Anselm Kiefer’s Rustbelt Romanticism Exhibition review at St Louis Art Museum
By Eileen G'sell
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As is often the case for American culture, it takes an outsider to gild our mythos, to redeem the dismissed as truly magnificent. German artist Anselm Kiefer has pulled this off for the Mississippi River and its surrounding territory. Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea, on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum, is the Neo-Expressionist’s first major United States museum show in 20 years. The exhibition is a dazzling tour de force, displaying 40 works from the past half century, about half created in the last five years, along with five towering, site-specific canvases that line the museum’s vaulted 1904 Sculpture Hall.
Becoming the Sea is a sublime instance of Kiefer’s inveterate (some might say shameless) Romanticism. Nostalgia for the Rhine River of his childhood flows into homages to the Mississippi as a symbol of both industry and creative freedom; the feminine spirits of the Indigenous North American Anishinaabe and Wabanaki people ebb into a reference to the “Rhinemaidens” of the Wagner opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung); tributes to German-Jewish poet Paul Celan splash against those of American Beat poet Gregory Corso, to whom the show owes its title. Philosophers and mythological figures loom within a visual language that convolutes cultural distinction within a Kiefer-verse of singular awe. Uniting much of his recent work is a palette of refulgent gold and aquamarine, the murky browns of the “muddy” Mississippi exalted as glittering spectacle.
Among the most moving monuments to Rustbelt grandeur is “Missouri, Mississippi” (2024), a vertical diptych reaching over 30 feet. In the upper portion, a nude water nymph rests her body against the curves of the Missouri River, the cursive words “St. Louis” draped over her knee like a gilt scarf. In the lower portion, torrential waves crash against the gates of a dam, dark below a saffron sky (a scene evidently based on a visit Kiefer made to the Melvin Price Lock and Dam in 1991 at the river confluence in Alton, Illinois). While an aerial view of the river tributary denotes divine leisure, from below the manmade marvels of industry explode with rapturous energy.
