Kiefer’s World: Journey to Barjac

Die Himmelspaläste (The Heavenly Palaces), 2003-2018. Photo: Charles Duprat / Copyright Anselm Kiefer

By KRISTINA ANDERSSON BICHER September 9, 2024

The “women” of La Ribaute – artist Anselm Kiefer’s jaw-dropping 100-acre studio estate in the village of Barjac in southern France – are everywhere. Cast as empty white dresses, numbering in the dozens, they serve as sentries, appear as ghosts, seem as queens, scholars, victims. They pay homage to certain historical figures and to women as a whole.

As one approaches the 19^th century former silk manufacturing complex that Kiefer purchased in 1992, one is “greeted” by five such women installed in a sort of semi-circular receiving line. Their forms were created in resin by casting 18^th and 19^th century-style dresses. Their finish is matte, chalky, such that they absorb light and thus appear even more three-dimensional. The dresses are largely short-sleeved with tight bodices and plentiful folds in their full skirts.

Did I mention they are headless, limbless? It is jarring to see: women reduced to containers, and gendered containers at that. Filled with air or perhaps some conjured, lingering spirits.
 

Amphitheater, 1999-2002. Photo: Charles Duprat / Copyright Anselm Kiefer
 

When walking the grounds, one espies two or three amidst a copse on a ridge, lending a spectral effect. Or when standing on the tiers of a concrete amphitheater, they appear as Evitas greeting an empty future/past.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself, no doubt due to an excess of enthusiasm from my visit. I’ve long been a fan of Kiefer’s work. And having seen both the phenomenal site-specific installation at the Doge’s Palace in Venice in 2022 and more recently the large-scale show Punctum at Gagosian in Chelsea and Kiefer’s work quasi-permanently installed at Mass MOCA, I put my name on a mailing list to receive notice when tours of the site opened up for 2024. 

It happened at 5 a.m. in the dead of winter that I received an email invitation with a warning that openings book quickly. I clicked on two tickets for June 2024 including a full-day guided tour in English of both the grounds and the studios. (By the way, the guide was superlative…more of a curator than a typical tour guide in terms of the depth of her knowledge and thoughtful presentation). Having opened to the public in 2022, the site known as La Ribaute and now part of the Eschaton Foundation is open three days a week during visiting season from mid-April to the end of October. Barjac residents can reserve a guided tour without cost at certain, defined dates.

So now to return to the “women.” The tour guide noted that Kiefer believes the historical role of women, their influence and import but also their creative power, has been greatly underrecognized, thus inspiring the creation of these works.  Handwritten script alludes to their names: Circe, Sappho, Cornelia, Rapunzel. And yet in looking at these sculptures, one can’t help but conclude that such power comes at a cost. In one haunting piece comprised of 17 figures – Die Frauen der Antike or The Women of Antiquity – installed in a bespoke greenhouse with white-washed windows, each figure is uniquely but distinctly encumbered.
 

Die Frauen der Antike (The Women of Antiquity), 1999-2002. Ensemble of 17 sculptures. Photo: Charles Duprat / Copyright Anselm Kiefer

For example, the hem of one’s garment is weighed down with large boulders. Another’s gown is spiked with large shards of glass. Some sport a tangle of barbed wire where their heads might be. Others have oversized lead books in lieu of heads, which lends a different take on the expression “weight of knowledge.” In fact, these books seem crushing.

**

What is one to make of La Ribaute?  Indeed, what is one to call it? In addition to the land and the extant historic brick buildings, there are some 90 purpose-built (under Kiefer’s direction) pavilions of various sizes, sometimes in the form of corrugated steel hangers or glass greenhouses. All of the greenhouses and pavilions are considered installation pieces in their own right; some of the hangers seem to function as more traditional exhibition spaces for certain paintings. There is a vast field with some 16 concrete towers, in addition to other outdoor pieces including a sculpture composed of large wings at the crest of a rise. Kiefer created a remarkable four-story amphitheater configured as an inverted ziggurat by pouring cement into shipping containers.

Beneath the grass, Kiefer dug out two underground crypts and a series of tunnels which sometimes lead to staircases into the pavilions. One crypt leads into a work comprised of lead beds, women’s names, and some water on each bed to suggest the “creative essence” of each woman. This installation, called Les Femmes de la Révolution or The Women of the Revolution (the work at Mass MoCA has the same title), felt similarly disquieting as the Women of Antiquity in so far as the signifiers of importance or power were far from how these attributes are typically represented.

