Hidden depths: Anselm Kiefer’s Odi Navali

The Italian Gabriele d’Annunzio would go on to become a major military and political figure. However, in the early 1890s, when he wrote a series of poems called Odi Navali (‘Naval Odes’), he was still primarily known as a writer. The poems argue that his country had the potential to become one of the world’s supreme powers — but only if its leaders spent large sums on developing an all-conquering navy. Failure to do so would risk Italy becoming ‘a nonentity’.

The navy that d’Annunzio sought never came into being. However, there’s irony in the fact that, after he declared himself dictator of the disputed city of Fiume in 1919, it was the Italian navy that unceremoniously expelled him.

Fast-forward several decades, and the German artist Anselm Kiefer would take the title of d’Annunzio’s poems and use it to name a work of his own. On 13 October 2023, Odi Navali is being offered in Christie’s 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale.

A keen student of history, Kiefer once said that ‘art cannot live on itself. It has to draw on a broader knowledge. It needs to bear the scars of the world.’ The artist is more conscious of those scars than most.

He was born in 1945, during the final months of the Second World War, in a small town in the Black Forest area of southern Germany. Much of the work across his long career has addressed the guilt of his parents’ generation for enabling, and in many cases supporting, the rise of Nazism.

Initially, this took the form of works such as 1969’s series ‘Occupations’ (Besetzungen), in which Kiefer had himself photographed doing the infamous fascist salute at various monuments across Europe. Over time, however, as his art matured, Kiefer’s references to his country’s past grew subtler and more allusive.

Odi Navali — which has the two titular words scrawled in the top left of the canvas — is a good example. The sentiment expressed in d’Annunzio’s poems had echoes in the policies later adopted by Germany. More than that, the painting amounts to a highly charged seascape, to which Kiefer has fixed a lead model of a U-boat.

Odi Navali is similar to works in the series ‘Velimir Chlebnikov’. Thirty paintings from the series were exhibited collectively — as a single installation — in a purpose-built pavilion outside White Cube gallery in London in 2005. That installation is currently on long-term loan to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA).

The picture coming to auction was produced in 2006 but is closely aligned to its 30 predecessors. As he did with them, Kiefer made it by working and reworking the surface at length, churning his paint into troughs and furrows. The thick, deliberately uneven impasto suggests a choppy sea. The palette is a compelling combination of muted tones.

As for the lead vessel, it appears marooned. It is suspended from the top of the canvas by ultra-thin metal wires, adding to a sense of precariousness. Assuming it is meant to be a U-boat, Kiefer presents us too with the paradoxical sight of a surfaced submarine: a ship not fit for purpose.

Thinking metaphorically, might we consider this a ship of state, representing Germany after the war? Perhaps, but by no means only that. Kiefer is an artist as good at building layers of meaning as layers of paint.

Given his nationality, some viewers might see Odi Navali as harking back to the moody seascapes of Caspar David Friedrich. Kiefer’s panoply of references goes beyond art history, however. Alongside the poetry of d’Annunzio, it’s also worth dwelling on the title of this whole series: ‘Velimir Chlebnikov’.

Velimir Chlebnikov was a mystic, early-20th-century Russian poet. He was a member of his country’s Futurist movement alongside the better-known Vladimir Mayakovsky — and counted among his achievements inventing a nonsensical language called ‘Zaum’, which liberated sound from meaning.

Chlebnikov spent much of his life as a nomad, wandering barefoot through Central Asia, jotting down verses and ideas in a notebook as he went. At the heart of his thinking was a numerological interpretation of human history — a belief that algorithms governed the occurrence of key events. One of his claims was that, once every 317 years, dating back to the Trojan War, a naval battle takes place which fundamentally changes the course of world affairs.

‘It’s a crazy, kind of Dadaist idea,’ Kiefer said in 2005. ‘But I like it for its strangeness, because the world is such a disparate, senseless place.’

Chlebnikov’s ideas appealed to the artist’s own chequered view of history, as examples of the myth-making impulse that leads and misleads humankind as we strive in vain to make sense of our existence — like a ship lost at sea.

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