anselm kiefer's die berühmten orden der nacht

8/12/2019 Anselm Kiefer's Die berhmten Orden der Nacht

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Anselm Kiefer's "Die berhmten Orden der Nacht"

Author(s): John TainSource: Getty Research Journal, No. 3 (2011), pp. 215-221Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the J. Paul Getty TrustStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23005400 .Accessed: 29/03/2014 09:29

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Anselm Kiefer's

Die beruhmten Or den derNacht

John Tain

Of all major living artists, Anselm Kiefer arguably has been the most productively

engaged with the book form, both as a subject of and as a medium for his work.1 Die

beriihmten Orden der Nacht (The renowned order of the night), a recent acquisition of

the special collections at the Getty Research Institute, is quintessential Kiefer in its deft

mixing of photography with drawing and painting, and of the everyday with the mytho

logical. Yet it also stands out because of Kiefer's unusually light touch, both literally (in

the sparseness of means) and metaphorically (in the intimate, lyrical tone). Compared to

the artist's grandiose productions, Die beriihmten Orden is modest, even restrained. Just

shy of a foot tall and roughly square, it consists of twenty-nine spreads of mounted and

bound photographic prints. On the cover, the silhouettes of five sunflowers are partially

obscured by thinly brushed-on paint, with the book's title handwritten in cursive script

beneath (fig. 1). Sunflowers, seen from the ground up, occupy the first spread, with the

inscription pour Jean-Louis/d'Anselm spanning the two pages. (The book's dedica

tee, Jean-Louis Froment, founded Bordeaux's CAPC Musee d'art contemporain, one

of Europe's seminal contemporary art institutions, and mounted the first French solo

exhibition of Kiefer's work in 1984.2) The initial images set the scene for what follows:

sunflowers in a field, seeming to float in the sky above, are transformed by the addition

of ink drawing and brushy passages of white paint into stars, constellations, and celestial bodies (fig. 2). As if charted by an astronomer, some flowers are identified by both

Messier (M) and New General Catalog (NGC) numbers.3 The book meanders through

the sky/field until the twentieth spread, when we reach Sagittarius. The spread lingers on

this constellation, with M22 (NGC 6656) the brightest globular cluster in the North

ern Hemisphereshining out. On the following spread, we see this sunflower/star close

up (fig. 3). A turn of the page brings us even closer: we are almost completely absorbed

within the flower's dark disk, which gleams from the raking light.4 And, finally, in the six

concluding pages and the back cover, we seem plunged into its darkness, as flowers and

photography disappear entirely, replaced by a starry sky conjured by white spattered

across thick, veined black paint (fig. 4).In Die beruhmten Orden the mutation of seeming oppositessuch as light and

dark, heaven and earth, or the micro- and macrocosmicinto each other clearly relates it

to a body of work that explores alchemy and mysticism, begun in 1993, following Kiefer's

Getty Research Journal, no. 3 (2011): 215-221 2011 J. Paul Getty Trust

215

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Xr

Fig. 1. Anselm Kiefer (German, b. 1945). Die beriihmten Orden derNacht, 199 6, collage,

(11% x i23/8 in.). Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (2818-250)

Fig. 2. Anselm Kiefer (German, b. 1945). Die beriihmten Orden derNacht, 199 6, collage, 30 x 63 cm

(:11V8x 24V4 in.). Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (2818-250)

216 GETTY RESEARCH JOURNAL, NO. 3 (201l)



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Fig. 5. Engraved title page. From Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet etminoris metaphysial,

physica atqve technica historia, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Aere Johan-Theodori de Bry, 1617). Los Angeles, Getty

Research Institute (1378-183)

departure from Germany and his resettlement in the south of France. Indeed, the mysti

cal cast of his new work was readily apparent in a set of books exhibited in 1996, several

of which also rehearse the metamorphosis of sunflowers into starscapes.5 Confirming the

metaphysical bent of the work, a few of the books (as well as the related paintings) pay

homage to Robert Fludd, the seventeenth-century physician who diagrammed the mys

tical intersection of the microcosmic with the macrocosmic and proposed the idea that

every plant has its corresponding star (fig. 5).6 Indeed, the larger significance of Kiefer's

body of work has been interpreted precisely as his turn to the metaphysical,7 and the

Getty volume seems to affirm this.

But while Die beriihmten Orden bears resemblance to these works, it also remains

distinct from them. Most obviously, it takes its title from neither Fludd nor the mystical




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references to Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Vassily Kandinsky, and other painters, as if

to underscore that art is inextricably entwined with history.

In later years, Kiefer's fascination with the heavens would translate itself into

sculptural lead books such as La vie secrete desplantes (2001), picking up where the monu

mentality of the books of the eighties had left off. Indeed, monumentality has been the

dominant characteristic of Kiefer's work since then, with the installation of his Sternefall

exhibition/environment at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2007 serving as the most spec

tacular example of this trope. By contrast, like other early works by Kiefer in the GRI's

collection, Die beruhmten Orden finds Kiefer thinking on a smaller scale, though no less

ambitiously, about beauty and art, and their place within the larger world.

John Tain is curator of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute.

Notesotes 1. On the importance of books for Kiefer's practice, see Michael Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven

and Earth (Fort Worth: Prestel, 2005), 40.

2. That same month, an exhibition also traveled from the Stadtische Kunsthalle Diisseldorf

to the ARC/Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. See Jean-Louis Froment, Anselm Kiefer (Bordeaux:

CAPC Musee d'art contemporain, 1984).

3. The Messier catalog of nebulae and other heavenly objects was established in the late eigh

teenth century by Charles Messier, while the more comprehensive New General Catalog was compiled a

century later. Both nomenclature systems are still in use.