The crypt we visited was a marvel to behold, with a series of mud-covered pillars in addition to the floor, ceiling and walls. It felt so natural that it’s hard believe it was Kiefer who built it by excavation and careful planning.

Thinking about the sheer work (and money) involved in creating this subterranean world in Barjac prompts another question about the “value” of art. These caves and tunnels cannot be monetized. It’s unlikely the amphitheater could be moved, let alone sold. So the excavation can be better seen as artistic process and internal, psychological exploration: an artist digging into the unconscious, the unknown, the unseen while physically carving a world below ground.  It brings to mind a line by the poet Theodore Roethke: “I learn by going where I am to go.”

La Ribaute could also be termed a farm of sorts. Said Kiefer, “Barjac is not just an enclosure, an exhibition space, a work environment or a laboratory. It is from its soil that I was able to extract most of my work materials.” These materials include hay, flowers, dirt, and wood ash. In fact, Kiefer came across a remarkable cultivar of sunflowers when he was in Japan, which he later grew from seed at La Ribaute; these became the basis for not only paintings but for casting elements for other works.

This synthetic approach to artmaking is in consonance with Kiefer’s wide-ranging philosophical and spiritual concerns. His artistic explorations are lower-case ‘c’ catholic, as his oeuvre draws from sources such as the Kabbalah, ancient Egypt, Greek mythology, the Bible, and Norse mythology. Influences also include the poet Paul Celan who is especially important to Kiefer.  There are references to Durer’s Melancholia, not only with his name painted but also representations of his famous polyhedron. Kiefer is an inveterate reader across multiple disciplines and indeed a polymath. And though his influences cycle through various phases, one senses less a person in search of the one real truth than someone who makes room for and indeed is excited by multiplicity.

By way of biography, visitors to La Ribaute are informed that on the same night that Kiefer’s mother went into labor with him in 1945, his family’s village and home in Germany was bombed by Allied forces. Thus had he been born any later, he may not have been born at all. We were also informed that as a child, he was a natural builder, fascinated with the act of creation. 

But the flip-side of creation is destruction. And one can only imagine how the physical landscape of his German homeland looked when he was growing up and how that imprinted on him. For this visitor in particular, there seemed a greater artistic interest in destruction than creation. In fact, Kiefer’s monumental canvases with their epic depictions often seem to be recreating a devastated earth. With his layered, textured, mixed media approach, he seems to be building ruins out of ruins (dried and burned natural materials).
 

Mesopotamia, 2007-2020. Photo: Georges Poncet / Copyright Anselm Kiefer
 

Throughout the premises, especially in the sculptures, one sees ladders and staircases laid low,  stacked on the ground or arranged in such a way that renders them without purpose or function.  Their appearance perhaps suggests the futility of escape or its inherently fraught or fragile nature. The cement towers appear on the edge of toppling. 

It’s interesting to add here that the name in his foundation “eschaton” means “the final event in the divine plan; the end of the world.” While there is no indication that this is a personal or religious belief of Kiefer, I take it as further evidence of his intellectual interest in the cycles of creation and destruction that various mythologies and belief systems over time have grappled with.

There is, of course, reflected in Kiefer’s work a palpable sense of German guilt over his country’s actions in WWII. Again according to the tour guide, it wasn’t until Kiefer was a teenager that he even learned of Germany’s role. His earliest work confronted this legacy head-on and met with resistance in his homeland.
 

Samson (crypt), 2003-2005. Photo: Charles Duprat / Copyright Anselm Kiefer
 

There is so much more that can be said about La Ribaute and the work there, enough to fill volumes. I would add here other works that were especially affecting and not previously mentioned such as the oversized books rendered in lead in various installation (ranging in weight from 100 to 900 pounds), cast resin poppies (alluding to Celan’s book of poems “Poppy and Memory”), airplane and boats, multiple rendering of sunflowers, a remarkable array of paintings including some citing NASA’s star identifications, and the incredible “Morgenthau Plan,” a simulated field of hay with a few bronze snakes buried within.

What is the future of La Ribaute? Kiefer now works at his studio near Paris which is featured in Wim Wender’s recent documentary “Anselm” (which I highly recommend). Some in our tour group were a little confused as to whether the work here is for sale (no) or is this more of a museum (yes). Kiefer’s site-specific work has sometimes been brought here after it’s uninstalled. The plan appears to keep La Ribaute open to the public (on a guided basis only).

The depth, scale, and sheer tactility of Kiefer’s enterprise here is powerful. A visit to Barjac is a profound immersion into the big questions about humanity. It is an experience felt in the body. Said Kiefer, “An artist stands in a river and all things pass through him.” WM