"Anselm Kiefer and the XXL Arbiters of Elegance" by Eric Mircher

[The second of my translations of Eric Mircher's original articles.  Please read this introduction for the background behind this project.]

Anselm Kiefer is the subject and the object, the featured artist, in the opening of two massive new gallery spaces, both on the outskirts of Paris. These two solo shows which, having opened this past October, runs on to the end of February, at Thadaeus Ropac's new space in Pantin, and on through March, at Larry Gagosian's new space at Le Bourget.

Paris, during the month of October, bristles with contemporary art.  It is generally the start of the exhibition season and also the time for Paris' increasingly inaccesible and expensive (for both galleries and the general public) international contemporary art fair, the FIAC (Foire International de l'Art Contemporain), at the palatial Grand Palais.  Along with this mothership, there are a number of “off-site” (parasite, if you will) fairs all opening at  the same time.  Some of these off-site offerings are quite dubious and constrained to “mom and pop's” proportions, not a fair, more like a garage sale.  The large distance that separates the FIAC and its unwanted offspring casts a light on the fact that ART does spin around on questions of power and geography.  And in this context unfolds the story of how the two XXL international art dealers mentioned above staged their fight on the week of  October 19, 2012.

Let's set the stage.  To the right, the elegant and efficient Austrian, Thaddaeus Ropac.  His gallery has been established in the City of Lights for over 20 years. At the time, setting up shop in Paris was a risky venture, as the capital city, despite its storied past, had essentially become a provincial non-lieu for contemporary art by 1990.  To the left (and there without prejudice), Larry Gagosian, the tycoon of contemporary art with his eleven and counting gallery spaces in eight different cities all over the world and a managerial program of art exhibitions.  When Gagosian opened his first gallery space in Paris in 2010, the French Press celebrated and toasted the return of Paris to the big stage of the contemporary art world, after all, there were nowbetween him and Ropac, two international powerbrokers of contemporary art in town.  Behind all this self-congratulatory fanfare, however, lies a sour note, one can't but notice that neither Gagosian nor Ropac have any interest in artists from the “French scene.”  Apparently it is because they have very little regard for it.  

One comes to Paris, it so appears, for good food and wine, for beautiful monuments, for charming old-fashioned manners.  The jet set flock here during Fashion Week--art collectors come with partners in tow for the trademark romance of Paris, and it can be bought, at couture houses as well as art galleries.  Of course, there are some grave inconveniences – that damned language, the unpleasant and unbearable attitude of Parisians, their laziness.  So, for these two  XXL art dealers to the jet set,  as a compromise, recrutement for their stable of art stars occurs everywhere but here, with the exception of a few German artists who hang out on French soil, like Anselm Kiefer.

After his rise to art superstardom in the 1980s, Anselm Kiefer lived through a dry spell in his homeland in the 1990s, suddenly becoming, well, old-fashioned in German eyes.  All the same, he had an art dealer in Paris, Yvon Lambert, who stood by him through thick and thin.  France became Kiefer's adopted homeland.  So when Ropac began courting Kiefer to board his juggernaut gallery around 2002, he initially refused to leave the Yvon Lambert Gallery.  The Ropac courtship lasted a full year, with chauffered trips for Kiefer in a Rolls-Royce from Paris all the way down south, to Barjac, where he had a studio.  Ropac did get the artist's OK in 2003 to have a show of his work in Salzburg, Austria -- the old double-gallery tactic, one could say double bottom (think ship design).  At his show, Ropac sold everything; no artist can resist this.  To placate the artist who wished to preserve his relationship with his loyal French dealer, Yvon Lambert,  Ropac partitioned the basement space of his Parisian gallery in the Marais to show the paintings that had been reserved during their initial exhibition in Salzburg, hidden away so as not to upset the old French art dealer.

Anself Kiefer made a huge comeback and began to make so much money for the gallery that it became impossible not to give in to all his demands, including an artist's take of 70%.  So for nearly a decade lived this threesome, a very French thing really, Kiefer, Lambert and Ropac in a ménage à trois.   The Austrian even learned to enjoy the compromise, for it made him money despite it all.  No matter his late arrival, Ropac became the more energetic of Kiefer's two Parisian art dealers, and partially financed, without Lambert who was always counting his last coins, Kiefer's French artistic enthronement--the Monumenta exhibition at the Grand Palais in 2007.  It wasn't a very eloquent affair, but it was all the same an EVENT.  So, the threesome continued their rise, but with the old French dealer becoming more an old memory to which one pays hommage only.  In the Kiefer household, German became again the language of choice.

