Anselm Kiefer

Beauty requires a counterpart. And in thinking about this flaw, the other flaw occurred to me as well: the Morgenthau Plan. For it too ignored the complexity of things.
—Anselm Kiefer

Gagosian is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and sculpture by Anselm Kiefer, which further explores the historical and formal concerns of Morgenthau Plan, his exhibition that inaugurated Gagosian Le Bourget in Paris last October.

Born at the close of World War II, Kiefer reflects upon and critiques the dangerous myths that propelled the Third Reich to power. Fusing art and literature, painting and sculpture, the artist engages German history and the ancestral epics of life, death, and the cosmos to reinforce lessons of the past.

The exhibition at Le Bourget and the subsequent body of work on view in New York draw upon the Morgenthau Plan as a metaphor for a common pitfall of the creative process—namely, works that put forth beauty without any other detectable motive. Kiefer presents the initiative as a representation of ideas—artistic and political—that ignore “the complexity of things.”

Proposed in 1944 by United States Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the plan was conceived to transform postwar Germany into a pre-industrial, agricultural nation in order to limit the country’s ability to wage war. Morgenthau sought to divide Germany into two independent states, annexing or dismantling all German centers of industry. Although the Morgenthau Plan was never realized in its original form, it represented an alternative postwar Germany potentially occupied more by farmland and plant-life than by industry. In his latest paintings, Kiefer explores this rural landscape. Flowers—one of his central leitmotifs—bloom through the devastation.

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