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Lot Essay
Fixed diagonally over a sweeping panoramic seascape, Anselm Kiefer’s Waterloo Bridge (2004) features a leaden ladder that connects the sea and sky. Strewn over the monochrome surface are miniature items of clothing, also fashioned from lead. These are characteristic motifs for the artist, who has spent the course of his epic, forty-year long career exploring the junctures—indeed, the bridges—between dualities: painting and sculpture, legacy and impermanence, death and renewal. Chalked across the surface, in his distinctive hand, are the words ‘Waterloo bridge’, and Von den Verlorenen gerührt, die der Glaube nicht trug, erwachen die Trommeln im Fluss (‘The drums in the river came alive, beaten by the lost ones, who were not supported by faith’). The phrase has woven through a number of Kiefer’s works and exhibitions since the early 2000s, and, alongside his use of raw, elemental mixed media, is testament to a practice that is equally engaged with the physicality of language itself. Indeed, it is through a distinctly material lens of durability, erosion and dissolution that the artist examines major themes of history, memory and poetry in his work. In a richly layered palimpsest of lead, charcoal and paint on photographic paper, Waterloo Bridge bears the traces of its own temporality. The work has been held in the same private collection since the year it was made.
Born in Germany in 1945, Kiefer grew up in a nation scarred by the devastating events of the Second World War. His childhood was inflected with strange and vivid memories of his ravaged surroundings. He recalls playing amongst the rubble, and, living on the banks of the Rhine near France’s border, he witnessed impressive seasonal floods that inundated the nearby land and houses. With its ebb and flow of crashing waves, Waterloo Bridge reflects the artist’s enduring fascination with landscape and its fluxing boundaries. The tableau accrues its own delicate debris of shirts and tunics, delicately cut from thin sheets of lead. With their beautifully mottled patinas and rusted stitching, these nondescript items flutter like ash into the sea and form one of the impactful symbols used by the artist to address the horrors of the Holocaust. ‘Kiefer’s art’, writes Michael Auping, ‘can be seen not only as a form of mourning and working through the catastrophe of the Nazi era, but also as the artist’s personal attempt to rebuild German culture into the more complex spiritual matrix that existed in a much earlier time’ (M. Auping, ‘Introduction’, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 46).
Drawing on the sublime language of his great German Romantic forebear Caspar David Friedrich, the present work reflects Kiefer’s belief in landscape as a repository of mythology, history, and national memory at large. The bridge itself has longstanding literary and artistic significance. Straddling past and present and forging a path over the abyss, it became a potent symbol of modernity for writers and painters in the early twentieth century. Featuring as a metaphor in poems by Victor Hugo and Guillaume Apollinaire, it was also the foundational source of inspiration for the eponymous German expressionist group Die Brücke. Commemorating the history of Napoleon’s defeat in Belgium in 1815, Waterloo Bridge becomes Kiefer’s own metaphor, evoking a legacy of ruinous battlefields and nationalist folly. Built in the early nineteenth century, the London landmark was famously depicted by Claude Monet forty-one times between 1900 and 1904. He had marvelled at its striking silhouette, capturing its form as it seemed to dissolve and glimmer beneath the city’s mist and coal smoke haze. Here, each crashing wave promises to wash Kiefer’s tableau clean. Waterloo Bridge captures a central tenet of artist’s practice—the natural cycle of the seasons, nature’s ever-correcting renewal of matter, and the regeneration of art and culture.
Born in Germany in 1945, Kiefer grew up in a nation scarred by the devastating events of the Second World War. His childhood was inflected with strange and vivid memories of his ravaged surroundings. He recalls playing amongst the rubble, and, living on the banks of the Rhine near France’s border, he witnessed impressive seasonal floods that inundated the nearby land and houses. With its ebb and flow of crashing waves, Waterloo Bridge reflects the artist’s enduring fascination with landscape and its fluxing boundaries. The tableau accrues its own delicate debris of shirts and tunics, delicately cut from thin sheets of lead. With their beautifully mottled patinas and rusted stitching, these nondescript items flutter like ash into the sea and form one of the impactful symbols used by the artist to address the horrors of the Holocaust. ‘Kiefer’s art’, writes Michael Auping, ‘can be seen not only as a form of mourning and working through the catastrophe of the Nazi era, but also as the artist’s personal attempt to rebuild German culture into the more complex spiritual matrix that existed in a much earlier time’ (M. Auping, ‘Introduction’, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth, exh. cat. Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas 2005, p. 46).
Drawing on the sublime language of his great German Romantic forebear Caspar David Friedrich, the present work reflects Kiefer’s belief in landscape as a repository of mythology, history, and national memory at large. The bridge itself has longstanding literary and artistic significance. Straddling past and present and forging a path over the abyss, it became a potent symbol of modernity for writers and painters in the early twentieth century. Featuring as a metaphor in poems by Victor Hugo and Guillaume Apollinaire, it was also the foundational source of inspiration for the eponymous German expressionist group Die Brücke. Commemorating the history of Napoleon’s defeat in Belgium in 1815, Waterloo Bridge becomes Kiefer’s own metaphor, evoking a legacy of ruinous battlefields and nationalist folly. Built in the early nineteenth century, the London landmark was famously depicted by Claude Monet forty-one times between 1900 and 1904. He had marvelled at its striking silhouette, capturing its form as it seemed to dissolve and glimmer beneath the city’s mist and coal smoke haze. Here, each crashing wave promises to wash Kiefer’s tableau clean. Waterloo Bridge captures a central tenet of artist’s practice—the natural cycle of the seasons, nature’s ever-correcting renewal of matter, and the regeneration of art and culture.