This shocking sculpture invokes both Nazi delirium and Jewish theology

Washington Post

13-03-2025

Great Works, In Focus
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#188 This shocking sculpture invokes both Nazi delirium and Jewish theology
Anselm Kiefer's seven-ton 'Breaking of the Vessels' is one of the artist's many manic dissections of German history.
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Column by Sebastian Smee
March 13, 2025 at 11:10 a.m. EDT
10 minutes ago
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It's a shocking thing to come across in an art museum. Anselm Kiefer's 'Breaking of the Vessels,' installed in the cavernous central hallway at the St. Louis Art Museum, looms over you like some ravaged altarpiece or charred library. The floor all around it is covered with broken glass.
What on earth has happened here? What are we looking at? Is it a new thing in the world — or a terribly old thing, the residue of a long-past catastrophe?
Kiefer is the kind of artist who wants to overwhelm you — not only with his blasted materials but also with thickening webs of correspondence, underground cathedrals of meaning. (St. Louis Art Museum is mounting a major Kiefer exhibition in October.) His works link modern literature, technology and political trauma with ancient mythology, religious scripture, cosmology and alchemy.
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Formally, 'Breaking of the Vessels,' which weighs over seven tons, evokes the classical, foursquare integrity and teeming, scale-scrambled malevolence of Auguste Rodin's 'The Gates of Hell.'
It's really a kind of bookcase, and it bears the weight of a bunch of Brobdingnagian book folios made from lead and broken glass. Lead markers project from the sides, linked together by meandering copper wires. A semicircular pane of glass suspended overhead has the Hebrew words 'Ain Soph Aur' — or infinite light — scrawled on it.
This and Kiefer's title hint at one way of understanding the sculpture. According to Jewish kabbalistic tradition, attributes of God's light were divided among 10 vessels, but the vessels were not strong enough to contain them. When they broke, God's light — his divinity — entered our imperfect world.
But Kiefer was a boy during World War II. And so he wants us to think less metaphysically, more historically. The books themselves suggest the centrality of learning to Jewish culture. Their ravaged look and the shattered glass call to mind the Nazis' book burning and then Kristallnacht, the wild rumpus of irrational violence that broke out in November 1938, when Nazi paramilitary officers and civilians smashed thousands of synagogues and storefronts of Jewish-owned businesses.
Kiefer has always been infatuated with the poetry of ruins. Rubble piles up relentlessly in his work. He often abandons his sculptures and paintings to the elements or stashes them in dark shipping containers. He has strafed some works with bullets. Others he burns, slashes or buries. He lays canvases on the ground so he can pour paint and diluted acid onto them. He places sculptures made from lead in electrolyte baths where they are left to corrode.
Behind Kiefer's creative destruction, I detect a kind of mania that puts me uncomfortably in mind of the Nazi delirium. The scope of his art, bursting with poetic and spiritual allusions, can render the specificity of what happened to particular individuals in particular traumatic circumstances almost negligible — as if actual people were mere grist to the mill of Kiefer's careening metaphysics.
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But still, I find his work enthralling. By embracing decay, by toying with ruins, Kiefer is trying, I think, to solve the problem of the 'merely' aesthetic.
When I see 'Breaking of the Vessels,' for instance, I feel I'm no longer in a museum looking at 'art.' I suddenly see not just the false aesthetic moment ('false' in the sense that art is always trying to set itself apart from life) but the larger, shattering sweep of life, and the ruins of our ongoing history.