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Conserving the Past for the Future
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A Conservation Tour
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Lot's Wife, 1989: When An Artist Uses Unconventional Materials
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| Anselm Kiefer (German, 1945-) Lot's Wife, 1989 Oil paint, ash, stucco, chalk, linseed oil, polymere emulsion, salt and applied elements (e.g., copper heating coil), on canvas, attached to lead foil, on plywood panels, 11 _ x 14 feet Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund 1990.8 |
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About the Painting
The work of German artist Anselm Kiefer (1945- ) was pivotal to the revitalization of European art during the 1980s. His art relies on a wide range of materials, such as bits of paper, staples, various metals, straw, sand, photographs, human hair, ashes, dried plants, and broken pieces of glass and ceramics. He is particularly gifted at employing and unifying incongruous elements and connecting age-old legends with contemporary concerns.Lot's Wife, from 1989, is a major example of Kiefer's work. With its riot of textures, visual density, and literal meaning, the bottom half provides a grounding as well as a contrast to the top unit, whose atmospheric appearance is physically less complex, lighter in color, and ethereal. Cloudlike forms appear to hover above a chaotic, devastated landscape. The painting comfortably carries its large scale and ambitious use of materials and themes, while engulfing the view.
The observable subject matter in the encrusted painting is a barren, scorched landscape, dominated by converging railroad tracks, one of Kiefer's favorite motifs. His photographs of the train tracks in Bordeaux, France inspired these images of abandoned steel arteries. Acting as a vertical element, the tracks provide a means of moving through the landscape, to ascend into the nebulous space contained in the top unit and return again. Over this field of texture, Kiefer uses white chalk to write the painting's German title, Lot's Frau. He also makes a long, delicate vertical mark-centrally positioned-to which he attachs the three-dimensional twisted form of a heating coil, covered with a white substance.
The complex allusions contained in Kiefer's work are often indecipherably private and incorporate a vast range of symbolism, including pagan and Christian mythology, history, and cultural references. A controversial subject in his work has been the struggle for a personal, public resolution of his country's participation in the Holocaust. For Kiefer, the railroad tracks are symbols of the transportation of Jews to the concentration camps. Another essential theme is the destructive, transformative powers of fire, with its intense heat. For the artist, transformation of the land is a metaphor for human suffering. The burned canvas and the coating of ashes reinforces the bleakness and desolation of his barren painted landscape.
The painting's title refers to the biblical story of Lot's wife who, was turned into a pillar of salt for disobeying the warning not to look back at God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Kiefer handles the story from the book of Genesis metaphorically, using the salt-encrusted panel and altered canvas to suggest the story's cataclysmic ending.
Kiefer's theme also has environmental overtones. He uses the biblical allegory as a warning about what may be expected if we do not become more environmentally conscious and responsible. The salt could, however, represent life-supporting as well as destructive qualities.
Page 1 of 3 | On the next page: How the Work Was Made