Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern

Tate Modern is now showing the retrospective Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010, previously at MoMA, New York. Polke, who died in 2010, was born in Silesia in 1941, fleeing west with his family as the Red Army advanced in 1945. In 1953 they left East Germany and settled in Düsseldorf. By the time he was a student alongside Gerhard Richter and others, the German economic recovery (Wirtschaftswunder) was under way and he responded to the rise of they saw as an American-style consumer culture with pop art works like The Sausage Eater (1963, Der Wurstesser, below left) and “raster drawings” made up of dots like Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald (1963, below right):

The dot drawings were far less mechanistic in appearance than Lichtenstein’s and part of a social commentary (Capitalist Realism) on German affluence and tourism, for example Girlfriends (1965-66, Freundinnen, below left), and fabric paintings like The Palm Painting (1964, Das Palmenbild, below right):

Also in the 1960s he took to criticising modern art in its various forms, whether abstract or conceptual – Solutions V (1967, Lösungen V, below left), even ridiculing artists in general - Polke as Astronaut (1968, Polke als Astronaut, below right):

During the 1970s Polke experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and went on the hippie trail through what is now called AfPak, and then further afield, making films (there are three at the Tate) and colouring in photographic images - Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan), (1974-1978 , below top)- but also painting works like Supermarkets (1976, below lower) which are a continuation of earlier preoccupations:

After the 1980s Polke began experimenting with unusual pigments – dye extracted from snails or heat and humidity sensitive substances as he used at the Venice Biennale in1986. A raster painting Police Pig (1986, Polizeischwein, below left), was hung outside the German pavilion. At that time he also made a series of Watchtower paintings which evoke both divided Germany and the Nazi camps, Watchtower (1984, Hochsitz, below right):

In the 1990s he experimented even more widely with soot paintings, distorted photocopying , resins, the effect of radiation on photographic materials, 3-D lenses and holograms, all explored in the Tate show. At the end of all this in 2007 he created The Illusionist (below), a work which I will not attempt to interpret but instead reproduce what Tate Modern had to say about it:

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 continues in London until 8 February 2015 and will be at Museum Ludwig in Cologne from 14 March to 5 July.

I have now posted here about all three of the most highly regarded German post-War painters, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer being the others.  For what it’s worth, my personal preference is for Richter.

Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy

Within the last three years, London’s gallery-goers have had the chance to see retrospectives of the three German artists who are regarded as the most significant since the Second World War. Tate Modern showed Gerhard Richter in 2011 and now it has Alibis: Sigmar Polke while the Royal Academy is offering Anselm Kiefer. I’m not sure that the RA has used the term “retrospective” to describe their show, and if they haven’t it was a wise choice, because significant pieces of Kiefer’s work are monumental installations fixed elsewhere. Anyone visiting the exhibition should find the recent Alan Yentob programme in the BBC1 imagine series a valuable complement to the RA exhibition because it reveals the scale of the works which remain in Kiefer’s workshops in Germany, southern France and near Paris. As it is, the canvases and installations, some made for this show, fill the RA’s rooms to capacity.

Kiefer was born in 1945 and he emerged as an artist in the late 1960s with Occupations, a series of photographs of the artist performing the Nazi salute while wearing his father’s military uniform. The image appears in Heroic Symbol V (1970, Heroisches Sinnbild V, below):

Landscape is a recurring theme in Kiefer’s work, for example Winter Landscape (1970, Winterlandschaf, below top) and Black Flakes (2006, Schwarze Flocken, below lower):

And so is German history. Kiefer grew up in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War and his work continues to address this period in works like Operation Sea Lion (1975, Unternehmen Seelöwe, the planned invasion of the UK in 1940, below top), Interior (1981, Innenraum), below middle, the ruins of Speer’s New Reich Chancellery in 1945) and Morgenthau Plan, (2013, bottom and detail in the poster above, the US plan for “converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral”):

Other recent works at the RA are concerned with the Atlantic Wall and the Siegfried Line. Inevitably Kiefer has addressed the Holocaust in his work, notably through the poetry of Paul Celan, a Romanian survivor of the camps. His poem Death Fugue (Todesfuge) which ends 'Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland' ('Death is a master from Deutschland') compares the blonde Margarete and the dark–haired Jewess Shulamite. For Margarete (1981, below top) Kiefer attached yellow straw to a painting of ruined fields, and Shulamite (1983, below lower) is printed over an image of the Nazi Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldier, built in Berlin.

Kiefer’s wide interests in history and philosophy are given expression in works like the massive (2.9 x 5 metres) Ways of Worldly Wisdom: Hermann's Battle, (1980 Wege der Weltweisheit: die Hermannsschlacht, below). This is one of several works of similar titles and which require a Neil MacGregor on hand to explain the full significance of the images Kiefer chose to include:

Personally I find Kiefer’s enthusiasm for alchemy and other mysticisms difficult. His preoccupation with lead in terms of “texture, colour, strength and malleability” to quote the RA’s Gallery Guide is understandable but:

He believes it is the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history, and that its properties most closely resemble ours. ‘It is in flux. It’s changeable and has potential to reach a higher state of gold.’ This reference to alchemy, the transformation of base metals into gold, a subject that fascinates Kiefer, is perhaps a metaphor for the way his art attempts to transform and redeem the past.

