MARTIN A RUEHL: ANSELM KIEFER - COSMOLOGY AND HISTORY

Martin A Ruehl: Anselm Kiefer – Cosmology and History

This is a summary of a review by Martin A Ruehl of the exhibition of works by Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy, London from 27^th September to 14^th December 2014. 

Martin A Ruehl teaches German cultural and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge.

The review by Martin A Ruehl was published in Art and Christianity 80, dated Winter 2014, on pages 8 and 9.

Art and Christianity is the quarterly journal of Art and Christianity Enquiry (ACE).

This blog published a summary of Jonathan Jones’ review of the Kiefer exhibition from the Guardian newspaper on 26^th September 2014.

Martin A Ruehl: Anselm Kiefer – cosmology and history

Ruehl writes about Kiefer’s ‘relentless, obsessive engagement with his country’s past’. 

He writes about Gallery 4 of the exhibition in which Kathleen Soriano – the curator of the exhibition – states her understanding of Kiefer’s cosmology, which is that Kiefer shows a link between the divine and the human.   Ruehl is dismissive of Soriano’s analysis. 

In its place Ruehl advances his view, which is that if Kiefer subscribes to a cosmology it seems likely to be that of the ‘black fairy tale told by the grandmother in Buchner’s Woyzeck’. 

This fairy tale as retold by Ruehl is, in summary, that there was a time when an orphan child found that he was the only person alive in the world.  The child’s desire was to ascend to heaven, and he managed to reach as far as the moon, but he found that the moon was no more than rotting wood.  The child travelled as far as the sun: he found that it was a decaying sunflower.  Upon arrival at the stars, the child found that these were ‘tiny golden insects stuck there as though by a butcher-bird on blackthorn’.  When he returned to the earth the child found that it was no more than ‘an upturned cooking pot’.  The child cried, alone, and he remains there to this day.

Ruehl describes Kiefer’s ‘sustained, determined resistance to transcendence’.  He argues that this arises not so much from a cosmology as from a specific understanding of history.  Ruehl argues that Kiefer depicts a world that is ‘man-made, or rather German-made’.  Kiefer’s world, writes Ruehl, is a world that survives after ‘an all-consuming conflagration whose charred remains are the only possible, or at any rate, the only legitimate objects and materials for the post-apocalyptic artist.  That conflagration is, of course, the holocaust’.

Kiefer is probably the only artist who has successfully presented Germany’s post-war reckoning with Nazism as visual art.

And Kiefer’s engagement with his subject is ‘monomaniacal’, and ‘deadly earnest’.  Ruehl is critical of Kiefer’s lack of irony, finding his work wanting when compared with that of Beuys who was Kiefer’s teacher.  Kiefer’s later works are ‘literal, heavy-handed and overly didactic’. 

Ruehl criticises Kiefer for his lack of awareness that his placing of National Socalism in a direct lineage from Nordic mythology and Prussian militarism perpetuates the Nazi understanding of German history.  Ruehl argues that the frequent motif in many of Kiefer’s works of parallel lines leading to a point in the distance may show Kiefer subconsciously subscribing to Sonderweg – Nazi Germany’s understanding that by rejecting the liberal ethos of Western Europe and adopting a ‘fateful special path’ for Germany, the Third Reich was inevitable. 

Thus, Ruehr argues that Kiefer is showing ‘death and destruction as the necessary vanishing points of German history’ and he is showing his belief in ‘German singularity’.   ‘Death is a master from Germany’.

GEOFFREY CLARKE: OBITUARY

Geoffrey Clarke: Obituary

Geoffrey Clarke was born on 28 November 1924: he died on 30 October 2014.  This is a personal summary of his obituary that was published in the Guardian newspaper on 8 November 2014.

Geoffrey Clarke: Obituary

Geoffrey Clarke was a British sculptor of ecclesiastical art and a stained glass maker who was most active and prominent in the 1950s.

Geoffrey Clarke was born in Derbyshire, the son of John Clarke - an architect who was also an etcher – and his wife Jean.  A grandparent had been a church outfitter.  Geoffrey Clarke attended three northern art schools and served in the Royal Air Force.  In 1948 he arrived at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.

