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Artist or Maker: Anslem Kiefer (B. 1945)

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Provenance: Asher Edelman, New York
Perry Rubenstein, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1987

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Exhibited: Venice, Museo Correr, Anselm Kiefer, June-November 1997, p. 418 (illustrated in color, pp. 228-229).

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Notes: In addressing Germany's fraught past, no other artist has navigated the difficult terrain between the possibility of transcendence and the necessity of remembrance as dramatically and as provocatively as Anselm Kiefer. His art dictates its role as a mediator to painful national tragedies and as a measure of passage towards an enlightened future. Such ambitions find formal parallels with Kiefer's mature work from the early 1980s: the vast scale, physical materiality and visual complexity of works such as Balder's Traume force recognition of their ponderous content.

Kiefer approaches the horrendous legacy of Nazi imperialism through the incorporation of myth, literature and art from the Nordic tradition as well as religion, philosophy, mysticism and the occult. The present work refers to the myth of Balder--the god of innocence, beauty, purity and peace--whose death unleashes the ultimate destruction of the Gods at Ragnorak. Upon dreaming of his own death, his mother tries to prevent it by making every object on earth vow never to hurt him. Her plan overlooks the mistletoe, on account of the weed's unthreatening insignificance, but this unfortunate misstep is later exploited by the demon Loki, who masterminds Balder's murder with a magic spear made from the weed. At the pleas of his grieving mother, Balder is promised release from the underworld to return to a new, joyful and better world that will rise upon the demise of Ragnorak, which must be destroyed as punishment for his death. In this Christ-like resurrection of a new world eased of pain and born of the old, Kiefer wields an apt metaphor for overcoming his country's burdened past and proceeding into the future.

Kiefer's ability to interweave ancient Nordic myth with recent or Twentieth Century political realities explores the various strands of German history; he expresses this synthesis metaphorically through multiple materials. Balder's Traume sprawls across an enlarged photograph affixed to canvas and overlaid with oil, acrylic, emulsion, straw and the infamous mistletoe. It is landscape, both depicted and literal.

Filling its entire scope with landscape, Balder's Traume is notable in its rather drastic departure from the archetypal German Romantic tradition that it invokes. One experiences the vast expanse of the earth as if pushed into it or hovering just above it. This is not the ideal escape into nature; rather this is the landscape of war, its scorched tonality suggestive of ravaged battlegrounds. The blackened grooves of earth, plunging obliquely into perspective and interlaced with flickering tongues of red and yellow, suggest an infernal destruction. The high horizon line renders a sense of claustrophobia and barely allows escape from this man-made hell. Only the melancholic air of white light that hovers above the horizon offers the scant hope of salvation. With Balder's Traume emblazed across the upper left patch of sky, the work refers to the destruction of Ragnorak--the domain of the Gods--and carries with it the distant promise of rebirth. Such faith, the work seems to suggest, may also apply to the decimated terrain of post-World War II Germany, so that it may resurrect an improved place.

In the arduous path to redemption, Kiefer's work registers in purgatory. The physical fragility of his materials, notable in his frequent use of straw, sets the stage for vast human conflagration. Influenced by Joseph Beuys and Italian Arte Povera in their employment of unlikely materials which reveal the ravages of time, Kiefer seeks to attach additional symbolic value to his media. In Balder's Traume, straw--being easily combustible--suggests the vulnerable fate of German history. However, it is also an organic material subject to change: according to the artist, straw eventually changes composition through a process similar to fermentation and is thereby "transfigured."

Kiefer seems to suggest that transfiguration is something from which his country is not exempt. In his tenacious attempts to own history, one senses a glimmer of hope rising from under the burdened dermis of his creations. Balder's Traume is after all a dream of salvation.