id: 155637
accession number: 1990.8
share license status: Copyrighted
url: https://clevelandart.org/art/1990.8
updated: 2022-09-10 11:05:53.535000
Lot's Wife, 1989. Anselm Kiefer (German, 1945-). Oil paint, ash, stucco, chalk, linseed oil, polymer emulsion, salt, and applied elements (copper heating coil), on canvas, attached to lead foil, on plywood panels; framed: 350 x 410 cm (137 13/16 x 161 7/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund 1990.8 © Anselm Kiefer
title: Lot's Wife
title in original language:
series:
series in original language:
creation date: 1989
creation date earliest: 1989
creation date latest: 1989
current location: 229B Contemporary
creditline: Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund
copyright: © Anselm Kiefer
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culture: Germany, 20th century
technique: oil paint, ash, stucco, chalk, linseed oil, polymer emulsion, salt, and applied elements (copper heating coil), on canvas, attached to lead foil, on plywood panels
department: Contemporary Art
collection: CONTEMP - Painting
type: Painting
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catalogue raisonne:
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CREATORS
* Anselm Kiefer (German, 1945-) - artist
Anselm Kiefer German, 1945-
One of the most significant and reclusive artists of the past 20 years, Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Bavaria, two months before the end of World War II. His enormous mixed-media canvases, as well as his smaller bookworks, are laden with cultural, political, mythic, and religious symbolism. These works are made in direct response to his Teutonic heritage and, in particular, Germany's war experience. Kiefer addresses questions regarding German identity in the postwar world, a highly sensitive subject that has brought him both critical acclaim and adamant opposition.
Kiefer studied law and French at the University of Freiburg in 1965 before turning to painting. He graduated in 1970 and began informal study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys, who encouraged him to paint despite dominance of conceptual art at the time and the declaration that painting was dead. Kiefer often spends years on a piece, working intermittently, and retains rigid control of the placement of his paintings after they leave his studio.
Although Kiefer's work has changed little throughout his career, his earlier imagery relied on figurative elements and his later paintings have become more abstract, often incorporating architectural elements. He frequently begins with an enlarged photographic image, which he distorts by such techniques as scorching, staining, and burning. His materials include molten lead, tar, straw, and clay, metaphorical substances associated with the German land and its mythologies. The transformative process also recalls alchemy, a subject that interested Beuys, who believed art had the power to evoke a change of state from physical to spiritual.
Kiefer has had numerous international exhibitions and published monographs, and is represented in major American and European collections. In addition to one-person exhibitions in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Israel, and England, the Philadelphia Museum of Art organized a retrospective of his work that toured the United States in 1987-88. In recent years, Kiefer has begun to make films that, rooted in the medium of photography, extend the physical and narrative qualities characteristic of all his work into the realms of motion and time. He lives in Barjac, France. A.W.
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measurements: Framed: 350 x 410 cm (137 13/16 x 161 7/16 in.)
state of the work:
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inscriptions:
inscription: Titled in chalk on recto of lower panel: Lots Frau
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remark:
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CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
title: Notable Acquisitions
opening date: 1991-06-07T04:00:00
Notable Acquisitions. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (June 7-September 15, 1991).
title: Contemporary Gallery Reinstallation 2021
opening date: 2021-04-20T04:00:00
Contemporary Gallery Reinstallation 2021. The Cleveland Museum of Art (organizer).
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LEGACY EXHIBITIONS
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PROVENANCE
The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, purchased from the artist
date: 1990 -
footnotes:
citations:
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fun fact:
The subject of railroad tracks was inspired by the artist’s photograph of the Bordeaux rail facility.
digital description:
wall description:
Born in the final year of World War II, Anselm Kiefer addresses the history and legacy of the Third Reich in his native Germany. "We see railway tracks anywhere and think about Auschwitz," the artist said soon after painting Lot's Wife. "It will remain that way in the long run." The drama of the railway tracks dissecting a barren landscape is heightened by the work's surface, dense with gesture and a range of materials, including salt. Referring to the fate of Lot's wife in the Book of Genesis—who was turned to a pillar of salt when she looked back at the destruction of Sodom—Kiefer frames a historical narrative within a biblical one.
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RELATED WORKS
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CITATIONS
Hinson, Tom E. "Notable Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 3 (1991): 63-147.
page number: Reproduced and Mentioned: p. 109
url: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25161319
Hinson, Tom E. "Anselm Kiefer: "Lot's Wife"." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 4 (1993): 180-85.
page number: Reproduced: p. 180, 183; Mentioned: p. 180-85
url: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25161410
Cleveland Museum of Art, “The Cleveland Museum of Art Acquires Major Works,” December 20, 1995, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
page number:
url: https://archive.org/details/cmapr4002
Arasse, Daniel. Anselm Kiefer. London: Thames & Hudson, 2014.
page number: Reproduced: P. 84
url:
Cleveland Museum of Art. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2014.
page number: Mentioned and reproduced: P. 121
url:
Moore, John L., Esther Jun, Clodagh Keogh, William H. Robinson, Danni Shen, Enid Shomer, and Reto Thüring. Demise: Rina Banerjee, Esperanza Cortés, Jae Rhim Lee, Brian Maguire, Paolo Pelosini, Levent Tuncer. 2018, 8.
page number: Mentioned: p. 5; reproduced: p. 8.
url:
Gallagher, Lowell. Sodomscapes: Hospitality in the Flesh. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
page number: 1, 2
url:
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IMAGES