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PARTISAN REVIEW
surprising, in fact, how little that meaning is clarified when he adds
specific drawn images or found objects .
In
a few landscapes, image
and surface fuse to reinforce one another in potent, visceral ways-I
kept thinking, among other things, of a winter train journey I had
made across a cold, bleak East Germany to Berlin--but all too often,
surface and image seem at odds.
In
other pictures, the banality of
Kiefer's drawing undermines the inventiveness and evocativeness of
his surfaces in ways that seem far from deliberate. The smaller-scale
altered photos and prints and the "ruined" books (on hyper-elegant
steel stands) were often more eloquent than the large, bombastic
paintings. What puzzled me most was the coexistence of Kiefer's
impenetrability and literal-mindedness. His symbols are often so ar–
cane that only elaborate labels and explanations reveal the profun–
dities he is supposed to have pondered, or else they are obvious and
trite - witness his sculptural glorification of a cliche palette or his far
from subtle use of the bird wing.
Art politics seemed to be on exhibit at MOMA as much as art.
Kiefer's show raised questions , apart from the now usual issues of
which collectors and which dealers were best represented, that had
nothing to do with the quality of his paintings or the potency of his
content. The sheer size of the pictures, the extravagance of his
materials, the weight - physical rather than intellectual- of his
works made you wonder at the complications and expense of pro–
ducing them, to say nothing of the even more daunting problem of
moving them across continents and installing them. The aura of
power and money that Kiefer's art carries with it accounts for at least
some of the respect with which it was greeted.
Kiefer, like many German artists of his generation, acknowl–
edges his debt to Josef Beuys, so the concurrent Beuys exhibition at
HirschI and Adler Modern was both apt and helpful. The selection
was fairly expedient and, I should confess, I am not an unqualified
admirer of Beuys - I usually like the drawings best - but the chance
to compare the two artists was welcome and informative. The dia–
grams and artifacts of Beuys's shamanistic "actions," the assortment
of objects that he chose to elevate to totemic status all seemed highly
charged and mysterious in a way that too few of Kiefer's works did.
Even more noticeable was the sense of authenticity, of private obses–
sion and of
modesty
in Beuys's work that made Kiefer's appear more
grandiloquent and stylish than ever.
Jasper Johns has been almost as visible as Kiefer, oflate, partly
because of his auction prices, partly because of the travelling exhibit