Well perhaps, and better lead than uranium, denser and with a fissile isotope. Lead certainly makes impressive sculptures, overbearing even. For example, installed at the entrance to the show, Language of the Birds 2013:

Equally striking are the contents of the vitrines in the RA courtyard, Velimir Khlebnikov: Fates of Nations: The New Theory of War. Time, Dimension of the World, Battles at Sea Occur Every 317 Years or Multiples Thereof, Namely 317 x 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . . . . . ., 2011-14, though Kiefer is on record as saying that Khlebnikov’s ideas are “complete nonsense”:

Specifically for the RA, and occupying the whole of Gallery 7, is The Ages of the World (2014, below), an installation with a strong geological metaphor –the word ‘Devon’ in one of the accompanying paintings indirectly referring to SW England:

Towards the end of the exhibition, and in marked contrast, are “books” by Kiefer, one-off folios might be a better description, containing among other things some fairly graphic erotica. The Gallery Guide explains their derivation from similar pieces by Rodin, but possibly there is a link to Schiele’s nudes (currently  in London at the Courtauld Gallery).

Anselm Kiefer ends at the RA on 14 December.

Homage to a Government

At the last PMQs before the Easter Recess, immediately before the Financial Statement on 21 March, Ed Miliband asked for, and received, confirmation that combat operations in Afghanistan by British troops would cease by the end of 2014. Shortly afterwards, the Chancellor of the Exchequer stated that as a consequence the cost of operations is expected to be a total of £2.4 billion lower than planned over the remainder of the Parliament. British forces deployed under NATO to Afghanistan in 2001 and have suffered over 400 killed and over 5000 wounded there since then. So it isn’t surprising that their final removal is being seen as a significant milestone in British military history.

This departure is overshadowing an event which will take place a few years later later which may well be of greater historical significance for the UK, the final repatriation of British forces from Germany in 2020, 75 years after the end of World War 2. In fact the only years after 1919 in which the British Army was not present in Germany were 1930-1945. There were armies of occupation in the years after the World Wars, and, of course, the extended British presence after World War 2 was as part of NATO’s defence against the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War.

The British have a continuing preoccupation with World War 2, our finest hour, even though living memories of it in 2012 are confined to those over 75 (say 8 years old when it ended). For example, the weekend following the PMQs, BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show on 25 March ran an interview with Ben Macintyre pushing his new book, Double Cross: The True Story of The D-Day Spies while Five later gave 5½ hours over to two World War 2 films and a Battle of Britain documentary.

The Cold War by contrast gets little attention, probably because, although expensive (at least 3% more of UK GDP was spent on defence during the Cold War than at present), there were no hostilities, in fact no clear declarations of war or peace. Even the dates of its start and end are subjects of historical debate, although good cases can be made for 1947 and 1989 (Baruch’s speech in April 1947, in which he made use of the term to describe US/USSR relations, and the Gorbachev - George HW Bush Summit in Malta in December 1989). On that basis, some “living memories” of the Cold War should be carried by anyone over 40 (say 17 in 1989). But we don’t hear, read or see much about it by comparison with the World Wars - perhaps a little more attention will be given in the media later this year during the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Once the Cold War had ended, the British presence in Germany was on borrowed time while UK defence policy tried to square the circle of the role in the world aspired to and the resources available for defence expenditure. In 1998 the Strategic Defence Review put in place by the new Labour government concluded:

Basing in Germany. The Government is committed to the principle of NATO Allies stationing forces on one another's territory, which is an important symbol of our mutual obligations. Moreover, although the specific military argument for stationing forces close to the Cold War front line has disappeared, there are still significant military benefits in having capable forces based in continental Europe, where they are closer to many potential theatres of operations and they can train more readily alongside our Allies. There is also the practical and economic question of how much additional military infrastructure and training the United Kingdom could readily accommodate. All these considerations have led us to conclude that the bulk of our current military presence in Germany should remain there.
Some reductions can, however, be made in that presence as part of Army restructuring. Three armoured regiments (including the two to be re-roled) and a number of supporting units will be removed from the front line in Germany and returned to the United Kingdom, totalling about 2,500 military personnel and some 186 tanks.

(Supporting Essay Six Future Military Capabilities paras 34 and 35)

Plans were already in place to withdraw the RAF from Germany by 2002.
In 2010 the new Coalition government completed Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The Strategic Defence and Security Review and decided to deal with the ‘practical and economic question’ raised in the SDR 12 years earlier:

The UK currently also has a major military presence in Germany, with 20,000 service personnel and their families based there. For more than 50 years the Federal Government has supported the British military presence providing essential training and operational opportunities as well as basing. The presence of the British military has played an important role in demonstrating Alliance solidarity, and has also been a symbol of steadfast UK-German friendship. But there is no longer any operational requirement for UK forces to be based there, and the current arrangements impose financial costs on the UK, disruption on personnel and their families and opportunity costs in terms of wider Army coherence. We therefore aim to withdraw all forces from Germany by 2020.

(Part 2 Overseas Bases)

Philip Larkin’s poem, Homage to a Government, elegiac when it was written in 1969 just after the then Labour government’s decision to withdraw forces from East of Suez, turns out to have been prophetic as well. It ends:

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.