Anselm Kiefer

Next week the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum¹ opens a major exhibition of the German visionary Anselm Kiefer, which it describes as “a landmark survey of the artist’s work produced between 1969-1982.”

So why should this interest Wildeans?

Well, for sometime now I have been taken by a painting by Kiefer entitled Winter Landscape (featured image above).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—the august body that sequesters this work from the public—describes its subject as the “disembodied head of a woman”—which might well be the case.

On the other hand I had an equally visceral but more fanciful vision.

To my susceptibilities the face suggested Oscar—and the sunset was a brooding metaphor of assassination and ascension. It was a notion too romantic, no doubt, and so I harbored the hypothesis some years ago.

But after coincidentally alighting upon Wim Wenders’ Anselm (2023) on the Criterion Channel recently—a documentary film chronicling the art of the German painter and sculptor—I suspected I might have been on to something.

From Oscar Wilde

Because it was then I realized that if Anselm Kiefer was not channeling Wilde, why did he produce this painting entitled From Oscar Wilde as a gift to his then wife Julia?

With this picture, Kiefer is either ascribing it as a gift from Wilde or, as the creator of the work, he is assuming the role of Oscar himself.

Either way, the connection was sufficient for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to link the “romantic floral subject” to Wilde’s fairy tale ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (1888) which they invoked as follows:

In Wilde’s story, the songbird impales itself on the thorn of a rosebush so that its song and blood will infuse the plant and give birth to a red flower. The rose produced by the nightingale’s sacrifice is then plucked by a feckless student of philosophy to give to his unrequited love. In turn she rejects his offer, choosing instead the jewels proffered by another suitor, and the scholar turns back to the only kind of knowledge he comprehends—philosophy.

The Order of the Night

And what then should we make of Kiefer’s 12 foot high canvas The Order of the Night — a later to work in pale yellow of a prostrate male form oppressively beneath the Wildean symbology of dying sunflowers?

Untitled (by Oscar Wilde)

Finally there is Untitled (by Oscar Wilde), 1998.

Although this is a more abstract work, an acknowledgment of its title and inspiration can be found upon closer inspection. Along the top of the canvas is another dedication: “Von Oscar Wilde fur Aeneas”.

Image source: Artsy.net.

Which brings us back to the Ashmolean retrospective.

Unfortunately, the visitor is unlikely find any of these works in the exhibition, although Wildeans among them may now approach it a little more circumspect.

© John Cooper, 2025.

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Footnote:

1. The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology on Beaumont Street in Oxford, England, is Britain’s first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University of Oxford in 1677. [Wikipedia] ↩︎

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