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Lot Essay
Jak makiem zachoú (1992) is a poetic and beautiful mixed-media composition by Anselm Kiefer. The artist conjures a textural, terracotta-coloured landscape from soil, charcoal, acrylic and oil paint on canvas, with bunches of dried poppies laid diagonally across the foreground. Splashes of burnt sienna imply the flowers’ petals. White and pale blue impasto streaks convey a plunge towards the horizon above, and light, perhaps, breaking through cloud. At the top of the canvas, Kiefer has inscribed the title Jak makiem zachoú. This Polish phrase translates as ‘like sowing poppy seeds’: an idiom that refers to something done in total silence. Poppies have long been associated with sleep, dreams and narcosis, but also, in the twentieth century, with the remembrance of war. Kiefer uses the plant to explore how memory and history are written into the land, and to invoke the possibility of regeneration.
Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945, and grew up surrounded by the ruins of the Second World War. His works represent a vast, ongoing reckoning with the country’s past. They are deeply evocative and materially complex, drawing on motifs from literature, painting, architecture and music. Jak makiem zachoú belongs to a diverse body of canvases that he has been making since the 1970s which complicate the German Romantic tradition of landscape painting. These powerful, richly physical depictions of scorched earth, oceans, churned-up fields and lowering skies—often incorporating dried plant matter and other materials—are layered with references to sources from Wagnerian opera to Kabbalistic texts, military campaigns and the poetry of the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan.
The poppies in Jak makiem zachoú summon a variety of meanings. John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1919), which described red poppies growing over fallen soldiers’ graves, made them a popular memorial symbol in the years after the First World War. Thanks to their narcotic properties, they also have an ancient cultural association with sleep: in Greek mythology the poppy flower is an attribute of Morpheus, the god of dreams. In this sense, they might be said—like the inscription of history itself—to involve both remembrance and forgetting. Paul Celan employed this tension in his most famous collection, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory) (1952). His verses entangled the sensual, musical intoxication of the poetic line with the inescapable horror of his own wartime memories. Kiefer embraces a similar complexity, questioning whether art can be commensurate with the weight of the world.
The present work’s title also points to Poland, a significant place in Kiefer’s imagination. The country’s invasion by National Socialist forces in 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. Kiefer explored this turning point in his series Noch ist Polen Veloren (Poland is Not Yet Lost) (1978), which takes its title from the Polish national anthem. These works were laments but also offered grounds for hope, with spiral motifs evoking the rise and fall of national destinies. History moves in cycles, Kiefer believes, and creation can emerge from destruction. The poppy is part of such a cycle itself, its dried heads sowing new life as they scatter their seeds to the wind. ‘Rubble is like the blossom of a plant’, said Kiefer in 2008. ‘It is the radiant high point of an incessant metabolism, the beginning of a rebirth’ (A. Kiefer, Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels 2008: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung, Paris 2008, p. 48).
Kiefer was born in Germany in 1945, and grew up surrounded by the ruins of the Second World War. His works represent a vast, ongoing reckoning with the country’s past. They are deeply evocative and materially complex, drawing on motifs from literature, painting, architecture and music. Jak makiem zachoú belongs to a diverse body of canvases that he has been making since the 1970s which complicate the German Romantic tradition of landscape painting. These powerful, richly physical depictions of scorched earth, oceans, churned-up fields and lowering skies—often incorporating dried plant matter and other materials—are layered with references to sources from Wagnerian opera to Kabbalistic texts, military campaigns and the poetry of the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan.
The poppies in Jak makiem zachoú summon a variety of meanings. John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ (1919), which described red poppies growing over fallen soldiers’ graves, made them a popular memorial symbol in the years after the First World War. Thanks to their narcotic properties, they also have an ancient cultural association with sleep: in Greek mythology the poppy flower is an attribute of Morpheus, the god of dreams. In this sense, they might be said—like the inscription of history itself—to involve both remembrance and forgetting. Paul Celan employed this tension in his most famous collection, Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory) (1952). His verses entangled the sensual, musical intoxication of the poetic line with the inescapable horror of his own wartime memories. Kiefer embraces a similar complexity, questioning whether art can be commensurate with the weight of the world.
The present work’s title also points to Poland, a significant place in Kiefer’s imagination. The country’s invasion by National Socialist forces in 1939 marked the start of the Second World War. Kiefer explored this turning point in his series Noch ist Polen Veloren (Poland is Not Yet Lost) (1978), which takes its title from the Polish national anthem. These works were laments but also offered grounds for hope, with spiral motifs evoking the rise and fall of national destinies. History moves in cycles, Kiefer believes, and creation can emerge from destruction. The poppy is part of such a cycle itself, its dried heads sowing new life as they scatter their seeds to the wind. ‘Rubble is like the blossom of a plant’, said Kiefer in 2008. ‘It is the radiant high point of an incessant metabolism, the beginning of a rebirth’ (A. Kiefer, Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels 2008: Ansprachen aus Anlass der Verleihung, Paris 2008, p. 48).