Word: paintings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Chicago show was organized by the late A. James Speyer (from 1961 to 1986 the Art Institute's curator of 20th century painting) and Mark Rosenthal of the Philadelphia Museum, who wrote its catalog. It will travel through 1988 to Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York City. An hour at it can be a fairly exhausting experience, like a slog toward a receding horizon across the plowed clay fields that are Kiefer's favorite landscape. His canvases are huge in size and engulfing in scale; he is, one notes, one of the few artists around who really do understand...
...list of his materials, apart from paint, would include paper, staples, canvas, rough foil formed by throwing a bucket of molten lead on the canvas and letting it cool there, sand, gold leaf, copper wire, woodcuts and lumps of busted ceramic. It is highly unlikely that more than a few will survive for 50 or even 25 years. Kiefer carries a disregard for the permanence of his materials to such an extreme that the lead will not stay in place and the straw on some canvases is already rotting, though this does not seem to discourage collectors...
...ghosts come out anyway; and it is Kiefer's project to lay them by showing their relations to the real cultural history of Germany, bitterly polluted by Nazi appropriation. When Kiefer paints a Nazi monument, such as the Mosaic Room in Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin, designed by Speer, he also evokes by implication the noble tradition of German neoclassicism that Speer froze and vulgarized. His charred, plowed landscapes, their heavy paint mixed with straw, are real agricultural terrain, but they are also frontier, no- man's land, graveyard and the biblical desert of Exodus...
...like their counterparts in England, a dark side exists to this patriotism. Spraypainted in dayglow paint throughout Harvard Square, can be seen a modified swatstika, with dots on each of the points. On the hands of some of the skinheads Nazi paraphenelia, such as S.S. rings, can be spotted. One morning, when employees of the Cambridge Savings Bank, went up to the top floor, they found their American flag replaced with a grey flag with a Maltese cross of German Army fame, and the words "Skinheads" and "DMZ" spraypainted...
...residents in the apartment house is a wealthy Englishman named Percival Bartlebooth, whose past, along with those of dozens of other tenants, gradually emerges. In 1925, Bartlebooth embarks on the rigid program he has mapped out for the rest of his life. He spends ten years learning how to paint watercolors. For the next 20 years he travels the globe, rendering one seaport scene roughly every two weeks and sending each painting to Paris, where a craftsman turns the artwork into a jigsaw puzzle. From 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, back in his apartment, solves each puzzle and then...