Early in his time at the RCA, Clarke opted to work in stained glass and a piece of his work attracted the attention of the college principal – Robin Darwin.  The piece was awarded a silver medal.  In 1950 Darwin proposed Clarke to be a member of team working with Basil Spence to rebuild Coventry Cathedral.

By 1952 Clarke had ten years’ worth of commissions.  These included the cross and candle sticks for the high altar in the new Coventry Cathedral and three of the ten nave windows in the new cathedral.  In 1962 a critic of the Sunday Telegraph newspaper listed the works that Clarke had completed in the previous ten years: a wide range that included relief panels, doors, light fittings, a mosaic, a tapestry and a relief sculpture in settings that included banks, an ocean liner, university colleges and a theatre. 

In 1952 the critic Herbert Read had given a name to the style of the group of eight sculptors who had exhibited in the British Pavilion in that year’s Venice Biennale: ‘the geometry of fear’.  These sculptors’ work was ‘spiky, organic ..... mutant, angry’.  Other artists in the group were Lynn Chadwick, William Turnbull, Reg Butler and Kenneth Armitage: several of these ‘dominated British sculpture for the decade to follow and, in some cases, beyond’.  Geoffrey Clarke had ‘a less enduring fame’.

Subsequent to 1964, Clarke’s popularity waned.  This is attributed to Clarke’s identification with Christian spirituality.  Clarke had been ‘one of the most experimental of the Geometry of Fear sculptors’ and he remained innovative.  At the height of his popularity, Clarke had modelled his works in polystyrene rather than in the traditional manner in clay.  The polystyrene gives the cast a ‘rough-hewn, bark-like quality that gives them the look of a medieval take on Anthony Caro’s contemporaneous Early One Morning’.  But this was not to Clarke’s advantage: fashion was ‘turning away from skill’: the contemporary pop art ‘demanded slickness and appropriation’ which was not Clarke’s forte. 

Clarke had ‘ceased to be a churchgoer’ in 1954 and ‘his leanings were roughly Jungian’.  His focus on the cross in his work is less a response to Christian symbolism and more a presentation of a universal archetype.  He remained amiable towards the religion that had ‘been both his salvation and his downfall’.

SUSANNE LANGE: 'HISTORY OF STYLE - INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF BERND AND HILLA BECHER'

Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

In 2005 a book was published by Thames & Hudson: Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic forms of industrial buildings.

The book comprises:

a)      Foreword;

b)      an essay by Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’, dated ‘Cologne, June 2004’;

c)       61 illustrations in duotone which are photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher that ‘constitute a representative selection from the broad range of subjects chosen by the Bechers in what are characteristic ‘portraits’ of the objects in question.  Subjects include cooling towers, water towers and winding towers, blast furnaces, lime kilns, gravel plants, grain elevators, gas tanks and even details of the interiors of these industrial edifices’.

The endpaper note states: ‘Rendered timeless by the camera and isolated from their original, often perplexingly complex surroundings, the structures photographed by the Bechers appear as monumental symbols of their own history – with all the stylistic diversity of great masterpieces of architecture’.

This is a personal summary of the essay by Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

Susanne Lange: ‘History of style – industrial buildings: the photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher’

The photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher are found in widely differing collections throughout the world.  They are found alongside major figures in minimal and conceptual art, as well being counted with leading documentary and narrative photographers.  They are also highly esteemed by industrial archaeologists and architectural conservationists.  The Bechers also set new standards in perceptual aesthetics, showing heavy industry as art.  

‘The Bechers’ black and white photographs are ultimately alienated quotations of reality, their objective dimension developed mainly by the artists’ insistence on recording motifs with prosaic precision’.  

The Bechers’ imagery is not a subjective response: it refrains from metaphor and symbolism.  The lineage of the Bechers’ work is the ‘international avant-garde of the 1960s in minimal and conceptual art’.

Bernd Becher

Bernd Becher had a childhood interest in industrial buildings: he grew up in Siegen (in western Germany) close to a steelworks.  In 1954 he enrolled at the State Art Academy in Stuttgart to study art.  Here he was encouraged in his interest in industrial architecture.  In the mid 1950s Bernd Becher became aware that economic change would lead to the decline of heavy industry in his home area: he would return here to sketch plant and buildings.  In 1957 he photographed demolition under way at the Eisenhardter Tiefbau mine near Siegen to assist him with sketches he intended to make.  Soon afterwards Bernd Becher abandoned sketching for photography so that he could record the industrial landscape that he knew so well before it was lost.

