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THE GERMANS IN LONDON

Jeremy Eccles
Eyeline 83
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This past northern autumn London has seen major retrospectives for German artists Anselm Kiefer (at the Royal Academy) and Sigmar Polke (at the Tate Modern), a follow-up to the British Museum’s brilliant ‘Germany: Memories of A Nation’ involving an exhibition, a BBC radio series and a book by Neil MacGregor, plus ancillary performances from the Schaubühne Berlin and the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Arguably, all the artists involved are world leaders, benchmarkers in the way that the French Impressionists and post-Impressionists once were, and later the American Abstract Expressionists. But who before this conjunction has referred to the German post-War ‘renaissance’ — as Neil MacGregor does in his claim: ‘You cannot be a thinking German of our generation without realising that the structures of the State are contingent, dangerous and fragile, and that seems to give an edge and clarity of vision — that is why there is this great German renaissance’.

So there is an artistic imperative beyond the sheer zeitgeist of it all. There is also a temporal reason — it is twenty-five years since Germany was reunified, giving the British Museum the excuse to borrow iconic artefacts that might not otherwise have been allowed out of the country. Ironically, the two great German visual artists have arrived more by happenstance than design — the Kiefer exhibition being a four year project by Kathleen Soriano — whose heart may have been marginally more in this magnificent exhibition than 2013’s ‘Australia’ show, also at the Royal Academy! And the Polke — the first time that anyone has attempted to bring together the full panoply of his bewildering range of media — is primarily an American effort, initiated by the Museum of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Anselm Kiefer, Sprache der Vögel, 1989.

Anselm Kiefer, Sprache der Vögel, 1989. Lead, steel, wool, oil, plaster, resin and acrylic, 114 3/16 x 194 1/8 x 66 15/16in. (290 x 493 x 170cm). © Anselm Kiefer. Photograph © Ben Westoby. Courtesy White Cube, London. 

Georg Baselitz, Adler (Eagle), 1977

Georg Baselitz, Adler (Eagle), 1977. Etching printed from perspex plate with oil on paper. Presented to the British Museum by Count Christian Duerckheim. Reproduced by permission of the artist. © Georg Baselitz.