To plunge into the art of Anselm Kiefer is to plunge into controversy. Is his art a profound meditation on the human condition or sophisticated kitsch? Is it monumental or bombastic? Is it liberating and brave or dour and depressing? (For a recent evaluation of Kiefer’s art, see Daniel A. Seidell, “Where Do You Stand? Anselm Kiefer’s Visual and Verbal Artifacts,” Image 77, accessed online at https://imagejournal.org/issue/issue77/ )

However one answers those questions, Kiefer’s work will take your breath away. His pieces are large, dark, and leaden. The last literal. He loves to use lead in his art, sometimes creating whole pieces out of lead, including lead airplanes, not the metal of choice if you want to fly. His pieces are often covered with straw and ashes or with words, often words from the Kabbalah—the Jewish mystical writings—written in a childlike script. They are replete with German history and mythology, with Wagner and the Bible, with philosophy and theology, with the holocaust and Naziism. 

They give visual expression to the poetry of Paul Celan, especially his “Death Fugue” (Todesfuge). And now a movie has been made of his work by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders (“Anselm,” 2023), not that you are likely to be able to see it soon. Here, in the Bay Area, it’s supposed to play mid-January in a single San Francisco theater.

But my focus is not Kiefer himself, however much he is the star of his productions, but a single work, the huge and evocative Entfaltung der Sefirot (“The Unfolding of the Sefirot,” San Francisco Modern Museum of Art; https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/FC.297.A-C/). The piece is enormous, overwhelming: over 11 feet high and 28 feet long (342.27 X 691.52 cm). The upper part of it is draped in lead with what appears to be a large manhole cover impressed in the lead sheet. On the manhole cover is written Ain Soph several times with a question mark. Ain Soph, literally “without end,” in the theology of the Kabbalah is the name for the infinite, ultimately unnamable God, the invisible reality behind all reality. On the lower part of the work hang ten lead rocks on cords, each with an attached paper label naming one of the ten sefirot. The sefirot are the attributes of God manifest in the world. The work presents the moment of creation, the big bang, by another name.

In the Lurianic Kabbalah, the moment pictured is just after the breaking of the vessels. The vessels contained the sefirot, those luminous aspects of the divine out of which the universe is composed. They include, in one tradition, keter, “crown” or “authority”; binah, “understanding”: chochmah, “wisdom”; da’at, “knowledge”; chesed, “kindness”; gevurah, “strength”; tiferet, “beauty”; netzach, “endurance”; hod, “glory”; yesod, “foundation,” and malkut, “sovereignity.” These are many things. They are attributes of God, the elements out of which the creation is composed, aspects of human psychology, even the properties of the body. 

In the story, God breathes in, creating space for the visible world, but when God again breathes out the light of God shatters the vessels, and we now live in that shattered world. The sefirot, shattered and scattered, come to us in hidden form, in lead rocks, as it were. We who live in the world are called to the work of tikkun ha’Olam, the “restoration of the world,” the rediscovery of the sefirot where they are no longer visible.

“The Unfolding of the Sefirot,” Kiefer’s work is in conversation with this Kabbalistic tradition. The manhole through which the light of Ain Soph exploded is now covered. In the expanding and cooling universe, the sefirot are buried in lead rocks, hanging precariously off the edge of the world.

We are cast into the role of observers. The sefirot, those qualities of the divine that make up the world, cannot be seen except by those who can name them. These ancient names, binah, chochmah, da’at, chesed and so on resonate with God, with the Ain Soph. And only we who can name them can see them. In the naming comes the seeing.

What stuns me is that in these conversations—the conversation of Kiefer with Kabbalistic tradition, our conversation with Kiefer, Kiefer’s conversation with his German past, and on and on—so many things come together: the Kabbalah, modern scientific cosmology, Kiefer’s art, and more. The vision here does not split us up, religion from science, Judaism from Christianity, art from philosophy. It doesn’t take one side against the other. In this vision, all things come together.

And our job, the job of all who see what is going on, is tikkun: tikkun ha’Olam, the “restoration of the world.” Each time we see shards of light in what look like rocks we do the work of tikkun. Each time we see the sefirotin each other we do the work of tikkun. We restore a bit of what has been lost.

It’s of this that the Gospel of John sings at the beginning:

     In the beginning was the word [logos]

Or should that be:

In the beginning was the conversation

and the conversation was within God,

and the conversation was God.

In the beginning, the conversation was within God.

Through the conversation all things came into being;

without the conversation nothing came into being.

In the conversation was life, and that life was the light of all humankind.

The light has shone in the darkness,

and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)

This is the deep hope in Kiefer’s work: that the darkness has not overcome the light. It is, as well, the deep hope of Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all my readers.

Clay