Mammoth sculpture anchors Mass MoCA show

December 04, 2007|Art Review, Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

NORTH ADAMS - To be in the presence of Anselm Kiefer's mammoth sculpture, "Etroits sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow Are the Vessels)" is both sobering and healing. Like a hushed cathedral, the sculpture can humble a visitor with its size and form. The piece is a stuttering undulation of concrete and rebar, part ravaged city and part graceful ocean wave. It embodies something ineffable and perhaps holy. Unlike a cathedral, it is as ugly and seemingly broken as it is grand.

The 80-foot, six-ton behemoth comes to Mass MoCA courtesy of Connecticut collectors Christine and Andrew Hall, who in September were enjoined by a Connecticut court to remove the sculpture from their property after the Fairfield Historic District Commission challenged the couple for not obtaining a certificate of appropriateness for the piece. It's ironic that a work of art that sharply addresses issues of life, death, and the destruction we humans wreak upon ourselves and our world should fall victim to quibbling about what's appropriate.

The viewing public lucked out, though. The Halls have loaned the piece to Mass MoCA, along with several of Kiefer's paintings, which add up to an exhibition that's brief and bracing. It's a small show, but it effectively conveys the artist's ambitious and cauterizing vision.

Kiefer was born in 1945 in southern Germany, as the Third Reich was falling. His art has fearlessly delved into recent history, brooding on the savagery of war. He paints landscapes of epic conflict; he mixes straw, lead, and dirt into his paint to make grounds that look like gunmetal or scorched earth.

The earlier paintings here date back 20 years. "A.E.I.O.U. (Elizabeth of Austria)" (1987) sports a scabrous, rusty ground of lead that looks almost topographical - wrinkled, pitted, discolored, stomped on. A toy-size naval boat might represent Elizabeth's steamer Miromar, although Elizabeth ruled in the 19th century and the boat is distinctly from the 1930s or 1940s. The vowels scrawled above it refer to an acronym apparently coined by 15th-century ruler Frederick III of Austria, perhaps for the Latin "Austria est imperare orbi universo" or "Austria's destiny is to rule the world." Kiefer conflates eras, suggesting that history repeats itself, and that power always loses its sheen.

Four more recent paintings, from 2005-06, are giant landscapes, up to 25 feet long by 10 feet high. In each of these thickly impastoed works, the horizon line crosses near the top, and the land unfurls toward us in dramatic, fanning furrows.