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Anselm Kiefer's Die Berühmten Orden Der Nacht
Anselm Kiefer's Die Berühmten Orden Der Nacht
Anselm Kiefer's Die Berühmten Orden Der Nacht
3 (2011), pp. 215-221 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the J. Paul Getty Trust Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23005400 . Accessed: 29/03/2014 09:29
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Anselm
Kiefer's
living
artists,
Anselm both
Kiefer
arguably
has
been
the
most
productively Die of
the book
form,
as a subject order
of and
as a medium
Orden
der Nacht
(The
of the night),
a recent
collections
Institute,
is quintessential
in its deft
painting,
of Kiefer's
of means)
and metaphorically
tone). even
Compared
grandiose
productions, square,
is modest,
restrained. of mounted
shy of a foot tall and roughly bound obscured beneath inscription photographic prints.
of twenty-nine
spreads
the silhouettes
of five sunflowers
in cursive
CAPC
seminal of Kiefer's
mounted
images
follows:
passages
flowers The
numbers.3 we reach
book
the sky/field
Sagittarius. globular
The
this constellation,
(NGC
6656)
the
brightest spread,
cluster
ern Hemisphereshining
closer:
we are almost
absorbed
concluding
we seem
photography disappear entirely, replaced by a starry sky conjured by white spattered across thick,veined black paint (fig.4).
In Die dark, heaven to a body beruhmten Orden the mutation of seeming oppositessuch each begun other as light clearly and it and earth, or the microthat explores
relates Kiefer's
of work
alchemy
in 1993, following
Getty Research
Journal,
215
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Xr
Fig. 1. Anselm
Kiefer (German,
(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 Institute (2818-250)
216
GETTY RESEARCH
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* * <r - '
c r ^ .
Fig. 3. Anselm
Kiefer (German,
(11% x 24M in.). Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute (2818-250) Fig. 4. Anselm Kiefer (German, b. 1945). Die beriihmten Orden derNacht, 199 6, collage, 30 x 63 cm
Tain
217
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Fig. 5. Engraved
title page. From Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet etminoris metaphysial, de Bry, 1617). Los Angeles, Getty
physica atqve technica historia, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Aere Johan-Theodori Research Institute (1378-183)
in the south
of France. exhibited
Indeed,
in a set of books
in 1996,
rehearse bent
the metamorphosis
of sunflowers (as
Confirming paintings)
to Robert
the seventeenth-century
physician
the idea
the larger
of work volume
as his turn
to the metaphysical,7
seems
to affirm this. Orden bears it takes resemblance to these works, Fludd it also remains
from them.
obviously,
218
GETTY RESEARCH
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tradition, originally
Bachmann's
(To
the sun).
The
poem
was
des groBen
Baren
of the great
darkness,
placed
under
Major,
of the title.
not simply
book,
at its heart
Bachmann's
of an ode
to the sun's
beauty,
the second
the beauty
of all that its light gives person "you." Thus, bodies, and
an addressee, declares
whereas
the ending
not the sun, at the pinnacle, a metaphor between for the beauty the loved
in greatest
reverence.9
The
radiating
similitude
one
by the very form of the poem. fifth stanza, als unter which consists
around unter to be
of the single
der Sonne
zu sein"
(Nothing
so beautiful
under
the sun):
the beauty
of the sun with all that basks for the simile by seeming five lines each; and
line, with the first and last stanzas the third and the seventh, thus renders
of the verses
between
beloved,
the poem's
twin
Thus,
the beauty of
the poem
also
the capacity
its rigorous
Bachmann,
the most
Kiefer
of the manner
is not merely
"about" such
incommensurates In other
place.12
words,
Kiefer's practice,
work one
proposes
of alchemical
imaginatively
it is Kiefer's
broader
concerns, them,
or
to intertwine
his work of
in a group
heavens).
Each
of a scrapbook seemingly
of fragments shapes
photographs, without
and magazine
illustrations, In at least
arbitrary Kiefer
any apparent
order.13
has included
a reproduction as one
for Nuremberg,
perhaps,
penchant what
fabric."14 space
at first glance
commentary
Tain
219
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references to underscore
to Piet
Mondrian,
Henri
Matisse, entwined
Vassily
Kandinsky,
and
other
painters,
as if
with history. the heavens (2001), would picking translate up where itself into
fascination
with
monumentality
has been
work
since Palais
at the Grand
though
within collections
of modern
Institute.
Notes
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 d'Art Moderne also traveled from the Stadtische Kunsthalle Diisseldorf
to the ARC/Musee
The Messier catalog of nebulae and other heavenly objects was established
teenth century by Charles Messier, while the more comprehensive century later. Both nomenclature 4. Responding systems are still in use.
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 and
board, the format of the picture book allows for the introduction expression generally either strictly condensed
or entirely absent from the pictorial arts." Peter Nisbet, ed., Harvard University Art Museums, 2003), 13.
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 73. of Kiefer's interest in
Two of the books are Robert Fludd and For Robert Fludd. A measure
Fludd's work can be observed in statements such as "When I look at the ripe, heavy sunflowers, bending to the ground, with blackened seeds in the middle of its corolla, I see the firmament and the stars"; Ber 1996): 23. For
nard Comment, "Cette obscure clarte qui tombe des etoiles," Art Press, no. 216 (September more information on Kiefer's relation to Fludd, see Thomas McEvilley, "Communion in Kiefer's New Work: Simultaneously Hand (London: 1995-2001," 78.
and Transcendence
Entering the Body and Leaving the Body," in I Hold All Indias in My and Katharina Schmidt, "Cosmos (Basel: Fondation and Star Paintings Beyeler, 2001).
in Anselm Kiefer: The Seven Heavenly Palaces 1973-2001 See, for instance, McEvilley, "Communion
and Transcendence."
"An die Sonne" is reprinted in both the original and translation in Ingeborg Bachmann, Dark 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 Ingeborg Bachmann (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986), 132-35. Unless otherwise stated, translations are taken from Bachmann,
220
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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 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 Verlust meiner Augen. your life and my life depend on it daily, is the sun.)
(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 on each side, the first and last sentences with five lines, the
around [a] central line[,] with four sentences second and penultimate scale descending
with four, then three, and then two lines each. With the simplicity of a five-note 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 with an appreciation mann (Columbia: li.
of life's beauty under the sun." See Karen R. Achberger, Understanding Ingeborg Bach Press, 1995), 18.
Bachmann
on this idea in the tenth verse: "Ohne die Sonne nimmt auch die Kunst the sun, even art puts on a veil again). My thanks to Barbara Gaehtgens the way in which the poem is a reflection on
(Without
for first pointing out this line to me. Hans Holler discusses art. See Hans Holler, IngeborgBachmann: (Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1987), 66. 12. The interpretation of Bachmann
of Bach
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 Stauffenburg,
suche tin unschuldiges Land: Reading History in the Poetry oflngeborg Bachmann (Tubingen: 2001), 47. 13A selection of the pages of one copy is reproduced in Massimo Indeed, Cacciari and Germano
at the start of Auping, Anselm Kiefer. Pages Celant, Anselm Kiefer (Milan: Edizioni of
it is common
images that form a sort of artist's book in situ. 14Auping, Anselm Kiefer, 32.
Tain
221
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