4. Responding to the cinematic quality of the sequence, Daniel Arasse has described the clos

ing in as if by a zoom effect. See Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer (Paris: Editions du Regard, 2001), 256. Lisa

Saltzman has also commented on this aspect of Kiefer's book work, noting that like a cinematic story

board, the format of the picture book allows for the introduction of narrative, a form of depiction and

expression generally either strictly condensed or entirely absent from the pictorial arts. Peter Nisbet, ed.,

Anselm Kiefer: The Heavenly Palaces, Merkabah (Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, 2003), 13.

5. Many of them, including Robert Fludd, For Robert Fludd, and Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des

etoiles (all presumably 1996, but undated in the catalog), were exhibited in 1996 at Kiefer's first exhibition

following his move to France. See the catalog Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des etoiles (Paris: Yvon Lambert,

1996). The Secret Life of Plants (1998), meanwhile, is reproduced in Andrea Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul

Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory (Paris: Editions du Regard, 2007), 73.

6. Two of the books are Robert Fludd and For Robert Fludd. A measure of Kiefer's interest in

Fludd's work can be observed in statements such as When I look at the ripe, heavy sunflowers, bendingto the ground, with blackened seeds in the middle of its corolla, I see the firmament and the stars ; Ber

nard Comment, Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des etoiles, Art Press, no. 216 (September 1996): 23. For

more information on Kiefer's relation to Fludd, see Thomas McEvilley, Communion and Transcendence

in Kiefer's New Work: Simultaneously Entering the Body and Leaving the Body, in I Hold All Indias in My

Hand (London: Anthony D'Offay Gallery, 1996); and Katharina Schmidt, Cosmos and Star Paintings

1995-2001, in Anselm Kiefer: The Seven Heavenly Palaces 1973-2001 (Basel: Fondation Beyeler, 2001).

7- See, for instance, McEvilley, Communion and Transcendence.8. An die Sonne is reprinted in both the original and translation in Ingeborg Bachmann, Dark

ness Spoken: IngeborgBachmann, the Collected Poems, trans. Peter Filkins (Brookline: Zephyr, 2006), 214-17;

and Mark Anderson, ed. and trans., In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems by ngeborg Bachmann (Princeton:

Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), 132-35. Unless otherwise stated, translations are taken from Bachmann,




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Darkness Spoken, 215,217. For a discussion of the importance of Bachmann as an authorial figure in Kiefer's

oeuvre, see Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan, 180-204.

9. See note 8. Cf. the first stanza:

Schoner als der beachtliche Mond und sein geadeltes Licht,

Schoner als die Sterne, die beruhmten Orden der Nacht

Viel schoner als der feurige Auftritt eines Kometen

Und zu weit Schonrem berufen als jedes andere Gestirn,

Weil dein und mein Lebenjeden Tag an ihr hangt, ist die Sonne

(More beautiful than the remarkable moon and its noble light,More beautiful than the stars, the celebrated orders of night,

Much more beautiful than the fierydisplayofacomet,

And so much more beautiful than any other star,

Because your life and my life depend on it daily, is the sun.)

with the last stanza:

Schone Sonne, dervom Staub noch die gropte Bewundrunggebuhrt,

Drum werde ich nicht wegen dem Mond und den Sternen und nicht,

Weil die Nacht mit Kometen prahlt und in mir einen Narren sucht,

Sondern deinetwegen und bald endlos und wie um nichts sonst

Klage fiihren iiber den unadwendbaren Verlust meiner Augen.

(Beautiful sun, which even from dust deserves the highest praise,Causing me to raise a cry, not to the moon,

The star, the night's garish comets that name me a fool,

But rather to you, and ultimately to you alone,

As I lament the inevitable loss of my sight.)

io. As Karen Achberger notes, the twenty-nine lines of the poem are structured symmetrically

around [a] central line[,] with four sentences on each side, the first and last sentences with five lines, the

second and penultimate with four, then three, and then two lines each. With the simplicity of a five-note

scale descending to and then ascending from the tonic keynote (5-4-3-2-1-2-3-4-5), with the curve of an

orbit or an hourglass, the poem counters the destruction of the Great Bear on the night side of the earth

with an appreciation of life's beauty under the sun. See Karen R. Achberger, Understanding Ingeborg Bach

mann (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1995), 18.li. Bachmann touches on this idea in the tenth verse: Ohne die Sonne nimmt auch die Kunst

wieder den Schleier (Without the sun, even art puts on a veil again). My thanks to Barbara Gaehtgens

for first pointing out this line to me. Hans Holler discusses the way in which the poem is a reflection on

art. See Hans Holler, IngeborgBachmann: Das Werkvon denfriihesten Gedichten biszum Todesarten -Zyklus

(Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1987), 66.

12. The interpretation of Bachmann found here relies on Leslie Morris's presentation of Bach

mann's work as poetological, that is, as poetry in which the subject matter is poetry itself. Morris

insists, however, that poetic self-reflexivity [is] a political and historical act, one that does not preclude

participation in larger historical discourse (on National Socialism, for instance). Leslie Morris, Ich

suche tin unschuldiges Land: Reading History in the Poetry oflngeborg Bachmann (Tubingen: Stauffenburg,

2001),47.

13- A selection of the pages of one copy is reproduced at the start of Auping, Anselm Kiefer. Pages

from both are reproduced in Massimo Cacciari and Germano Celant, Anselm Kiefer (Milan: Edizioni

Charta, 1997), 91-97,102-5. Indeed, it is common for Kiefer monographs to begin with a selection of

images that form a sort of artist's book in situ.

14- Auping, Anselm Kiefer, 32.

Tain Anselm Kiefer's Die beriihmten Orden der Nacht 221

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anselm kiefer's die berühmten orden der nacht

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