Sense of Place - Research: Narrative and Memory

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945): Narrative, History and Myth

I went to see Kiefer’s exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2014, and have recently re-read the book which accompanied the exhibition, “Anselm Kiefer” (Soriano et al., 2014).

Kiefer hones in on the impact of the aftermath of the war on German soil, interweaving mythology, ancient cultures, and cosmology. He meditates on beliefs and the complex relationship between art and spirituality. Kiefer’s work is extremely thought provoking and powerful.

Anselm Kiefer, Sulamith, 1983, oil, acrylic, emulsion and straw on canvas, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

 The painting was made in 1983. During this period Kiefer was exploring the impact and aftermath of the Second World War on German society. The painting works on a number of different levels. The image reflects a poem and the years his friend and poet, Paul Celan spent in a concentration camp. The building, modelled on Wilhelm Kreis’s Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers in Berlin, is transformed by Kiefer into a Holocaust memorial. Kiefer has used his imagination, and built on the story to make the connections between the poem and his image. Kiefer has deliberately provided us with a stark, dark, enclosed space to conjure up the oppressive feelings which must go with imprisonment.

Memory and time

Frank Auerbach (b. 1931)

In a rare interview with Smith on BBC Newsnight (2015) we get an insight into Auerbach’s background, motivation and personality which drive his work, having lost both parents in the Holocaust. Auerbach’s subject matter is confined to those subjects which he gets to know well over time. Over the years he has made hundreds of visits to the National Gallery where he will draw before the works of masters such as Rubens, Rembrandt and Constable. He would then take his drawing back to his studio where he would pin it up and work from it while it was still fresh in his mind, starting anew on each visit. They are not slavish copies, but lively original works.  Sometimes he will transfer compositional elements into another painting, such as his Park Village East, below, loosely based on Constable’s The Hay Wain,1821.

Frank Auerbach, Park Village East, 1997-98

His interest in landscape derives with his fascination of the area of London around Camden, where he has had his studio for over fifty years. He visited London as a child during the war and saw at first hand the bomb damage. When he was a student after the war and during the rebuilding of bombed sites, he would visit these areas on a daily basis and record the transformation. He became “fonder and fonder of it” (Auerbach, 2015). In this way, we can understand the influence time and memory plays on the way Auerbach sees and creates his paintings.