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Lot Essay
A monumental vision almost three metres across, Anselm Kiefer’s Velimir Chlebnikow (2005) is part of an important series dedicated to the Russian Futurist poet of the same name. It consists of a lead submarine hanging in a turbulent, textural seascape formed of oil, emulsion, acrylic, charcoal and plaster. A huge wave appears to crash behind the vessel: echoes of Courbet and Turner resound in the picture’s stormy merger of sea, spray and sky. At the upper edge Kiefer has written Velimir Chlebnikow: Lehre vom Krieg: Seeschlachten widerholen sich alle 317 Jahre (‘Velimir Chlebnikow: lessons from war: sea battles repeat themselves every 317 years’). The inscription refers to a central tenet of the poet’s writing. He believed that mystical algorithms governed historical events, identifying a cycle of 317 years marked by pivotal naval battles. The work relates closely to a thirty-painting installation on the Chlebnikov theme that Kiefer first exhibited in a purpose-built steel pavilion at White Cube, Hoxton Square, in 2005, and is now on a long-term loan to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
Born in 1945 in the dying days of the Second World War, Kiefer has drawn upon literature, painting, architecture and music in his vast, ongoing reckoning with the weight of history. Recent decades have seen his work expand towards a wide-ranging exploration of ancient folklore, alchemy, and esoteric belief systems. Chlebnikov is one of his more arcane sources. Kiefer first came across the poet in the 1970s, reading his work in a German translation of the Zaum original—an experiment in sound-symbolism that freed language from meaning. Chlebnikov published his futurological model in 1912, and correctly predicted 1917 to be a year of upheaval. His prophecy was fulfilled when the battleship Aurora fired on the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to trigger the Bolshevik Revolution.
‘It’s a crazy, kind of Dadaist idea,’ Kiefer has said of Chlebnikov’s 317-year theory, ‘but I like it for its strangeness, because the world is such a disparate, senseless place’ (A. Kiefer quoted in A. Sooke, ‘Deep Impact’, The Telegraph, 2 July 2005). Though Kiefer did not take on the poet’s views in literal terms, he and Chlebnikov share a mutual interest in finding instruction in history, and order in language. In his own cyclical motion, Kiefer has circled back to Chlebnikov at various points since an initial series of gouaches in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most recently, he returned to his raging seascapes for the 2017 exhibition Anselm Kiefer, for Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations at the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, duly marking the centenary of the revolution.
The present work’s U-boat is made of lead: a constant, alchemical presence in Kiefer’s art which he considers ‘the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history’ (A. Kiefer quoted K. Soriano, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2014, p. 29). It is also a material ironically ill-suited for a sea-going vessel. The submarine surfaces precariously amid the ocean’s swell. Thick channels of opaque pigment are directed among areas of deep and shallow relief, forming troughs, furrows and estuaries that pool, craze and flow through the canvas. The U-boat appears less purposeful than marooned among a ‘disparate, senseless’ tide of history. For all that Chlebnikov and others might try to apply systems of order, Kiefer suggests, states, ships and individuals alike are all adrift in the endless flux of the world.
Born in 1945 in the dying days of the Second World War, Kiefer has drawn upon literature, painting, architecture and music in his vast, ongoing reckoning with the weight of history. Recent decades have seen his work expand towards a wide-ranging exploration of ancient folklore, alchemy, and esoteric belief systems. Chlebnikov is one of his more arcane sources. Kiefer first came across the poet in the 1970s, reading his work in a German translation of the Zaum original—an experiment in sound-symbolism that freed language from meaning. Chlebnikov published his futurological model in 1912, and correctly predicted 1917 to be a year of upheaval. His prophecy was fulfilled when the battleship Aurora fired on the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to trigger the Bolshevik Revolution.
‘It’s a crazy, kind of Dadaist idea,’ Kiefer has said of Chlebnikov’s 317-year theory, ‘but I like it for its strangeness, because the world is such a disparate, senseless place’ (A. Kiefer quoted in A. Sooke, ‘Deep Impact’, The Telegraph, 2 July 2005). Though Kiefer did not take on the poet’s views in literal terms, he and Chlebnikov share a mutual interest in finding instruction in history, and order in language. In his own cyclical motion, Kiefer has circled back to Chlebnikov at various points since an initial series of gouaches in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Most recently, he returned to his raging seascapes for the 2017 exhibition Anselm Kiefer, for Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations at the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, duly marking the centenary of the revolution.
The present work’s U-boat is made of lead: a constant, alchemical presence in Kiefer’s art which he considers ‘the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history’ (A. Kiefer quoted K. Soriano, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, in Anselm Kiefer, exh. cat. Royal Academy of Arts, London 2014, p. 29). It is also a material ironically ill-suited for a sea-going vessel. The submarine surfaces precariously amid the ocean’s swell. Thick channels of opaque pigment are directed among areas of deep and shallow relief, forming troughs, furrows and estuaries that pool, craze and flow through the canvas. The U-boat appears less purposeful than marooned among a ‘disparate, senseless’ tide of history. For all that Chlebnikov and others might try to apply systems of order, Kiefer suggests, states, ships and individuals alike are all adrift in the endless flux of the world.