Anselm Kiefer’s Exploration of Industrial Decay and Romantic Themes
“Spirit is Life. It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea.” —Gregory Corso
ST. LOUIS — At 2,340 miles, the “mighty” Mississippi River borders no fewer than eight American states. Missouri is among them, where the city of St. Louis has been the site of both tenacious (and pugnacious) expansionist gusto and, in the wake of midcentury de-industrialization, precipitous decline.
As is often the case for American culture, it takes an outsider to gild our mythos, to redeem the dismissed as truly magnificent. German artist Anselm Kiefer has pulled this off for the Mississippi River and its surrounding territory. Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea, on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum, is the Neo-Expressionist’s first major United States museum show in 20 years. The exhibition is a dazzling tour de force, displaying 40 works from the past half century, about half created in the last five years, along with five towering, site-specific canvases that line the museum’s vaulted 1904 Sculpture Hall.
Becoming the Sea is a sublime instance of Kiefer’s inveterate (some might say shameless) Romanticism. Nostalgia for the Rhine River of his childhood flows into homages to the Mississippi as a symbol of both industry and creative freedom; the feminine spirits of the Indigenous North American Anishinaabe and Wabanaki people ebb into a reference to the “Rhinemaidens” of the Wagner opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung); tributes to German-Jewish poet Paul Celan splash against those of American Beat poet Gregory Corso, to whom the show owes its title. Philosophers and mythological figures loom within a visual language that convolutes cultural distinction within a Kiefer-verse of singular awe. Uniting much of his recent work is a palette of refulgent gold and aquamarine, the murky browns of the “muddy” Mississippi exalted as glittering spectacle.
Among the most moving monuments to Rustbelt grandeur is “Missouri, Mississippi” (2024), a vertical diptych reaching over 30 feet. In the upper portion, a nude water nymph rests her body against the curves of the Missouri River, the cursive words “St. Louis” draped over her knee like a gilt scarf. In the lower portion, torrential waves crash against the gates of a dam, dark below a saffron sky (a scene evidently based on a visit Kiefer made to the Melvin Price Lock and Dam in 1991 at the river confluence in Alton, Illinois). While an aerial view of the river tributary denotes divine leisure, from below the manmade marvels of industry explode with rapturous energy.
Growing up in the professed “Gateway to the West,” flanked by the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, water was part of my consciousness — whether breathing soupy summer air as a child or dancing at a casino in college at the confluence of the country’s two largest rivers. As an adult, I developed a keen, if unsettling, awareness of my provenance as “flyover country.” Even the airport, where my grandfather toiled for 30 years, was a dim shell of the modernist masterpiece designed by Minoru Yamasaki a half century prior. Taking in “Missouri, Mississippi,” it is hard to see “flyover” country in quite the same way again.
In the galleries of the museum’s East Building, where most of the exhibition is located, the deliciously tactile nature of Kiefer’s green-and-gold ensemble is more approachable and intimate. In “Der Rhine” (The Rhine, 2024), the Black Forest’s thick branches form a fine brocade over the river, the leaves leaping from the surface like tongues of fire. On the opposite wall, “Dans ce vert linceul” (In This Green Shroud) (2024), which quotes lines of poetry from French Romanticist Gérard de Nerval, depicts a man lying on the ground holding a tall bouquet of yellow-petaled twigs. Donning the signature nightshirt of Kiefer’s earlier self-portraits, the supine figure appears at once relaxed and wondrous, a gesture perhaps to a oneness with nature as our own mortality approaches.
In the Weil Gallery, works from the sculpture series Die Frauen der Antike (The Women of Antiquity) (2018–25) catch the light from a wall-length window overlooking a row of trees. When the show opened, the greenery outside stood in stark contrast to the white gowns that compose the figures, each one representing a renowned female artist or martyr (Sappho, St. Eulalia, and