"You must see the Anselm Kiefer," a recent visitor to Chateau Smyth insisted. "It's magnificent and would make a great diary," she said, implying, perhaps a little unsubtly, that something less dry than Europolitics might improve the reader profile.
And, I thought, expose your correspondent for the visual illiterate that he really is. But this is a diary, not a review. So bear with me. And Kiefer is, in the critic Robert Hughes's words, "the best painter of his generation on either side of the Atlantic". Not to be missed.
A welcome bonus would be a return to SMAK, Ghent's stunning new gallery of modern art, whose multiplicity of simple spaces provides an ideal variety of displays for Kiefer's monumental work. This exhibition, which runs to late April, is of his work from 1996 and has been put together with the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Bologna.
Initially it is the size of the pieces that is overwhelming, awesome, whole walls, some two storeys high, and the sense of entering into the work.
Then the texture and variety of forms. Kiefer builds his work from dirt, sand, wood, huge dead sunflowers, processed photographs, lumps of lead, tar, pieces of objects etc.
In Storm of Roses (1998),he uses coils of rusty razor wire to give both a third dimension to paintings and, wrapped round dead black roses, a sense of violence. In the background is a muddy field that could be Flanders and innumerable numbered tags suggesting the anonymous butchery of a killing machine.
Paint is thrown or forced on to canvases rather than painted. Often they take on a scorched look; his work appears to have survived some ordeal.
And the colours are the grey of concrete, brown, and rusty orange of decay, sands of the desert. This is not fun, not an exaltation of the human spirit, but a dark, agonising reflection on Germany's history.
Born in 1945, Kiefer studied in Dusseldorf under Joseph Beuys in the early 1970s. He became a key figure and sometimes controversial figure in the German "neo-expressionist" movement. His ambiguous references to national and Norse myths, the cycles of history, Wagner, alchemy, love, the Holocaust, suggested, some critics said, a sympathy with the Nazis.
Early work in which he ironically used photographs of himself giving a Nazi salute stoked controversy. "I do not identify with Nero or Hitler," he said then, "but I have to re-enact what they did just a little bit in order to understand the madness."
His refusal to accept the categorisation of his difficult work as pro- or anti-fascist cannot have helped in the politically charged world of the arts, but looking at it now it is difficult to see any such sympathies in the recurring portrayals of decay. (In recent years, underlining his real sympathies, he has contributed substantial sums to helping young Israeli artists.)
Until 1992 he lived and worked in Hornbach, Germany, then moved to Barjac, in the south of France, close to Arles, where Van Gogh painted his bright yellow sunflowers and starry skies. Both are transformed in Kiefer's recent work into dark and ominous symbols, part tribute to a man who inspired the expressionist tradition, part, the ironic, unsettling juxtaposition of icons representing life with the desolation which is his hallmark.
Kiefer's coming to grips with his national heritage has been a struggle. He has attempted to integrate the spiritual beauty of romantic German thought with the demons that grew out of it. According to the critic and novelist, Francine Prose, Kiefer's artistic project involves nothing less than redeeming his country by making the viewer look hard at images that evoke Germany's past and present.
Even his most enthusiastic supporters struggle with the multiple layers of meaning and find his allegories obscure, and hence ambiguous. The ordinary viewer of much of the work requires a detailed accompanying text of footnotes to the literary and biblical allusions that are everywhere.
Yet few can help but be moved by the vast archaeological scenes of sand-covered brickworks (Sonnereste, and others, 1997) that suggest connections between a fabulous past and the ovens of Auschwitz. Or the massive dark spiral of stars (Cette clarte obscure qui tombe des etoiles, 1996) which evokes man's ultimate puniness.
In Shooting Stars (1998) the stalks of dozens of dead sunflowers emerge from bullet holes in a construction that appears to be the Berlin Wall, presumably a grim joke about extinguished hope. And in Jason (The Argonaut), a teetering pile of lead books surmounted by a model battleship, Kiefer is surely making an ironic comment on the abuse of human genius.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that I haven't missed the point completely. But then, please note, this is only a diary.
Patrick Smyth can be contacted at psmyth@irish-times.ie