In 1957 Bernd Becher moved to Dusseldorf Art Academy where he decided that juxtaposition would be the most effective arrangement for ‘formal analysis’ of the subjects of his photographs.  This approach was perfected from 1959 when Bernd began working with Hilla Wobeser who was also passionate about technical and industrial themes: she was also accomplished in photographic technique. 

Hilla Wobeser

Hilla Wobeser had been encouraged in photography from the age of 13 by her mother who had had photographic training in Berlin in the 1920s.  In 1951 Hilla Wobeser began a three year apprenticeship at the Eichgrun photography studio in her birthplace – Potsdam, in eastern Germany.  At the end of the three years Hilla moved westwards to Dusseldorf to work at an advertising agency where Bernd Becher also worked occasionally.  She subsequently enrolled at Dusseldorf Art Academy.  In 1961 Bernd and Hilla married and they left the Academy.

The industrial landscape

In the early 1960s the couple photographed in western Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom where, in 1966, they benefitted from a British Council grant.  In 1968 the Bechers produced their first photographs of industrial areas in North America.  Since the 1960s the Bechers have revisited many places to fully record the industrial landscape that was being lost.  This work was done at their own initiative with no patron to satisfy.

Anonymous sculptures in a process of constant transformation

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological style of juxtaposed similar subjects has a systematic approach that is essentially a scientific method of verification.  At the same time, the typologies are enlivened by the aesthetic sensibility of the two photographers.  And the ‘anonymous sculptures’ that are the subject of each of the Bechers’ collections of photographs are presented as a type that is in a process of ‘constant transformation’. 

Through the gallery in Dusseldorf that was owned by Konrad Fischer, the Bechers met ‘the international avant-garde’ including the artists Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt.  This led to exhibitions that innovated by combining film, performance and installations.  In 1972 the Bechers had their first show in New York with the sponsorship of the gallerist Ileana Sonnabend.

Subsequent exhibitions were held in the USA and Germany in which the Bechers’ significance in the history of photography was acknowledged. 

The Bechers built up their own archive of historical photographs of industrial structures and landscapes.

The Bechers’ work has led to industrial structures being conserved and re-used, rather than being demolished when their original purpose had ceased.

Awards granted to the Bechers in recent years have been in honour of their time as teachers at Dusseldorf Art Academy.  The couple held the first chair of artistic photography at the academy between 1976 and 1996.  

ART AND COAL

Art and Coal

In 1982 and 1983 an exhibition was organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain with the National Coal Board and supported by Barclays Bank: Coal - British mining in art 1680-1980.

The exhibition was shown at five locations around Great Britain: Stoke on Trent; Swansea; London; Durham; and Nottingham. 

An illustrated catalogue of the exhibition - Coal: British mining in art 1680-1980 - was published.  This is a personal summary of the section of the catalogue entitled ‘Art and Coal’, written by Douglas Gray. 

Art and Coal

The 150 pictures in the exhibition depict fully coal mining in the British Isles in the period 1680 – 1980.  Each of these works shows the artist’s response to coal.

The seminal image of the Industrial Revolution

The publication of Georg Agricola’s De Re Metallica in the 16^th Century marks Europe as the originator of a new view on life: the use of illustration to describe metal mining.  Contemporary artists and craftspeople also showed aspects of miners and mining. 

The painting by Peter Hartover, dated 1680, of Harraton Hall and Lumley Castle in County Durham ‘should be considered as the seminal image of the Industrial Revolution’, although it was not until a further 70 years had passed (ie. in 1750) that ‘artistic imagination and temperament are stirred again’ with Abraham Darby’s paintings of iron foundries and smelting furnaces in the ‘picturesqueness’ of Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire – the ‘cradle of the industrial revolution’.  Darby gives prominence to the ‘heat and light’ of ironworking, whilst the ‘damp and darkness’ of coal mining is relegated to the representation of ‘remotely situated coal pits’.

Edmund Burke’s Inquiry into the Origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was published in 1757. 

The first painting of a coal mine

The first ‘realistic representation of a coal mine’ dates from 1788: George Robertson’s ‘painting of the mouth of a coal pit near Broseley’ which now only exists as a print published in 1788 by Francis Chesham.  It seems that this work was never exhibited.

