Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1981

Ulm, Ulmer Museum, on loan to the permanent collection until 2014

Dorothée Bauerle, Kunst nach 1945 – Stiftung Sammlung Kurt Fried, Bestandskatalog VIII des Ulmer Museums, Ulm 1986, p. 239, illustrated

Brigitte Lamberts, ‘Das Kunstwerk des Monats’, Ulmer Museum Bulletin, No. 170, August 1993, n.p.,  illustrated

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals a small number of stable of drying cracks to some of the thicker areas of impasto. There is some slight wear to the extreme edges and corner tips. Surface irregularities appear to be in keeping with the artist's use of collage. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Belonging to one of the most prolific series by Anselm Kiefer, Wege (Paths) is a powerful example of his radical investigation into the nature of history and the iconographic ballast of his home country. Widely considered to be among the most influential artistic statements in post-war German art, other examples from this series are now located in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. While the emblematic title of the other works in this series Wege der Weltweisheit (Paths of World Wisdom) is only hinted at in the present work, it is an equally visually impressive and intellectually convincing example of Kiefer’s “symbolic recovery of the past” (Mark Rosenthal, ‘A Formal Breakthrough: 1980 to 1982’ in: Exhibition Catalogue, Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago (and travelling), Anselm Kiefer, 1987-89, p. 93).

For this multi-layered examination of the forces of history, the artist remarkably turned to the woodcut as a technique, a medium which has been described as having a distinct 'Germanic' aura since it has been brought to its perfection by Albrecht Dürer (Peter Schjeldahl, Anselm Kiefer, Bücher, 1969-1990, Stuttgart 1991, p. 20). For the present work, Anselm Kiefer grafted together various woodcut sheets portraying important figures of Germany’s past, such as Heinrich von Kleist, Alfred von Schlieffen, Immanuel Kant and Alfred Krupp into a single picture. They are placed next to the historic leader Hermann (Arminius), the victorious leader of the Germanic tribes in the great battle against the Romans in the Teutoburger Wald. A perennial symbol for those who tried to summon German national pride, he🍬 is also the connecting line between the approximately thirty-five monumental pictures th꧋at Kiefer has created as part of this cycle of work.

In Wege, the individual portraits are intertwined by what appears to be a log fire in a forest – a signature motif that has featured prominently in the imagery of the artist from an early moment on. The organic structures in the picture thereby overlap with the portraits, speaking to the idea that human history and the soil on which it takes place are closely connected. The image thus also evokes the concept of Verbrannte Erde (scorched earth), which describes a metaphysical place in which history has left no room for a future – an idea he also explored in a different series of the time, in which Kiefer portrayed the landscape of his homeland Germany as a dystopian setting. Congruously, the title of the present work alludes to one of the core works from this series entitled Wege: Märkischer Sand. The fire on the other hand is mirrored in the fact that the woo🐭dcuts themselves have been burnt by the artist before they were attached onto the canvas. Imparting a multi-layered role of ceremonial fires in German history, the burnt personages thus appear to be inscribed into material hist✱ory itself.

While the choice of this illustrious circle seems to defy an obvious narrative, it is exactly this intuitive mode of selection that allows for new and unlikely linkages. The only criterion that precedes Kiefer’s alchemy is the fact that “power has abused them” (Anselm Kiefer quoted in: Mark Rosenthal, op. cit., p. 55). Through this aleatoric procedure, Kiefer thus reveals the idea of a universal truth to be a chimera. Rather, history and wisdom are subject to many different readings and are fragile entities that can be lost, burnt or reassembled at any moment. Moreover, Kiefer’s artistic strategy also recalls Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits from the 1960s onward: “Like the American artist, Kiefer looks at the heroes of his country in a deadpan way; the result is a kind of jingoism in which these individuals take on the character of gods. The portrayals by both Warhol and Kiefer leave their subjects slightly hollow, all surface and no inner core. When they burn in Kiefer’s paintings, we do not witness the incineration of flesh but the cremation of icons” (Mark Rosenthal, ibid., p. 51).