鈥淟鈥檃nn茅e prochaine 脿 J茅rusalem, cette ann茅e 脿 Paris: 脿 propos d鈥橝nselm Kiefer, des imp茅ratifs iconographiques et des juifs,鈥 (鈥淣ext Year in Jerusalem, This Year in Paris: On Anselm Kiefer, Iconographic Imperatives and the Jews鈥).
The essay, 鈥淟鈥檃nn茅e prochaine 脿 J茅rusalem, cette ann茅e 脿 Paris: 脿 propos d鈥橝nselm Kiefer, des imp茅ratifs iconographiques et des juifs,鈥 (鈥淣ext Year in Jerusalem, This Year in Paris: On Anselm Kiefer, Iconographic Imperatives and the Jews,鈥) was commissioned by organizing curator Jean-Michel Bouhours for the accompanying the major retrospective exhibition Anselm Kiefer, now on view at the Centre Pompidou/Mus茅e National D鈥橝rt Moderne, Paris, from December 16, 2015 鈥 April 18, 2016.
Drawing upon the ideas and materials that were at the heart of her first book, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge, 1999) and inspired by a recent Kiefer exhibition at Gagosian Gallery in New York, 鈥淣ext Year in Jerusalem,鈥 Saltzman鈥檚 essay reflects on Kiefer鈥檚 enduring interest in Jewish subjects, historical, biblical and mystical, and what that interest means in the cultural and political context of the European present. For although Kiefer鈥檚 work has come, in recent decades, to embrace a global, even cosmic worldview, adding to his iconographic arsenal the numbered stars and nebulae of an ever expanding understanding of the universe, it has never wholly strayed from its grounding concern with the historical inheritance of Germany鈥檚 Nazi past and the genocidal destruction of European Jewry. Even as he plumbs another nation鈥檚 history of trauma, creating, for example, the series of landscape paintings Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom, an invocation of Mao鈥檚 short-lived call for cultural freedom and its subsequent withering in the anti-intellectual, agrarian ambitions of the Cultural Revolution, Kiefer also summons his nation鈥檚 collective inheritance of guilt, in what might be considered almost a companion series to the Chinese paintings, the Morgenthau Plan, which takes as its subject the proposal by then U.S. secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr.鈥檚 postwar proposal to de-industrialize Germany, to leave it in a state of ruin and rubble and reduce it to its agrarian past, a vengeful plan, ultimately displaced and replaced by the economic engine of the Marshall Plan.