But in 2010, suddenly appeared the Californian, in ambush, who put an end to this French three-way love affair.  One can't really speak of a double bottom here, more like an endless bottom.  To start with, Gagosian did no serenading, he spoke with real stone and concrete – a beautiful flagship gallery space right in the heart of the 8^th arrondissement.  A really great choice of a neighborhood, with its wide open boulevards and manicured sidewalks, built for the patrician, all so much better than the mess in the Marais district, with its tiny little streets and rather plebian and dubious history.  Luckily for them, despite Gagosian's gleaming new Parisian gallery, Lambert and Ropac's old renovated workshops in the Marais only had to keep their heads up and not get too distracted, for Gagosian's thunderous start did not last.  The shows at the rue de Ponthieu were banal, a gleaming jewelery case without any ideas nor soul.  It functioned more like just another  pit stop for all his orbiting art stars, coming in for a landing at one eleven possible stops.

All the same, Kiefer's Austrian dealer felt threatened and had a revenge plot tucked under his sleeve – a highly classified plan to build a second gallery space in the industrial outskirts, just north of Paris, at Pantin.  The construction took months and the guest star for the opening exhibition, well, of course, Anselm Kiefer, now almost a French national treasure (he, unlike Manet's Olympia, is at the Louvre).  Weary of the comeuppance, the American elbows his way into Le Bourget, Europe's leading business aviation airport, and has Jean Nouvel renovate the interior of a former airplane hangar, situated right off the tarmac.  The planned opening exhibition for this new Gagosian space at Le Bourget?  Well, Anselm Kiefer, of course.  Ropac was furious, forgetting that he attracted the artist into his stable without much quibble, deftly taking him from under the old French dealer Lambert in similarly obtuse fashion.

Undeniably, the energy exerted by Ropac  was not justly compensated.  A very talented dealer, obviously, and one would have liked to have rooted for the underdog, Ropac, as David, facing the Goliath named Gagosian.  Well, non, he was had and twice over.  Gagosian's Le Bourget space is sublime.  The building is a masterpiece.  Jean Nouvel smartly and deftly understates his architect's hand here.   The genius of the space is that it makes one think of a Jacques Tati film.    One imagines, yes, quite easily, a Mr. Hulot getting off his private jet, smiling to his significant other who is dressed so smartly in that adorable sky blue coat, saying, “yes, yes, darling, we are going to take the Kiefer, it's fantastic.”  The life of leisure in the air, at Le Bourget, right off the tarmac, far from the congested center of Paris, far from that muddy banlieue of Pantin.

So Paris is being treated to two large shows of Anselm Kiefer's work.  And the shows themselves?  Well, Kiefer's pieces are XXL, overwrought, repetitive, and that in both galleries.  Sadly, despite this 0-0 tie, the winner is still the American.  Gagosian's renovated airplane hanger gives airspace to Kiefer's work, avoiding overload in the spacing of repetitive work, however pretty—that same horizon line, and until one gets to it,  layers and layers of congested scrawl and sprawl, of handwriting, shellac, objects, hay, and what not.  In contrast, Ropac's Pantin space is filled to the brim with paintings, sculptures, vitrine installations, and more paintings.  It is stifling.  Very few artists are able to paint the sea in such a motionless and frozen manner as Kiefer—moving masses of water as gob.  The worked-up surfaces, the horizon, it is heavy, stuffy, stiff.  The added found objects, for example, a metal balance, as symbolic as they are, do not really add much in terms of ideas nor aesthetic resolution.  Everything is painted with a trowel, a king size one, and it's obvious.  One is supposed to be awed, one feels, well, slightly suspicious.  This sense of overbearing heavinessness of light thinking continues in the sculptures, stacked iron bedframes (at Pantin), and installations, an enclosed field, dried hay stuck in sand, however expansive the space (at Le Bourget).  

But really, what does it matter, Kiefer succeeded, he is once again the cherished and desired darling of his dealers.  His new language of love, however, is not German.  Rather, it is the tongue of Shakespeare, the language of international bizzenezz.  

• Article written by Eric Mircher
• (Translated from French by Roy Forget)