“L’année prochaine à Jérusalem, cette année à Paris: à propos d’Anselm Kiefer, des impératifs iconographiques et des juifs,” (“Next Year in Jerusalem, This Year in Paris: On Anselm Kiefer, Iconographic Imperatives and the Jews”).
The essay, “L’année prochaine à Jérusalem, cette année à Paris: à propos d’Anselm Kiefer, des impératifs iconographiques et des juifs,” (“Next Year in Jerusalem, This Year in Paris: On Anselm Kiefer, Iconographic Imperatives and the Jews,”) was commissioned by organizing curator Jean-Michel Bouhours for the catalogue accompanying the major retrospective exhibition Anselm Kiefer, now on view at the Centre Pompidou/Musée National D’Art Moderne, Paris, from December 16, 2015 – April 18, 2016.
Drawing upon the ideas and materials that were at the heart of her first book, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge, 1999) and inspired by a recent Kiefer exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” Saltzman’s essay reflects on Kiefer’s enduring interest in Jewish subjects, historical, biblical and mystical, and what that interest means in the cultural and political context of the European present. For although Kiefer’s work has come, in recent decades, to embrace a global, even cosmic worldview, adding to his iconographic arsenal the numbered stars and nebulae of an ever expanding understanding of the universe, it has never wholly strayed from its grounding concern with the historical inheritance of Germany’s Nazi past and the genocidal destruction of European Jewry. Even as he plumbs another nation’s history of trauma, creating, for example, the series of landscape paintings Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, an invocation of Mao’s short-lived call for cultural freedom and its subsequent withering in the anti-intellectual, agrarian ambitions of the Cultural Revolution, Kiefer also summons his nation’s collective inheritance of guilt, in what might be considered almost a companion series to the Chinese paintings, the Morgenthau Plan, which takes as its subject the proposal by then U.S. secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s postwar proposal to de-industrialize Germany, to leave it in a state of ruin and rubble and reduce it to its agrarian past, a vengeful plan, ultimately displaced and replaced by the economic engine of the Marshall Plan.