Present lot illustrated (detail)
… we found the word that ascended summer: flower
Spanning almost four metres in width, the present work is a majestic hymn to two of Anselm Kiefer’s most important subjects: flowers, and the poetry of Paul Celan. From thick layers of oil and acrylic, a sweeping summer meadow blooms into life. Stems and petals blossom against a wide-open sky, spiked with jewelled tones of blue, yellow, violet and peach. Across the top of the composition, Kiefer has inscribed lines from Celan’s 1957 poem Blume (Flowers): ‘wir schöpften die Finsternis leer, wir fanden das wort, das den Sommer heraufkam: Blume’ (‘we scooped the darkness empty, we found the word that ascended summer: flower’). The work belongs to a series painted over large photographs, taken by Kiefer, of flowers he had sown the previous year at his property in Barjac in the South of France. Infused with Celan’s imagery of salvation and renewal, it continues his investigations into the relationship between landscape and history, offering a vision of beauty, hope and new life.
Born in 1945 at the close of the Second World War, Kiefer came of age in a world ravaged by conflict. His practice represents a vast, wide-ranging reckoning with Germany’s past and the fate of humankind, drawing together influences from art history, literature, opera, alchemy and philosophy. Celan’s poetry became a particular source of fascination after he discovered his seminal Todesfuge (Death Fugue) as a teenager. A Romanian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor, the poet had similarly struggled with the question of art’s limitations in the wake of atrocity, grappling with the pain and possibilities of writing. ‘Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language’, he said in 1958. ‘… In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss’ (‘Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen’, in R. Waldrop, trans., Collected Prose, New York, 1986, p. 34). In 2022 Kiefer mounted a major exhibition of installations and paintings at the Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris, dedicated to Celan.