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Item Number: 127506
Title: ANSELM KIEFER : Morgenthau Plan
Author: Calvocoressi, Richard
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9781935263821
Description: New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2013. 34 x 30cm., hardcover, slipcase, 127pp. illus., most in color. Exhibition catalogue. Summary: Gagosian Gallery presents an exhibition of recent paintings and sculpture by Anselm Kiefer, which further explores the historical and formal concerns of "Morgenthau Plan," his exhibition that inaugurated Gagosian Le Bourget in Paris last October. Born at the close of World War II, Kiefer reflects upon and critiques the dangerous myths that propelled the Third Reich to power. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, the artist engages German history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos to reinforce lessons of the past. The exhibition at Le Bourget and the subsequent body of work on view in New York draw upon the Morgenthau Plan as an apt metaphor for a common pitfall of the creative process—namely, works that put forth beauty without any other detectable motive. Kiefer presents the shortsighted, wrong-minded initiative as a representation of ideas—artistic and political—that ignore “the complexity of things.” Proposed in 1944 by United States Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the plan was conceived to transform post-war Germany into a pre-industrial, agricultural nation, allegedly in order to limit the country’s ability to wage war. Morgenthau sought to divide Germany into two independent states, annexing or dismantling all German centers of industry in an arrangement that may have led to the death of millions by pestilence and starvation. Although the Morgenthau Plan was never realized in its original and most extreme form, it represented an alternative post-war Germany potentially occupied more by farmland and plant-life than industry. In his latest paintings, Kiefer explores the landscape of this double-sided initiative. Flowers—one of his central leitmotifs—bloom through the devastation.
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