EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Names in Anselm Kiefer’s ‘Fall of the Angel’ at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Art “is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult…to understand.” And, Anselm Kiefer added, “it should always include having to scratch your head.”¹ You can scratch your’s at his magnificent exhibition, Fallen Angels, in Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi until July 21st. It’s a beautiful and puzzling show. The artist is known for his interest in philosophy, alchemy, Jewish theology, and the mystery of his materials so there is much to ponder and one way to approach that is thinking through names.

The exhibition’s key image was titled by Kiefer Fall of the Angel. That choice screams for attention because the fallen angel is not depicted; only St Michael is. The titular character is nowhere to be seen, except for some empty clothes within the chaos of the dark pit below. But first, the story. Lucifer, an archangel, denied God had created the angelic race, claiming instead that they had created themselves. That was a mistake. Other angels followed him into a war won by St Michael. Lucifer has ever since been known as Satan. The only formal clue provided in the exhibition’s catalogue is that Kiefer acknowledges copying Michael’s pose from a little-known painting of the same subject by Luca Giordano which is also curious.² Why copy another artist’s motif so precisely?

The key is the allegory within the story. It is all about good and evil, our dependence on God (or, sub-conscious powers), and humanity’s divided nature. We contain the moral opposites of good and evil. No-one is wholly good, nor wholly bad; we are both. Chaos, associated with evil, may not be bad either because life and new ideas emerge from it, like the universe itself in Genesis. Since chaos is crucial for creativity too, such themes are naturally encoded in the arts. Kiefer, the curator reports, is interested in “the search for unity through the fusion of opposites”³ which will be no surprise to art’s practitioners. The Surrealists are said to have used the absurd to destroy the dualistic view of good and evil⁴while Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman did so through other means.⁵ Françoise Gilot reported that Matisse sought “a non-dualistic, global vision of the universe….His primary goal was to unite”, and he told her, “opposite truths are not mutually exclusive.”⁶ Even in the 1960’s the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein thought unity was the goal of art.⁷ Kiefer lives within that same tradition, claiming that “painting is philosophy”, and that at his death “my infintessimal essence shall amalgamate with the whole.”⁸

So back to Fall of the Angel. Could Lucifer (evil) be absent because he and Michael (good) are united in one figure? Luca Giordano, the one known source, was named after the legendary apostle-painter Luke, which means “light-giver” just as Lucifer means “light-bearer.” That’s not the only link. Giordano’s family name (Jordan in English) alludes to the biblical river, and in its original Hebrew version means “flows down”. Kiefer’s angel by Giordano nominally flows down but actually flies up in a union of opposites, pointing to his own name, Michael in Hebrew above, which means “who is like God.” Kiefer, moreover, is interested in both Hebrew and rivers, and often treats the latter as borders between realms. Here the angel hovers on the surface of the panel, in between material reality on this side and inner spirituality on the other. The division occurs on his legs which, being golden down to his feet, are on the spiritual side while everything above is dark like the pit below. He is breaking into the material world through the surface of the image. 

Yet, why write the angel’s name, Michael, on the work itself? The artist uses words on images to challenge meaning and confuse. He has said that “the use of text serves to cancel or to contradict the painting…the text is there to play devil’s advocate with the painting, to challenge it - yes, also to interrogate the painting.”⁹ And that convolution explains why he added the text. Yes, the figure is the angel/Michael but the written name highlights its importance, thereby recalling the name of Florence’s most famous son, Michael/angelo, their names inverted and united in one figure. Thus, the precise reference to Giordano, while meaningful, is also a red herring. Besides, Michelangelo used a similar ploy. In signing the Vatican Pietà, he separated the 'Michael' and 'angelus' of his name to identify with St Michael as a messenger of God.¹⁰ And he often did likewise when signing letters. “Michael” means “who is like God”, the God in whom all is united.¹¹ 

That is not Kiefer's only reference to Michelangelo. The scene recalls one of the best-known Creation panels on the Sistine ceiling, God Separating the Waters from the Firmament. Michelangelo's God, like Kiefer’s St Michael, is flying through the surface of the panel into our space, the break-point occurring where light meets shadow on God's arm. That, in turn, explains why God has some of Michelangelo's own mortal features on this side of the canvas, the bump of a fractured nose and, as Omar Calabrese has shown, his own hands.¹² Human beings, these artists tell us, are both good and bad, divine and mortal, or in other words, a union of opposites.

So, do think about names and titles when you scratch your head. They are used this way more often than art lovers realize.

1. Kathleen Soriano, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Anselm Kiefer (London: Royal Academy) 2014, p. 21 
2. “Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Arturo Galansino. Croissy, October 16, 2023” in Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels (Florence: Palazzo Strozzi), pp. 31-32.
3. Galansino, “Anselm Kiefer at Palazzo Strozzi” in Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels, op. cit., p. 55.
4. Suzi Gablik, Magritte (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society) 1970, p. 62
5. David Anfam, “An Unending Equation” in Abstract Expressionism (London: Royal Academy of Arts) 2016, pp. 40, 44.
6. Françoise Gilot, Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (New York: Doubleday) 1990, pp. 77, 89.
7. John Jones, “Tape-recorded interview with Roy Lichtenstein, October 5, 1965, 11:00am” in Graham Bader (ed.), Roy Lichtenstein, October Files 7 (Cambridge: MIT Press) 2009, p. 17.
8. “Anselm Kiefer in Conversation with Arturo Galansino. Croissy, October 16, 2023”, op. cit., p. 30.  
9. Soriano, op. cit., p. 27
10. Aileen June Wang,  “Michelangelo's Signature”, The Sixteenth Century Journal 35, 2, Summer 2004, p. 447
11. Klaus Dermutz, “Creation and Crash” in Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels, op. cit., p. 40.
12. Omar Calabrese, “Chiromanzia di Michelangelo” in Il Ritratto e la Memoria: Materiali 2 (Rome: Bulzoni) 1993, pp. 241-7.