makes people aware of the present and connects them with the ancient past is a feature that would undoubtedly have appealed to Kiefer and may be reflected in his decision to paint it. Certainly Kiefer has chosen to highlight the mystery and the ancient nature of the Ridgeway by loosely rendering the stone circle of Avebury near the horizon in the upper left of the painting. Such Neolithic sites formed important points of pilgrimage for people from all over Britain and Europe circa 3000 BC including people from Northern Spain and, perhaps significantly, Germanic tribespeople from the Rhineland. The fact that the Ridgeway was a route of pilgrimage used by the tribal ancestors of the modern Germans would have been of particular interest to Kiefer as the road therefore not only offers itself as an ideal symbol of the ancient Teutonic past but also as one of continuity and survival throughout the ages. The Ridgeway, like the mythic journey of a man or people, cannot be defined by its beginning or its end but, as Kiefer has here depicted it, exists beyond these parameters and ultimately in a realm beyond time and space.
The close relationship that exists between the personal and heroic journey one must make across and within this landscape is often directly equated in Kiefer's art with the role and path of an artist. This is sometimes indicated by the immersing of his own personal symbol of identity - the painter's palette - above or within the scorched earth of the fields of his native land. These paintings, such as Malen and Malerei der verbrannten Ende for example, make plain the notion of the land as a metaphysical space within which a personal evolution or process of individuation is possible. Kiefer's vision of the landscape is part of the legacy of 19th Century German Romanticism and one that clearly sees the world beyond the purely spatial and the temporal and more as a metaphor of the infinite, the timeless and the mystic. In a typically Nietzschean way, but also one that probably reflects the influence of his teacher Joseph Beuys, Kiefer saw the role of the artist within society, particularly post-Nazi German society, as being fundamentally a shamanic one that enables a healing of the scars of the past.
Painted in 1983, The Ridge Way is one of the finest of Kiefer's large landscape paintings. A rare English-titled work, it depicts the Ridgeway - the oldest road in Europe, a road that is itself embedded in myth and mystery, a road seemingly without beginning or end that links many of the most ancient and sacred sites in Britain.
Dating from at least the Neolithic period five to six thousand years ago, the Ridgeway is a section of road, still surviving, that runs from the stone circle at Avebury for around thirty miles across central southern England. In their book devoted to the history and survival of this ancient thoroughfare, The Oldest Road: The Ridgeway", J R L Anderson and Fay Godwin ask, "How has it escaped the plough over thousands of years of close-fisted land-owning and jealous property rights? Here, where the ancient road served the heart of the lost civilization that produced the Great Stone Culture, something has protected it, something more powerful than laws or charters, an atavistic fear perhaps... It is as if over thousands and thousands of years ordinary greedy men were brought up short by - what? A line of footsteps in the muddy chalk? A feeling that a road trodden by countless generations has established property rights of its own? A simpler sense, felt in the bowels rather than the mind, that to plough the Ridgeway would exact retribution from the ghosts of all these years?...The fact is that the Ridgeway on these Downs has remained unploughed, a right of way established for the human race by laws older than any writ of man." (The Oldest Road: The Ridgeway , J R L Anderson and Fay Godwin, London, 1975. )
The sense of the Ridgeway being an immutable presence in the landscape that both makes people aware of the present and connects them with the ancient past is a feature that would undoubtedly have appealed to Kiefer and may be reflected in his decision to paint it. Certainly Kiefer has chosen to highlight the mystery and the ancient nature of the Ridgeway by loosely rendering the stone circle of Avebury near the horizon in the upper left of the painting. Such Neolithic sites formed important points of pilgrimage for people from all over Britain and Europe circa 3000 BC including people from Northern Spain and, perhaps significantly, Germanic tribespeople from the Rhineland. The fact that the Ridgeway was a route of pilgrimage used by the tribal ancestors of the modern Germans would have been of particular interest to Kiefer as the road therefore not only offers itself as an ideal symbol of the ancient Teutonic past but also as one of continuity and survival throughout the ages. The Ridgeway, like the mythic journey of a man or people, cannot be defined by its beginning or its end but, as Kiefer has here depicted it, exists beyond these parameters and ultimately in a realm beyond time and space.