MUNICH.- Anselm Kiefer has created a body of work that broke the silence surrounding the German past in the Third Reich, while also finding a poignant language for articulating the global intertwinement of human civilization. He delves deep into old Christian, Kabbalistic, and Far Eastern traditions, explores the world’s great mythical, religious, and poetic texts, and forges links between them and the world as it is experienced today.

The monumental painting “Der Sand aus den Urnen” (2009) and the two large wall pieces transferred onto lead in 2011 and entitled “OCCUPATIONS” (1969/2011) as well as the two display cases “Die 12 Stämme“ (2010) and “Morgenthau” (2016) will now form an additional highlight in the collection profile at the Pinakothek der Moderne.

“Der Sand aus den Urnen” shows a sprawling, architecturally incomplete or ruin-like assemblage of bricks. Is it the archaeological site of a once magnificent building, which takes the observer back to Ancient Egypt, Greece, or Mesopotamia? Or is it rather an unfinished construction project from our contemporary world? Or does the work show a brick factory that practically fills up the entire space of the picture?

Kiefer himself had witnessed something of this description on a trip to Southern India in the mid-1990s when he saw a production facility manufacturing bricks for the Indian construction industry. He described the experience as a “real shock”, as during the production process the bricks were stacked and rearranged in such a way that they formed structures that looked like ancient architectures such as walls or pyramids, without however bearing any actual relationship to these architectures and their functions. The dichotomies of order and devastation, creation and destruction, grandeur and banality draw awareness to the constant transformations undergone by society, with certainties only granted a temporary existence – a theme with urgent relevance for our own contemporary world. The title quoted in the picture “Der Sand aus den Urnen [The Sand from the Urns]” refers to a (subsequently pulped) cycle of poems by Paul Celan from 1948. The cycle appeared in 1952 in “Poppy and Memory”, and featured the poem entitled “House of Forgetting” that resonates with the work in the collection:

“Moldgreen is the house of forgetting […] You fill the urns here and feed your heart”.

Memory and uncertainty, time and space – all exist in a constant state of tension and transformation in Kiefer’s “Der Sand aus den Urnen”.

In his 2011 work “OCCUPATIONS”, Kiefer refers back to his own photo series “Besetzungen”, which in 1969 brought the artist both fame and notoriety. Kiefer photographed himself giving the Hitler salute (illegal since the Second World War in Germany and in Austria) in a variety of locations throughout Europe: at the Colosseum in Rome, the crater of Mount Vesuvius, the Swiss towns of Küssnacht and Bellinzona, and, as seen in the newly acquired pictures, in front of the Temple of Athena in Paestum and at a location between Rome and Naples. Dressed in his father’s old German army uniform (or parts of it), he explores the National Socialists’ devastating claim to power. Kiefer’s “OCCUPATIONS” feign identification with the subject and yet stage an attempted catharsis from the tragedy of the “Thousand Year Reich”. The works are now on show in the Pinakothek der Moderne in immediate proximity to both the former “Führerbau”, the administration building of the Nazi Party, and the two “Temples of Honour” that once held sarcophagi of party members killed in the Beer Hall Putsch and which were subsequently destroyed after WWII and left in a ruinous state. Unlike in the Third Reich, when Munich bore the epithet “Capital of the (Nazi) Movement” and anyone passing the “Temples of Honour” had to raise their right arm in a Hitler salute, Kiefer’s provocative gesture is not a “political tool”, as the artist has been at pains to make clear. In the museum context it is a gesture of inversion, like Duchamp’s urinal. From a practical standpoint it becomes useless, while exhausting the comprehensive possibilities of the perception of and reflection on art. In 2011 Kiefer developed new prints of his images and mounted them on lead plates. The “OCCUPATIONS” photographs were then subjected to a corrosive procedure by means of electrolysis. The photographic subject is partially overlaid with weathering marks that will slowly but progressively continue to grow. The process effectively establishes a form of temporal distance. However, over the long process of becoming erased, history and memory are maintained in a continuum.

The display cases “Morgenthau” and “Die 12 Stämme” also evoke memories of historical events or traditions, and yet go far beyond any concrete association to the events they reference. In “Morgenthau”, giant, yet at the same time deceptively genuine-looking golden ears of corn are a celebration of the magical power of nature beyond the shadow of modern history. However, the title reminds us of the US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau (1891– 1967), who in 1944, as an Allied victory became more tangible, came up with the plan to transform Germany into an agricultural state. The aim was to limit the country’s economic and military strength in the long term. In the display case “Die 12 Stämme”, twelve monumental sunflower sculptures, hanging upside-down, give the visual impression of a hortus conclusus. The largely lead-coated plants, each marked with a small label bearing one of the twelve names of the tribes of Israel, seem to proclaim the end of time, and yet have scattered life-giving seeds on the vitrine floor. In a sign of hope, the work evokes nature’s power of regeneration and the millennium-old idea of an original, fraternal kinship among all peoples, now separated by divergent languages and cultures.

The recent acquisitions of five works by Anselm Kiefer significantly expand the institution’s holdings of the artist’s works, which previously consisted solely of three photographs and the painting “Nero malt” (1974), the latter from the Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds (formerly known as the Prince Franz of Bavaria Collection). With the five new accessions, the collection now boasts a representative display of Anselm Kiefer’s art. The artist’s works will go on show alongside comprehensive groups and/or rooms of works by other groundbreaking artists, particularly Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Wolfgang Laib, Sigmar Polke, Arnulf Rainer and Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Andy Warhol. The acquisition of this set of works not only enriches the collection in terms of its density and variety, but also further bolsters the Pinakothek der Moderne’s profile on the international stage.