Currently reading Lisa Saltzman’s Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz. Though I don’t agree with a large portion of her theory, her analysis of this early watercolor made me do a lot of thinking. Is this the ashen-haired Sulamith of Celan’s “Todesfuge”, in her spacious grave above the clouds after symbolically dying in the Holocaust? Or, as Saltzman suggests, is it a self-portrait of Kiefer and his working through his death of identity as a German artist born in 1945? Saltzman argues that this watercolor is both melancholic and a symptom of Kiefer’s own melancholia, his inability to mourn the Holocaust, instead inertly dwelling in his own loss.
