Anselm Kiefer’s seven-ton “Breaking of the Vessels” Great works, in focus . (This link opens in a new tab).
By Sebastian Smee
It’s a shocking thing to come across in an art museum. Anselm Kiefer’s “Breaking of the Vessels,” installed in the cavernous central hallway at the St. Louis Art Museum, looms over you like some ravaged altarpiece or charred library. The floor all around it is covered with broken glass.
What on earth has happened here? What are we looking at? Is it a new thing in the world — or a terribly old thing, the residue of a long-past catastrophe?
Kiefer is the kind of artist who wants to overwhelm you — not only with his blasted materials but also with thickening webs of correspondence, underground cathedrals of meaning. (St. Louis Art Museum is mounting a major Kiefer exhibition in October.) His works link modern literature, technology and political trauma with ancient mythology, religious scripture, cosmology and alchemy.
Formally, “Breaking of the Vessels,” which weighs over seven tons, evokes the classical, foursquare integrity and teeming, scale-scrambled malevolence of Auguste Rodin’s “The Gates of Hell.”
It’s really a kind of bookcase, and it bears the weight of a bunch of Brobdingnagian book folios made from lead and broken glass. Lead markers project from the sides, linked together by meandering copper wires. A semicircular pane of glass suspended overhead has the Hebrew words “Ain Soph Aur” — or infinite light — scrawled on it.
