One Fine Show: "Anselm Kiefer, Becoming the Sea" Review of his show at the Saint Louis Art Museum
By Dan Duray
The best exhibition of work by Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945) that I’ve seen so far was held at the Doge’s Palace in Venice in 2022. This grandiose venue of political intrigue turned out to be the perfect place for the German artist’s large-scale scenes of luxurious destruction. The gilded furnishings always lead so naturally to the Bridge of Sighs and the adjacent prison. Even the color scheme of burnt ochre and grey went well with the palace’s rich wood and often literal darkness.
It would be hard to think of many places more different from Venice than Saint Louis, yet the Saint Louis Art Museum, which just opened “Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea,” is not as unlikely a venue for a show of the artist as you might think. What the two cities have in common is water, which is crucial to Kiefer’s tide pool worlds. In 1991, the artist journeyed up the Mississippi during a visit to St. Louis, a formative trip that evoked the Rhine of his childhood. The exhibition features 40 works from the 1970s through to the present, with more than 20 works made in the last five years and five monumental site-specific paintings.
One of these new works, Missouri, Mississippi (2024), commemorates that trip from 1991. It is gigantic like all of them, 30 feet by 27 feet. Dominating the scene is the end of the journey when, in a small boat, the artist came upon the Melvin Price Lock and Dam in Alton, Illinois. Waves crash against the giant edifice, which apparently has a series of mysterious airy structures atop it like a series of strange identical Parthenons, but this is only the bottom half of the painting. In the top we see the water swirling around a woman’s body. She’s some kind of tortured river goddess or maybe just dead.
