Die Orden der Nacht Archives

Object of the Week: The Wave

Carrie Dedon on Feb 24 2017

For regular readers of our Object of the Week series, the name Anselm Kiefer should ring a bell. It wasn’t so long ago that Jeffrey Carlson, SAM Collections Coordinator and this series’ regular contributor, wrote about Kiefer’s monumental and haunting painting Die Orden der Nacht, currently on view in the installation Big Picture: Art after 1945. But today I’m here to talk about Kiefer again, and his work which currently hangs right next to Die Orden der Nacht: the 1990 painting Die Welle (The Wave), or Lilit am Roten Meer (Lilith at the Red Sea).

In many ways Jeff’s earlier discussion of Die Orden der Nacht rings true for Die Welle as well. It is similarly monumental in scale, similarly ambitious in its scope and symbolism. It is similarly laden with its own materiality, its thickly layered surface reaching out from the wall and defying its classification as painting. And, like Die Orden der Nacht, Die Welle is staggeringly heavy—literally (how often do you see lead listed as a medium, and hanging defiantly on a wall?), but even more so metaphorically. Its materials also include wire, ash, and children’s clothes—haunting, aching in their empty presence, a visceral gut-punch aura of destruction and death.

Aside from these obvious material and compositional differences, what distinguishes Die Welle from its neighbor is the mythology suggested in its alternate title: Lilit am Roten Meer, which translates to Lilith at the Red Sea. Lilith is a figure from Hebrew folklore who features in many of Kiefer’s works from the 1980s and ‘90s. According to the mythology, Lilith was meant to be Adam’s first wife, made by God at the same time and from the same earth as the first man. But she refused to be subservient to Adam, and fled the Garden of Eden to live on the edge of the Red Sea. So God made Adam a new wife (grown from Adam’s rib this time—a woman made of man, instead of with him), and Adam and Eve started the work of begetting the human race. Meanwhile, Lilith in her exile became the matriarch of a different kind of progeny: a massive host of demons, and a legacy of destruction and death. If Adam and Eve represent the birth of humankind, so some readings go, then evil is descended from Lilith.

This is a heavy subject (with heavily debated interpretations and readings) to go along with an already somber artwork—but, again like Die Orden der Nacht, Die Welle (or Lilit am Roten Meer) resists easy interpretation. Where is Lilith in this work? Is she one of the hollow figures, or is she lurking in the background, the unseen progenitor of this scene of devestation? More complicated still is the evocation of the Red Sea, which represents the home of Lilith and her demon-children—but also the site of the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, and the drowning of the Egyptians who pursued them. Is the titular welle (wave) cresting towards us with a promise of deliverance, or destruction?

—Carrie Dedon, Curatorial Assistant, Modern & Contemporary Art

Image: Die Welle (The Wave), 1990, Anselm Kiefer, lead, clothes, steel wire, and ash on canvas, Gift of the Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum, 2007.120, © Anselm Kiefer.

Object of the Week: Die Orden der Nacht

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke on Dec 9 2016

At times an artwork has so much to say that I approach it and, admittedly, fail to meet the challenge. I’m not able to engage with the artist at the intellectual height or emotional depth that they have established in the piece. I just can’t always get there. One of the ways I encourage myself is by returning to these works to see if they teach me more on the next visit. Lately I’ve been returning regularly to Anselm Kiefer’s Die Orden der Nacht (translated as The Orders of the Night), which is hanging in a haunting installation called Material Difference, part of the larger Big Picture: Art after 1945 show at Seattle Art Museum.

First, it is huge, ambitious, and awe-inspiring. An oppressive energy emerges from the canvas. In the picture, a figure lies supine as giant sunflowers loom above, their seeds black and charred, their wilting stems and downcast petals seeming both sad and malicious. Wide-reaching symbolism informs the picture. When Kiefer says “These sunflowers are black like the firmament,” he assigns cosmic significance to them, to go along with their tremendous proportions.¹ The man lying flat on the soil from which the sunflowers grow also links to a range of mythologies that tell of creation sprouting from suffering.

We can say, for sure, that it’s not an easy painting to digest. Kiefer believes firmly that art should be difficult—to make, and to understand—and that the challenge it offers can also bring growth.

He has caked paint all over the canvas in thick sloshings, building the picture outward as he has filled it horizontally and vertically. The surface shows cracks from the artist’s heavy application of paint, and this natural reaction of the medium also contributes to the mood of the painting. Like cracks in dried mud, they leave behind impressions of drying up and drought. Up close, one can see the paint applied aggressively, in big, slashing marks.

One of three really exemplary works by Anselm Kiefer in SAM’s collection, Die Orden der Nacht figured prominently in the two most important recent exhibitions of Kiefer’s work, the first displayed at London’s Royal Academy of Arts from September to December of 2014, and the second at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, from December of 2015 through April of this year. The celebrated Pompidou show was a globally important one, marking the first Kiefer retrospective in 30 years to be held in France, where the artist has made his home since 1992.

Also praised by art critics, the 2014 exhibition of Kiefer’s work at the Royal Academy in London united Die Orden der Nacht with another work of the same name by Kiefer. An earlier work, dating to 1988, this other Die Orden der Nacht is an illustrated book, comprising 40 pages, drawn in lead and bedazzled with diamonds. Though a large book, with dimensions of about three feet by two feet, it represents another face to Kiefer’s work that is different in many ways, including its size. With this and other illustrated books, the artist whose effectiveness seems, at first, so linked to the scale on which he is working—dwarfing viewers with the massive dimensions of his paintings, making grand gestures in lavish outlays of materials—moves into intimate territory, creating poetic images that approach the seemingly un-Kiefer idea of beauty. One artist has produced both bodies of work.

To view SAM’s Die Orden der Nacht next to the museum’s other two dark and enigmatic Kiefers, Die Welle (1990) and Untitled (1983), gives one a great introduction to Kiefer, and only an introduction. As much as we like to know artists, the great ones continue to challenge us. As much as we like to define artworks and achieve a sense of resolution,

–Jeffrey Carlson, SAM Collections Coordinator

¹ Quoted by Christian Weikop in “Forests of Myth, Forests of Memory,” in Anselm Kiefer, exhibition catalogue, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2014; 38.

Image: Installation view of Die Orden der Nacht, 1996, Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945), acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas, 140 x 182 1/4 in. Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard C. Hedreen, 99.85, © Anselm Kiefer, Photo: Natali Wiseman.

1 Quoted by Christian Weikop in “Forests of Myth, Forests of Memory,” in Anselm Kiefer, exhibition catalogue, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2014; 38.

Image: Installation view of Die Orden der Nacht, 1996, Anselm Kiefer (German, born 1945), acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas, 140 x 182 1/4 in. Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Richard C. Hedreen, 99.85, © Anselm Kiefer, Photo: Natali Wiseman.

¹ Quoted by Christian Weikop in “Forests of Myth, Forests of Memory,” in Anselm Kiefer, exhibition catalogue, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2014; 38.