The first painting of a coal mine that was exhibited appears to be William Williams’ pair that were shown in 1788: they are both views of Coalbrookdale.  In one of the paintings the pastoral idyll is being replaced by the needs of industry: ‘the first inevitable step from picturesque landscape to industrial wasteland’. 

‘Wild romantic scenery’

Artists in the late 18^th Century were also seeking ‘wild romantic scenery’ elsewhere in the British Isles’.  Paul Sandby – ‘a less passionate artist than those who had visited Shropshire’ – painted collieries in Wales in about 1775 / 76 in a ‘cool and restrained way’. 

Other artists visited Wales at this time in search of romantic subjects and they ‘have bequeathed a major legacy of industrial paintings and drawings that are unique in art history’.  These show all the aspects of industrial enterprise in Wales at that time including the coal industry.  These artists are listed as: John Hassell, George Robertson, George Samuel, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, J M W Turner (who was there in 1792, 1795 and 1798); Francois Louis Francia; William Havell; and John Laporte.  But the landscape setting of all these artists’ works in the late 18^th Century / early 19^th Century is the rural environment, and there is no hint of the national significance of what is depicted.  Social realism was precluded by the factors of the dominant aesthetic philosophy, the pressures of patronage and the desires of the art market. 

The widening availability of printed publications in the early 19^th Century enabled a broadening of awareness of the realities of coal mining.  Three significant publications were: W H Pyne’s Microcosm; George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire; and William Daniell’s A Voyage Round Great Britain.  Walker includes an illustration showing a miner in a mining landscape which includes a colliery, a steam winder, and a train of coal wagons hauled by a locomotive.  Pyne shows coal mining in the ‘archaic’ style of Sandby.  Daniell travelled with Richard Ayton from Lands End to Whitehaven from 1813 to 1823.  At Whitehaven Ayton visited the William Pit and Daniell sketched ‘on the windswept quay’  Ayton described his experience of being underground in the coal mine: he was ‘alienated and overwhelmed’.  Daniell did not make any drawings of coal mines. 

The Royal Academy

The Royal Academy (RA) exercised a strong control that defined acceptable subject matter, and this was rarely breached in the first 25 years of the 19^th Century.  ‘Industrial genre painting’ would not find a place in the RA’s stated list of acceptable subject matter that had ‘High Art – Sacred and Secular’ in first place, and ‘Sea and Landscape Painting’ as the last of the seven acceptable categories. 

Henry Perlee Parker’s ‘Pitmen at play near Newcastle upon Tyne: painted from nature’ was probably the first ‘true’ mining painting to hang in the RA, in 1836.  Parker lived in Newcastle upon Tyne from 1815 to 1840: his works at this time ‘predict the social realist subjects that became firm favourites with the Royal Academy in the late Victorian period’.  His patrons and friends included prominent mining engineers who will have given him access to coal mines. 

J M W Turner’s ‘Keelmen heaving in coals by moonlight’ dates from 1835 ‘but as with all his work it is so much more than just ‘coal’’.  Its roots lie in Turner’s ‘brilliant watercolour study of ‘Shields on the River Tyne’, painted in 1823.

These two works – Parker’s of 1836 and Turner’s of 1835 – both symbolise the dynamism of the change that the coal industry effected at this time: the human element and the organisation and transport of coal that together were providing the momentum for massive social and economic upheaval. 

In the late 18^th Century a number of less-well-known artists also illustrated the growing coal industry.  In the vicinity of Newcastle upon Tyne these included William Beilby, Thomas Bewick and Luke Clennell who took as their subject the relatively advanced collieries of their area.  Other artists at this time also showed human aspects of mining, and marine painters depicted the transport of coal by sea.

1842

Three events in 1842 are significant. 

Firstly, the publication of the First Report of the Commissioners (Mines) from the Children’s Employment Commission included diagrams and illustrations: this caused an outcry, and at the same time paved the way for ‘a new form of artistic realism’. 

Secondly. the founding of the Illustrated London News was the first mass circulation journal that used pictures as a means of communication, and other similar publications soon followed.  The coal mining industry and associated economic and social change were reported and illustrated.

