Art of Germany’s Kiefer Making First U.S. Showing Here

West German artist Anselm Kiefer is the leading candidate for artistic apotheosis these days, promoted as a kind of aesthetic Moses chosen to lead the elite out of enslavement to bad art and historical ignorance. At least, he is in this country. Back home, he proves that no man is a prophet in his own Weinstube . Germans generally regard him as a pain in the keister, at worst a neo-Nazi, at best a pesky nudzh who will not let them forget the past.

He paints ceremonial halls, nightmare memories of the Nazi architecture of Albert Speer that speak the horrible hollowness of power. There are huge eroded landscapes of seething earth, redolent with dread mourning over holocausts and sculpture of books flying on leaden Icarus wings--dark ruminations on human knowledge wobbling toward enlightenment.

Critics as unlike as Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer have levitated Kiefer on wings of praise. Museums and collectors add secular lift, paying ballooning prices. The wealthy are glad to fork out $375,000 for paintings that rebuke worldly pride and often use materials literally as flimsy as straw. Kiefer’s high standing in the hectic firmament of today’s art market lends plausibility to the rumor that an early key work recently sold privately for $1 million.

Beginning Sunday, Los Angeles can make up its own mind about the latest German Miracle when a traveling 70-work survey opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Bunker Hill, on view through Sept. 11. The event has all the hallmarks of a gala--organization by the prestigious Philadelphia Museum and Art Institute of Chicago, a finale that will be played at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, backing by Ford Motor Co. and the Lannan Foundation, dinners for collectors and local pooh-bahs who will undoubtedly be chuckling smugly that, for once, L.A. got a big spectacular before the Big A. Yup, the show has everything--except, well, the artist.

Herr Kiefer regrets.

He is a refreshing anomaly in a shallow epoch where artists earn like rock stars and behave like divas wallowing in adulation. Not Kiefer. He’s given a few interviews, but now rarely speaks to the press, permitting himself only to be paraphrased and not quoted. He forbids photographs of himself, using them only in certain of his conceptual works.

What is this--shyness, contempt or the circumspect act of a person who retains the impulse of primary people who believe photographs rob them of their souls and that words are magical and sacred?

The closest approach to an answer comes from Mark Rosenthal, the Philadelphia Museum curator of modern art who organized the survey and came out West to hang it. He is an authority on the artist’s work and a knothole into his person, having visited Kiefer frequently in the three years he spent organizing the exhibition, shuttling back and forth to the artist’s home in a tiny town in the Oden district between Frankfurt and Stuttgart.

“He’s been embarrassed by the treatment he’s gotten by German magazines like Der Spiegel, which insist on emphasizing his prices and celebrity. He was unhappy over a photograph taken of him at an opening, signing autographs. He thinks journalistic insistence on so-called ‘life style’ issues is irrelevant and distracting to the meaning of his art.

“He clings to that fundamental idea that art should speak for itself. He believes that art has a large mission and may well be one of the only redemptive activities left to mankind. He’s a very serious guy.”

Rosenthal should know. It’s been his task to interpret layers of complex meaning in Kiefer’s art, ranging from Teutonic myth to Wagnerian opera to German romantic poetry and painting and the strategic planning of Hitler’s army for a harebrained invasion of Great Britain. Results in the catalogue essay have been justly compared to literary guides like that for James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” examples of limpid scholarly clarity worth reading for their own sake.

Rosenthal is no intellectual slouch, taking his Ph.D. in art history at Ohio State and organizing exhibitions devoted to such challenging artists as Franz Marc, Jon Borofsky and Neil Jenny. Most recently he put together a Jasper Johns show that will open in the American pavilion of the Venice Bienale this month. But even he was often stumped by Kiefer.

“He tried to explain one painting to me by telling me the title in Latin. I confessed I don’t speak Latin. He said, ‘How can you do what you do and not speak Latin?’ ”

Kiefer--who also speaks good English and flawless French--is characterized by Rosenthal as the kind of chap who wants to know, when he paints a sky blue, if we understand why it is blue--all the implied literary, symbolic, mythological and alchemical meanings.

However, the art does simplify itself as a profound and often pessimistic rumination on the longing for elemental myth and redemption as well as as a conscious attempt on Kiefer’s part to shake up the modern German conscience and perhaps by extension, all of us. (Speaking of symbols, Kiefer’s tenacious didactic intentions seem summed up by the fact that his name means “jawbone” and he lives in a converted schoolhouse with his wife and three children. Both his parents were teachers.)

According to Rosenthal, the artist is profoundly suspicious of the general view that Germans have changed since World War II. He recently pursued a campaign to quash a new census that includes severe penalties if not filed, such as a $1,500 fine and a year in the slammer.

Kiefer was most upset by a provision requiring the revelation of one’s religion. He remembered that was how the Nazis identified Jews for roundup. All this fuss makes little sense to Americans, who tend to look at art for its own sake rather than in European style. In Germany especially, art is taken with the utmost intellectual seriousness, its moral, philosophical and political implications endlessly debated.

On hearing that some Germans style Kiefer as a neo-Nazi, one American observer said: “That’s crazy. Can’t they see his Nazi references are damning and ironical? The guy has been invited to teach in Israel. If there was any Nazi taint on him, the Mossad (Israel’s secret service) wouldn’t have let him in.”

Germans repeatedly expressed dismay to Rosenthal at Kiefer’s American popularity, saying, “What is this, just one more American way of pointing the finger at us?”

Rosenthal confessed a paranoid fantasy of his own, worrying that his Jewishness and the fact that some Kiefer collectors are Jewish might give Germans the impression his popularity constituted a kind of revenge.

Such is the subtle and complex nature of international art politics.

“The truth is,” said Rosenthal wryly, “what really impresses people about Kiefer’ art is its sheer visual power.”