‘Drop Down Ye Heavens’

Andromeda shows both wonder at the ‘starry heavens above’ (the title of a 1980 painting of Anselm Kiefer’s), and the moral depths which humanity is capable of plumbing. Two enormous lead sheets cover the upper and lower parts of the work. On the exposed canvas in between, ocean waves roll towards us.

Scientific taxonomy and mythological attempts to grapple with the immensity of the heavens jostle in this painting: NASA’s alphanumerical designators appear alongside a number of the heavenly bodies, while white lines of connection cross the sea to pick out the ancient constellations of Andromeda and Pegasus, their names faintly scrawled in chalk towards the top of the painting.  

The mythological resonance of the winged Pegasus develops a recurring theme of wings and flight in Kiefer’s oeuvre, an image of the artist’s search for transcendence and for communion between heaven and earth. But Kiefer’s mythology does not only soar. In this work, the celestial and the earthy cannot be free of one another. The clouds and nebulae of the heavens are rendered in brown drips and chalky deposits. The corrosion of the lead sheets by wind and rain imbues the image with an integral earthiness. The breaking waves that interrupt the heavens insistently recall the darker sacrificial narrative of the mythical Andromeda, chained to a rock as an offering to the sea monster Cetus.

Even more troublingly, given the prominence of references to the Nazi past in Kiefer’s earlier work, the alphanumerical star numbers seem also to suggest the tattoos on the inmates of the Camps. If this is an image of the unfathomable mystery of creation, it is one drawing on Job as well as Isaiah, in which we find both light and darkness, weal and woe (Isaiah 45:7).

This painting suggests that neither the imaginative—but arbitrary—lines of ancient astrological myths, nor the astronomical mapping of stars long dead by the time their light has reached the earth, are able to fathom the meaning of the cosmos. The Lord who alone stretched out the heavens also makes fools of the diviners, and turns back the wise and makes their knowledge foolish (Isaiah 44:24–5; Job 9).   

Anselm Kiefer’s enormous landscape—more than seven metres across—blurs the line between painterly expressionism and nature itself. Depicting a field of churned earth, buckets of brown, black, and russet paint were dolloped onto the canvas, which was then placed flat on the floor and covered with actual earth and exposed to the sun. The textured surface has coagulated, dried, and cracked.

This is both a painting of—and a sculpture formed from—encrusted, parched clay. In both its surface texture and its formal composition, the painting is almost all earth. The perspective, with its high horizon, is oppressively bleak, and yet draws the gaze inexorably along the deep-furrowed diagonal lines towards its central vanishing point, as if towards a hoped-for future. In this empty space, something seems about to appear.

The image recalls Kiefer’s barren landscapes of the 1970s, with titles that explicitly evoke battles of the Second World War (Operation Barbarossa, Operation Hagenbewegung, 1975). Here, however, the desolate earth is beginning to open. Horizontal lines of poppies seem to sprout from the caked earth in the foreground. They appear in a dazzling array of colours rarely seen in Kiefer’s work, a rainbow token of God’s renewed covenant with the earth.

Across the narrow strip of black sky above this vast landscape are scrawled the words from Isaiah 45:8 ‘aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem rorate caeli desuper et pluant iustum .....’. The quotation is not quite right, as if half-remembered from a Latin liturgy heard many years before. The liturgical text is especially associated with the penitence and expectation of the season of Advent, in anticipation of the coming of Christ:

        Shower, O heavens, from above,

           and let the skies rain down righteousness;

        let the earth open, that salvation may sprout forth,

          and let it cause righteousness to spring up also.

This is a painting of desolation and anticipation. The violence which has harrowed the land does not end in despair; the swords might yet be ploughshares. The earth has been broken open, in expectation of a saviour.

A track winds away from the viewer, its end lost in a field choked with high stalks.

Anselm Kiefer has here deliberately recalled Vincent van Gogh’s final painting before his suicide: Wheatfield with Crows (1890). In Kiefer’s painting, these thick black stalks are topped with shockingly vibrant blooms, rendered in lavish impasto. From above, the landscape is suffocated by crimson clouds, pouring what seems to be a toxic, bloody rain onto the earth below.

The ‘raining clouds’ of Kiefer’s title come from the Latin version of Isaiah 45:8, used in the Advent liturgy to anticipate the coming of Christ at his nativity and at the Last Judgement. Isaiah pleads that the clouds might ‘rain down righteousness’; here this righteousness seems more like apocalyptic punishment or ecological disaster. In the paintings which accompanied Nubes Pluant in the 2016 exhibition ‘Walhalla’ at the White Cube gallery, London, polluting clouds were rendered by smearing the canvas in molten lead, which solidified into impenetrable masses. In this painting the clouds are not yet solid, but dripping and spattering down the canvas.

And yet the dominant motif here recalls a verse from the opening of our passage: ‘I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you’ (Isaiah 44:22). A bright, cadmium-yellow sunburst radiates from the top and centre of the canvas. The dark clouds of sin, thick with blood and transgression, are being driven away, or else turned to a Turneresque radiant splendour. Solidified lead is becoming liquid gold, raining down to nourish the lurid blossoms below.   

Martin Luther understood verse 22 to refer to Christ as the sun, rising each morning gradually to disperse the mists of sin, so that the sinner might daily see more clearly in the light of Christ. In Kiefer’s painting, the clouds do not vanish, but the clarifying, redemptive heat of the sun precedes, illuminates, and steadily transforms them. As the sun-nourished flowers testify in spite of the clouds, God’s redemption is always already at work: ‘return to me, for I have redeemed you’.