Thirdly, a ‘relatively obscure artist’, Thomas H Hair published his Views of the Collieries in the Counties of Northumberland and Durham.  This was the result of Hair’s travels from about 1837 to 1840, during which he made ‘objective watercolours of the most advanced and profitable pits’.  The published illustrations were ‘etched rather than engraved’.

During the next fifty years there was frequent illustrated reportage of aspects of life in the coal industry in mass circulation publications.  

Dramatic illustration

In 1875 John Ruskin deplored the tendency that had developed by that date for ‘young socially concerned artists’ to depict subjects in the genre of the popular taste for dramatic illustration of contemporary scenes.  But in 1882 Vincent Van Gogh took the opposite view, writing that ‘the English black and white artists’ have the same sentiment as Dickens – ‘noble and healthy’.

‘Genre painting’ was accepted in 19^th Century Britain but most artists who produced such work have now been forgotten.  Genre paintings that are remembered are those ‘whose subject matter is of historical or sociological interest or where the work maintains a very high quality and can be measured in terms of virtuosity’.  A work that is remembered is William Scott Bell’s ‘Coal and Iron’.

After the death of the Prince Consort in 1861 the ‘acceptable tragedy of modern life’ was increasingly depicted in illustrated publications by portraying contemporary situations of suffering such as colliery disasters.  Previously the acceptable manner for artists to engage with human tragedy was through ‘history painting’.  The Hartley Colliery Disaster in 1862 was the subject of a painting in the Royal Academy exhibition of that year: Frederick Bacon Barwell’s ‘Unaccredited Heroes – A Pit Mouth’. 

The ‘sentimentality, mawkishness and complacency of mid-19^th Century art continued unchanged for the larger part of forty years’.  The extremes of sentiment within society were reflected in the wide range of approaches taken by artists to the coal industry.

A preference for photography

In 1893 William Thomas – the Camborne Superintendent of Mines – criticised the ‘mining genre art’ for its lurid approach and he expressed a preference for photography for the portrayal of mining.  Thomas was not a disinterested observer: he was championing his photographer friend John Charles Burrow whose underground photographs of Cornish tin mines are ‘technical masterpieces’.  ‘After Burrow’s documentation ..... a more realistic and informed method of representation had to be adopted’.  By the time of Burrow’s death in 1914 many photographers had achieved a massive archive of documentary record of all aspects of coal mining in Britain. 

‘Modern artists have to search for ..... adaptations of old ideas to the spirit of our time’

Writing in 1903 in the Art Magazine of 1903, P G Konody wrote that ‘modern artists have to search for ..... adaptations of old ideas to the spirit of our time’.  This reflected the writer’s optimism and his understanding of changes taking place in art elsewhere in Europe.  But the First World War ‘made irrelevant the entire scale of sensibilities held previously’. 

The ‘New Realism’ of German artists in the 1920s had no equivalent in Britain. 

P G Konody’s challenge was not taken up until the 1930s.  Various trends developed over this decade and during the Second World War.  Pre-war initiatives were: the documentary film crews of John Grierson; the Mass Observation Unit; the photographers Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith; and the ‘pitmen painters’ of the Ashington Group.  The War Artists Advisory Committee placed artists - Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer and other artists - ‘in the midst of industry’ during war time.  Sutherland and Moore painted among the coal industry.

The artist Josef Herman arrived in the Swansea valleys, ‘via Warsaw, Brussels and Glasgow’ in 1944.  He stayed for 11 years and produced ‘images of Welsh miners (that) are probably the most well known symbols of British mining’.  The artist who settles in a mining community to paint is an ‘outsider’.  Herman’s paintings show a mining community that has ‘returned to those votive symbols of primitive religions’.  The ‘outsider’ ‘has to become an ‘insider’ even to half understand the nature of coal mining or the special qualities of the miner and his community’.

The photographers Robert Frank and Eugene Smith worked in the Welsh mining communities in the first few years after nationalisation in 1947.  They became ‘insiders’.  For these photographers ‘the individual is of overriding importance’. 

The opposite view was taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher in their photography of the British coalfields in 1973.  These photographs record 19^th and 20^th Century industrial structures in a way that is closely controlled in order to contain the meaning of the image: these are sculptural forms ‘that make no comment or protest concerning the mining industry or its workers’.

Artists have continued to work in the mining industry: ‘individual approaches ...... are manifested most clearly by those artists who have continued to search for the equation that will transcend mere reality’.